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The history of economics has often been described as the “history of economic thought.” In this essay, I explore an alternative perspective that builds on the French tradition of historical epistemology and treats economics as a social practice. I argue that a practice-based view provides a more philosophically robust conception of historiography and a richer field of investigation for historians of economics.

The paper seeks to provide a theoretical contribution to the current phase of the knowledge creation theory of knowledge management (KM) by addressing the need for a paradigm shift and having more ontological and epistemological discussions.

The proposed “becoming to know” framework builds on the KM literature review and on the study of learning, knowing and becoming concepts from several perspectives. Both conceptual and empirical research papers contribute to the framework.

The paper presents the challenges of KM; it identifies five phases of the knowledge creation theory development through 1995‐2008; it summarizes the main criticism against the theory; and it proposes the “becoming epistemology” concept and the “becoming to know” framework. The main elements of this framework are: engaging, exploring, experiencing, emerging, enabling and evolving.

Study of the KM literature reveals several other challenges that are not addressed here and could provide opportunities for researchers. The paper calls for more discussions regarding the paradigm shift and for more attention to the participative research paradigm, as well as action and case study research in KM.

Drawing on the participative paradigm, epistemology of practice, extended epistemology, transformative teleology, becoming ontology and on concepts of learning, knowing, and becoming, the proposed framework illustrates the dynamic, iterative, interactive interplay and evolution of ontological and epistemological knowledge creation spirals that is the essence of the knowledge creation theory.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.

Focuses on the nature of professional practice based on research conducted with practitioners via interviews and questionnaires. Aims to determine how practitioners actually tackle professional problem solving. Discusses reflection, specialised knowledge and repertoires of solutions, among other factors, and examines differences in professional practice according to age, gender and membership of various professions. Finds that although specialist knowledge is crucial to successful practice, improvisation is a key factor. Suggests that a combination of applied knowledge and reflection is important in professional practice.

The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional organizing. The term intra-activity refers to relationships between multiple elements (human and more-than-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries. The paper aims at reframing organizing, as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements, by introducing the metaphor of shadow organizing. It offers examples as diverse as knowledge spillover, evidence-based medicine and improvisation, and the mafia’s organizational rules.

The frame of reference is metaphorical theorization, based on the metaphor of shadow organizing, and is explored through three metonymies: the forest and its sheltered spaces in penumbra; the shadow as a grey zone between canonical and non-canonical practices; and secret societies, hidden in the shadow. The shadow is the symbol of what is “betwixt and between.”

Shadow organizing focuses on the way that situated elements (people, technologies, knowledge, infrastructures, society) intra-relate and acquire agency. Whilst organizing as the effect of intentional coordination, planning, and strategizing represents a well-established theorization, shadow organizing sheds light on what happen in the interstices of intentional and structured processes. The paper identifies the dimensions of shadow organizing as performativity, liminality, and secrecy.

The passage from elements in interaction to intra-acting relations that form elements is a challenge both for theory and methodology. To face this challenge, metaphorical thinking proves useful since it enhances scholars’ imaginations and emotional participation.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize the theory-practice gap and to provide examples of how it currently expresses itself and how it might be addressed to better integrate between the worlds of thought and praxis.

Two empirical examples exemplify how the theory-practice gap is an institutionally embodied social reality. Cultural-historical activity theory is described as a means for theorizing the inevitable gap. An example from the airline industry shows how the gap may be dealt with in, and integrated into, practice.

Cultural-historical activity theory suggests different forms of consciousness to exist in different activity systems because of the different object/motives in the world in which we think and the practical world in which we live. A brief case study of the efforts of one airline to integrate reflection on practice (i.e. theory) into their on-the-job training shows how the world in which pilots think about what they do is made part of the world in which pilots live.

First, in some cases, such as teacher education, institutional arrangements can be made to situate education/training in the workplace. Second, even in the training systems with high fidelity, high validity (transferability) cannot be guaranteed.

The approach proposed provides a theory not only for understanding the theory-practice gap but also the gap that exists even between very high-fidelity (“photo-realistic”) training situations and the real-world praxis full of surprises.

The aim of this paper was to review the knowledge and practice‐related literature, as well as to develop a theoretical framework that functions like a sorting device, in order to improve our understanding about how theories are turned into practice.

This is a theoretical paper that discusses the relationships between practice and knowledge using practice‐based lenses.

This paper discusses the relationships between diverse forms of knowledge and practice, and it elaborates the cognitive mechanisms used to know how to shift from the inside to the outside view, and vice versa.

By organising a wide range of knowledge‐ and practice‐related concepts into meaningful categories, this paper contributes to overcoming the use of the concepts of knowledge and practice as universal.

By recognising the implicit epistemological stance associated with the diverse theories and concepts, the framework may be useful in selecting the most suitable practice concepts and theories for specific situations, especially since they are not universal and are usually developed with different purposes.

The proposed framework contributes to improve our understanding about how theories are turned into practice.

The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based studies: “formativeness”, which denotes the kind of knowledge that is generated in the process of realizing the object of the practice and that is discovered while the form of the object is being shaped. This term focuses the analysis on how the elements of a practice are held together, rather than on what elements are involved in a practice.

Inspired by grounded theory, an empirical research study on craftswomen and their practical creativity (between the hand and the head) was designed. Storytelling was used in order to elicit the verbalization of the craftswomen's ways of knowing/doing, and the episodic interview was the technique employed to access and present the data.

Formativeness can be described and interpreted as the effect of the following dimensions: the emergence of the object, the golden rule of realization, forming by hybridization, experimentation, playfulness, attachment to matter, and proper realization.

The study's contribution may be evaluated in relation to how a vocabulary for describing and interpreting knowing-in-practice is constructed. Formativeness makes it possible to name the process by which ways of doing are discovered while activities are being performed. It contributes to a critique of representational knowledge, while offering an alternative line of inquiry.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how research managers and directors conceive, adopt and adapt organizational structures to regulate and stimulate academic research.

The study used principles of a grounded theory approach for collecting and analysing data in interviews with research directors and programme managers working at universities within the discipline of Business Administration in The Netherlands.

In total, four clusters of concepts emerged from the data, related to: the definition of organization structures; the effects and by‐products of providing structures; academic research as management object; and using organizational structures. The collected clusters show that research universities adopt all kinds of organization structures (formal, informal, narrow, broad, intentional, emergent) and that the perceptions and practices of research managers are crucial for deciding whether these structures may become “seeding” or “controlling”.

The “practice turn” in organization studies has highlighted how important work practices of individual knowledge workers are, but so far has not paid systematic attention to the role of management, or has even downplayed that role. Structuration, which is a key management domain, is not inherently “good” or “bad” (seeding vs controlling), nor is avoiding structuration. Research managers as quintessential knowledge managers appear centre stage in making structures work or not. What makes structures “seeding” (or not) is their selection, combination, adjustment and/or intentional ignoration in practices of management knowing. An important mechanism is that of negotiation in attempts to accommodate possibly divergent interpretations. The concept of management knowing introduced and elaborated claims that management knowledge and practices are intertwined and not independent management knowledge categories.