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Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors chose a situated practice – interviewing – focusing on the dynamic character of the intra-actions among its heterogeneous elements. What happens to us, as persons and researchers, when we put ourselves inside the practices we study? The authors tracked the sociomaterial traces left by affect in the transcript of the interviews, in the sounds of the voices, in the body of the interviewers, and in the collective memories, separating and mixing them like in a mixing console.

The reconstruction, in a non-representational text, of two episodes related to a work accident makes visible and communicable how affect circulates within a situated practice, and how it stiches all the practice elements together. The two episodes point to different aspects of the agency of affect: the first performs the resonance of boundaryless bodies, and the second performs the transformative power of affect in changing a situation.

The turn to affect and the turn to practice have in a common interest in the body, and together they contribute to re-opening the discussion on embodiment, embodied knowledge, and epistemic practices. Moreover, we suggest an inventive methodology for studying and writing affect in organization studies.

The aim of this article is to overcome an endogenous view of work, as a category isolated from the other existential spheres, and to identify an alternative approach to understanding how (paid) work and other life domains interweave. Biographical transitions between work and non‐work are analysed, paying specific attention to the processes of gender positioning.

The research is based on the analysis of 60 narrative interviews with men and women working in the Italian public sector (the civil service and the health service). The interviews were audiorecorded, transcribed, and then subjected to narrative analysis, focusing in particular on plots, biographical transitions and positioning processes.

The analysis has brought out the predominant plots, as well as the alternative ones, of the work stories narrated by men and women interviewed, highlighting the specific gender positioning that subtended different attributions between men and women in the inter‐relations between work and the personal and familial sphere.

The results show the opportunity to focus next research on organizations that use managerial models innovative in terms of time organization and performance assessment, giving visibility and legitimacy to alternative narratives on the interweaving among people's different biographical trajectories.

The paper proposes the concept of “biographical transition” as an interpretative category with which to study the different strategies and experiences of work/life balance and an heuristic tool able to give sense to the complex interweaving among different life trajectories in the contemporary society.

The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories told?

Stimulus texts have been used to elicit narratives. Students were asked to complete a short story regarding a fictive managerial character, either female or male, whose performance and attitude they were asked to evaluate.

The paper discusses how the collected stories as a whole expressed a conception of what counts as a “good manager” and how management is gendered. In the analysis, the authors discuss whether and how the relationships between gender and management are changing, or the basic assumptions about “think manager-think male” are still valid. The paper illustrates a traditional positioning of gendered management along the lines of rationality vs care, and a third positioning in which the ideal of the “good manager” has both competencies.

The authors designed an alternative research strategy focused on how gender and management are discursively constructed within a context of economic crisis that affects management reputation. Particularly, the authors discuss the surprising results concerning how the written stories evaluating male CEOs distrusted the masculine way of managing and positioned the female managing style within a trustworthy context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the trends and prospects for the development of the halal market for Italian foods, with a focus on pasta production as one of the most valued products of the Made in Italy brand. The analysis takes into consideration drivers and obstacles for developing halal orientation strategies in world and internal markets and opportunities and threats for Italian food firms.

Market dynamics were investigated by a forecasting tool, the Delphi method, which aims to explore future market trends and give suggestions for firm strategies and policy intervention. Besides firms, other experts involved in the Italian halal food sector were interviewed. Answers were organised according to the level of importance given to the different issues and to the level of agreement between the opinions of the experts. These findings were then discussed in relation to the contexts, both external and internal to companies, that had given rise to such opinions.

The halal food market represents a good opportunity for enlarging the overseas markets for Italian products and producers. Several external and internal factors related to the demographic, the institutional, the market and the firm contexts, emerged. The challenges that non-Islamic countries, markets and firms face in the adoption of halal strategies are mainly due to the institutional context, to the scarce awareness of halal principles and practices, and to some suspicion of Islamic food and culture that does not yet seem well-known and accepted on the domestic market.

The Islamic food market has still to be fully explored in Italy, this is despite strongly emerging demand and a growing number of firms showing interest in implementing halal certification and entering new Islamic markets. The paper findings contribute to the scarce empirical literature about the halal market in Italy and give some recommendations both for supporting further studies, identifying preliminary implications and suggesting policy measures.