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It has been suggested that “space and artifacts constitute systems of communication which organizations build up within themselves” (Gagliardi, 1992a, b, p. vi) and reflect the cultural life within that organization. This is a study of how the “landscape” of a public library (“Library X”), as an information retrieval system, relates to the values of the people who created it. The efforts here are geared towards understanding the physical instantiation of institutional culture and, more specifically, institutional values as they are reflected through the artifact.

Artifacts are rarely used today to visualize thoughts, insights, and ideas in strategy work. Rather, textual and verbal communication dominates. This is despite artifacts and visual representations holding many advantages as tools to create and make sense of strategy in teamwork. To advance our understanding of the benefits of visual aids in strategy work, I synthesize insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and management research. My analysis exposes distinct neurocognitive advantages concerning attention, emotion, learning, memory, intuition, and creativity from visual sense-building. These advantages increase when sense-building activities are playful and storytelling is used.

Business models can be considered as cognitive models that managers or analysts can use to describe, understand, or test business activities. However, the emergence of a new business model requires not only cognitive operations but also concrete modifications to the realities of a company’s operations and structures. In this paper, we adopt a sociomaterial view of organizational change based on actor-network theory, and underline the role of artifacts in the emergence of new business models. We base our discussion on a case study of a French leader in kitchen electric appliances. Despite the fact that the building of its new business model is still in progress, this empirical study provides important suggestions concerning the role of artifacts.

Processes of novelty generation and adoption have received much more attention than novelty evaluation. This paper explores the internal processes enacted by organizations to recognize and assess novel ideas for further implementation by focusing on the role that artifacts play in identifying the creative potential of an idea versus another one. Our empirical study focuses on the evaluation of novelty in the form of new experiences and builds on the analysis of two highly creative organizations, elBulli restaurant, led by chef Ferran Adrià, and the Italian Drama Academy Nico Pepe. We find that organizations implement three distinct processes to evaluate the novelty of ideas: analyzing, structuring, and formalizing. In these processes, artifacts play a key role in making novel ideas tangible by anticipating audiences’ reactions, integrating the novelty generated into an organizational corpus of knowledge, and consolidating novel ideas for future applications. Our results show that these processes take place iteratively in all phases of the idea’s journey, increasingly leading to the collective identification and assessment of novelty.

This research explores two interconnected questions: (1) How do we approach stylistic features of multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters? (2) Do said artifacts designed for different purposes exhibit systematic stylistic differences? Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic categorization, this study develops a framework for examining concision, one of the primary stylistic considerations for multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters. This paper illustrates the use of this framework by exploring the correlation between rhetorical purpose and concision in posters created and disseminated before and during the 2011–2012 Québécois student movement. This study fine-tunes our existing knowledge on multimodality with style sensitivity, and demonstrates how an economy-of-sign based semiotic approach could enrich the empirical examination of multimodal rhetorical artifacts by generating more controlled interpretations.

As Ratnam makes clear, a cultural–historical perspective on teacher/faculty excessive entitlement is indispensable if we are to use this concept to work with, rather than undermine, education practitioners. In this chapter, a networked relational model of activity is proposed as a tool for understanding excessive entitlement from a cultural–historical activity theory (CHAT) perspective, so that the transformative potential of both entitlement and the modeling of it may be harnessed. The networked relational model, which represents CHAT activity systems as a hand-draw or painted network of relationships between actors and artifacts, allows its creators, in their capacity as researchers or academics, to use it as an imaginative artifact in the Wartofskian sense. That is, by representing activity systems of academic performance as networks of interacting entities, the emergence of excessive entitlement can be traced to, and perhaps mitigated through the relationships that they represent. In this regard, the why, what, and how artifacts proposed by Engeström are taken up as useful means for enhancing the functioning of the networked relational model not just as a tool for analyses of entitlement but also a means for envisioning alternative countercultures into being.

In a review of the tragedy that occurred in Charlottesville Virginia on August 11, 2017, this essay discusses the public perspectives and the view of public culture for historical artifacts and monuments, especially those whose pasts do not align with the views of our community today. Based on the renaming of a public park and removal of a Confederate soldier statue, protestors made up of hate groups claiming loss of heritage and counter protestors converged on the site. As tempers escalated, a protestor drove his car into the counter protesters where multiple people were injured, one person was killed, and two responding police officers also lost their lives. Historically, and in other countries, the removal of monuments whose imagery and historical meaning are painful to the community today is a commonplace practice. Within the United States, however, this leads to protests, hate groups that claim these artifacts as their heritage, counter protests, and painful outcomes with harsh repercussions including loss of precious life, as occurred in Charlottesville. Libraries, and other GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), have a key responsibility for educating their communities on the true history of these artifacts. This outreach work is especially vital in communities where laws have been enacted that disallow the removal or relocation of monuments, even those whose effigies inspire hate, as is the case for 90 Civil War statues in North Carolina. This essay reviews key literature, as well as personal experiences through blog posts, relating to cultural heritage and its relationship to public culture. This review is done to identify productive measures that libraries can take to break the archaic perspective of being neutral and becoming social justice advocates for their communities.

This study explores how organizations deal with divergent institutional logics when designing new products. Specifically, we investigate how organizations approach and embody institutional complexity in their product design. Through a multimodal study of serious games, we identify two design strategies, the proximity and the amplification strategies, which organizations employ to balance multiple institutional logics and design novel products that meet competing institutional expectations. Our study makes an important theoretical contribution by showing how institutional complexity can be a source of innovation. We also make a methodological contribution by developing a new, multimodal research design that allows for the in-depth study of organizational artifacts. Altogether, we complement our understanding of how institutional complexity is substantiated in organizational artifacts and highlight the role that multimodality plays in analyzing such situations.

This chapter focuses on the objectives of historical interpretation (particularly teaching objectives outside of the traditional name- and date-driven curriculum), ideas that lead to creating a safe environment for students to be willing to try character portrayal themselves, content typically taught using this strategy, and successfully implemented sample lessons and activities by the authors that effectively utilize and harness the power of historical interpretation. These activities involve intense and intentional skill–based instruction that scaffolds students throughout their coursework, filling the school year with meaningful student-researched and student-produced historical interpretation. The authors discuss their teaching philosophy in relation to history and social studies, explaining why historical interpretation benefits teaching and learning. Through teacher- and student-driven character portrayals, the authors have created vibrant, secure classroom environments where students become responsible for their own learning and enthusiastic about research, writing, and performing. The chapter contains recommendations for coaching students in artifact analysis, performance, historical thinking strategies, storytelling, and creative writing. While they acknowledge that living history is not a “one-size-fits-all” solution to teaching history and social studies, they demonstrate that the unique learning culture that can result, providing student reflections to illustrate that point. The authors include and explain several effective resources that they have developed for student analysis of artifacts/objects, for guiding historical thinking, and for researching and writing. The chapter concludes with suggestions for individual and large group performance activities and advice on how to grade living history projects, keeping learning in mind as a component of holistic grading of creative student products.

Members of an organization facing change often struggle to adapt and may create new routines. Drawing on insights from a case study of bariatric robotic surgery, the authors illustrate how a new ecology of space transforms the ostensive and performative aspect of a routine during the introduction of a new technological artifact. The authors discuss two types of space: experimental and reflective. The authors show that the reflective space through debriefings enables practitioners to discuss the new patterns of interdependent actions. Practitioners explore the different aspects of the performative struggle with new artifacts and try to integrate new actions and delineate the boundaries of this change during experimental performances. The findings of this study throw light on the role of the reflective space in addition to the experimental space in routine change, and suggest that socio-material ensembles can produce opportunities for reshaping routines.