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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of communities of practice in organizations and their most beneficial effects for both individual and collective development.

Based on a literature review, from the first authoritative texts by Lave and Wenger until the most recent critiques, the paper has attempted to conciliate the individual and the organizational perspectives about this precious tool for knowledge management and creation.

Because of their distinctive features, a joint enterprise, a mutual engagement and a shared repertoire, if strategically managed, might resort to individual and organizational positive outcomes. From an individual perspective, communities could be beneficial in developing professional skills, a stronger sense of identity and finding continuity even during discontinuity and change. From an organizational perspective, communities of practice could help drive the strategy, start new lines of business, solve problems quickly and transfer best practices.

Many limitations about this conceptualization have been presented. Therefore, future research should try to focus on communities within different socio-cultural contexts and within different kinds of organizations.

Practical implications about the use of communities of practice within organizational contexts are mainly linked to the enhancement of human and social capital seen as a strategic, although intangible, asset.

The social implications of this paper are connected to the contribution to the discussion on the theme which is quite uncommon in human resource management research.

The value of this paper is the attempt to connect the communities of practice to human and social capital.

This study investigated how consumers' confidence in medicine and health information seeking and usage could be related to purchase intentions and satisfaction.

A panel of 18 food supplements consumers were interviewed using soft laddering. Qualitative data were coded and used to develop a structured survey. Participants (N = 363) were recruited on a voluntary basis among the customers of an Italian company in this sector. Hypotheses were tested by linear regressions and generalized models.

Results showed that consumers' confidence in medicine interacted with health information seeking and usage influencing both purchase intention and satisfaction. Consumers with high confidence behave differently from those with low confidence.

The authors used a sample based on one company's customer base.

Companies should segment their customers based on their level of confidence in medicine and adopt different marketing strategies for different segments.

A broader knowledge of consumers' attitudes towards food supplements and medicines can improve the public policies aimed at increasing quality of life.

From a theoretical viewpoint, findings suggest to consider consumers' confidence in medicine along with other subjective and contextual variables in socio-cognitive models aimed at explaining food supplements' consumer behavior. From a marketing viewpoint, results suggest to consider confidence in medicine as a precious variable in segmentation strategies. While some communication strategies are valid for all customers (i.e. using experts as advisors, using scientific contents in ads), others (i.e. relying on the advice of trustworthy people, explaining the consequences of consumption) were proved to have different impact on consumers depending on their degree of confidence in medicine.

The current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies.

Project managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis.

Results showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed.

The originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career.

The paper argues that the diatextual analysis could be considered a psycho-cultural path of critical discourse analysis because it stresses the role of hermeneutical procedures in catching the inter-subjective nature of meanings. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these theoretical speculations in light with some empirical evidences coming from a discursive study exploring the construction of organizational identity through socialization practices.

Two focus group discussions were conducted, respectively, with retired workers and young workers employed in the same working organization to investigate how workers discursively shape their sense of belonging to the organization. Narratives of past and present membership were analyzed adopting the diatextual perspective, which was precious in tracking down the discursive traces of subjectivity, modality and argumentation emerging from their discourses.

Diatextual analysis was a precious tool to explore organizational identity through the different rhetoric that older and young workers used to make sense of it: “enchantment” vs “disenchantment.”

The study was a case study. It involved few people and results cannot be generalized, but the main aim of the paper was to support qualitative methodology.

The implication of the study are precious to design formal socialization and human resource management practices better attuned with the need of workers.

The social implications are connected with a wider revision of the organizational policies in terms of HRM.

The value of this paper is the discursive diatextual approach in organizational research.

The increasing flexibility and discontinuity of labor relations have been associated with the development of new forms of psychological contracts as well as the development of more self-directed and mobile career attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the forms of psychological contract and protean/boundaryless career attitudes on the one hand and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) on the other.

In total, 458 employees of three large Italian organizations were sampled through a self-report questionnaire. Zero-order correlations were carried out to examine the associations between study variables while dominance analysis, along with multiple linear regression, was used for evaluating their unique contribution with respect to OCB.

OCB were positively predicted by relational and balanced psychological contracts, protean career attitude and boundaryless mindset.

Organizations must pay particular attention to the content of the psychological contract and the career attitudes of their employees because they influence their willingness to carry out OCB.

The results add new evidence to the careers literature in terms of boundary conditions with regard to the effects of protean and boundaryless career attitudes as well as different forms of psychological contracts.

This paper aims to argue the beneficial effects of communities of practices for organizations. More specifically, given their intrinsic features, communities of practices support individuals and organizations in developing and diffusing the organizational culture, in making sense and guiding individual and collective actions, in defining identities and finally in coping with change and transitions.

Moving from a constructionist view of organizations, the paper reported the lessons learnt through literature about communities of practices, reviewing the most recent empirical evidences on the topic.

Boundary objects and boundary interactions are the concrete tools that allow individuals to exchange knowledge and to develop practices, thus becoming a community. This exchange of skills and expertise concretely shapes the practices that give sense to individual and organizational actions. Nonetheless, organizations and communities are open spaces constantly in interaction, both inside and outside the organizational borders. Thus, through contamination, namely, through the encounter with different actors and contexts, practices could be expanded and reformulated as long as they might suit to specific demands.

The paper argued that communities of practices in times of change could become a space for learning and development as long as they allow people to redefine mental models and practices and thus to make sense and to cope with a new cultural scenario.

The purpose of the study was to explore the moderating role of organizational learning culture in the relationship between training transfer and work performance.

A convenience group of 164 workers filled in an online questionnaire based on retrospective data about the last training experience they attended. Participants were 87 workers who attended an online course within the last six months. A moderated path analysis was tested to highlight the moderating role of learning culture in the relationships between training transfer and three dimensions of work performance (i.e. proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity), controlling for gender, age, training contents and length.

Training transfer and learning culture were positively related to each dimension of work performance. Learning culture showed a significant moderation effect in the relationship between training transfer and each dimension of work performance, namely proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity.

The study highlighted the role of organizational learning culture in influencing the process of training transfer: culture was proved to be associated not only with proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity but also to contribute creating the positive conditions that may allow training transfer.

Narrative is believed to be a crucial component of sense-making in organizations, and previous research in the field suggests that multiple levels and forms of narrative are inherent to the definition of professional identities (Clarke et al., 2009; Ybema et al., 2009; Brown and Lewis, 2011). For example, narrative can be found in the stories told by organizational actors as they informally interact in the workplace, in the formalized basic assumptions that support organizational strategy-making, in the accounts people give of their work, and in the artifacts they produced and experienced while engaged in accomplishing tasks. The purpose of this paper is to consider narrative as a way of giving sense to organizational membership, of constituting an overall and possibly shared sense of direction, of focussing one’s professional identity, and of enabling and/or constraining the ongoing activities of actors. The context of the research was given by a group of sport federations enrolled within the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), which is the national most authoritative network of professional local sport organizations.

Participants involved in the study were 42 professional referees belonging to this network and active in different sport disciplines and 12 people from the CONI management. In-depth narrative interviews were collected in the aim to investigate the narrative cues revealing the organizational sense-making processes that animate the representation of this professional identity both at a subjective and at an organizational level. Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlight the strict relationship between text, context and interlocutors.

Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlight the strict relationship between text, context and interlocutors. Results showed that there was an evident gap between what the management formally defined as strategic vision, mission and cultural guidelines that actually shape the organizational identity of the CONI and what was concretely experienced by its actors, in this case the referees.

Most of the studies conducted in sport organizations focussed either on an intra-organizational level investigating the specific features of given professional categories such as athletes and/or coaches, or at an inter-organizational level, paying attention mostly to the marketing and networking strategies oriented toward stakeholders. On the other hand, most studies conducted on referees have devoted attention strictly to performance assessment, that, in line with a positivist approach, considered the latter as an output of situational and psychological variables (e.g. Marie, 1999; MacMahon et al., 2007). Conversely, the findings coming from the present study contributed to support the promotion of an alternative organizational approach, more specifically based on the strategic relevance of horizontal (within the federations) and vertical (between the federations and the center of the network) communication as to enhance the identification process which give sense to the organizational basic assumptions.

Introduction: Sustainable human resource management (SHRM) as a practice is nowadays seen as an essential factor contributing to an individual’s and organisation’s growth. At the organisational level, the people concerned face many pressures to inculcate SHRM practices from various authorities and stakeholders.

Purpose: This chapter explains SHRM as a concept through an extensive literature review along with the evolutionary stages and multi-lateral perspectives of SHRM. The factors affecting this concept are Economic, Social, and Environmental; its driving forces like Employees, Government and Market Pressure; Employee Outcomes, namely Employee retention, satisfaction, motivation and Employee Presence; Organisational outcomes – Business level, Workers’ satisfaction, improved environmental outcomes better correlations, etc.; and value created by SHRM in terms of both employee and organisation are thereby explained.

Methodology: A specific procedure has been employed since the chapter has been based on literature review. The process of systematic literature review has been followed, which lays down the process followed by the authors – right from the Scope Formulation to the Illustration of Conceptual Framework.

Findings: A conceptual model is represented as a basis of the literature review, which the organisation can use and apply to develop SHRM practices, and finally, the precise effects of the research findings are suggested alongside ideas for future research.