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This article explores, identifies and conceptualises everyday audiobook reading practices amongst young adults.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten Swedish audiobook users aged 18–19. The material was analysed using qualitative content analysis and focused on their audiobook use during an average weekday, as this was the time that they listened the most. The theoretical framework consists of theories on practice, time and everyday routine.

Five timespaces emerged when audiobook practices were most prevalent: morning routines, commuting routines, school routines, after school routines and bedtime routines. Within these timespaces, several practices could be identified and conceptualised. Three mobile practices were commute listening, exercise listening and chore listening while more stationary practices were homework listening, schoolwork listening and leisure listening. An unexpected finding was how audiobooks routinely were used to aid respondents’ wellbeing. This wellbeing listening was used to alleviate stress, loneliness and help listeners relax or fall asleep. Furthermore, respondents switch between Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts, which is conceptualised as MAP-switching.

There is a scarcity of research on audiobook use, and this paper contributes with new knowledge on audiobook reading practices, how audiobooks fit into everyday routine and provides concepts to aid further research on audiobook practices.

Once a week, almost one in ten Swedish children moves between two homes, replacing the routines and practices of one household with those of another. They are children in dual residence arrangements, dividing their time equally between two households after parental separation. Being on the move physically, as well as emotionally and relationally, is a part of their everyday lives. In this chapter, the author addresses children’s perspectives on living their everyday lives in two households and belonging to two homes and how they make sense of regularly shifting between different locations and (perhaps) contrasting family practices, rules and routines. Children’s accounts reveal how moving becomes a routine everyday practice, yet the regular change is perceived differently by different children. While highly valued by some, others find it difficult to handle the emotional stress of constantly leaving one parent behind, or the practical juggling of packing and moving. In the children’s accounts, they reveal how they take part in shaping their dual family lives, post-separation. The chapter draws on qualitative interviews with 20 children and young people living in dual residence arrangements. By using family practices as the analytical focus when analysing children’s accounts, the aim is to understand how everyday life is shaped by mobility. It is argued that the practices associated with dual residence are deeply embedded in physical, emotional and relational dimensions of mobility.

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted.

Purpose – The transition into motherhood is a major life course event for most women, and is one that can be fraught with difficulties due to the uncertainty and instability which accompanies it. Previous research has explored what factors interplay within this transition with identity changes being considered a key attribute. By using assemblage theory, this study aims to undertake an innovative approach to conceptualising identity. Assemblage theory permitted an exploration of how an identity comes to be assembled and embodied through a mother’s relationality with the social world around her as opposed to merely exploring identity as a static entity of a fixed, organic whole as has predominantly been done previously. Assemblage theory is premised upon understanding processes of becoming as opposed to states of being and as such takes a machinic approach to understanding wholes. Rather than being organic totalities, they are conceptualised as being transient and fluid entities comprising an amalgamation of interchangeable components which collectively stabilise to make up the whole. At times of change, an individual’s ties to an identity undergo deterritorialisation, or weaken, as their sense of self and identity readjusts before then experiencing reterritorialisation once they (re)established their ties to a new identity or role. By conceptualising the mothers as assemblages in this manner, it became possible to understand how the women reconstructed their selves and identities through the situated practices and experiences in their everyday lives as they established ties to their new role as a mother.

Methodology/Approach – Results are presented from biographical narrative interviews with 10 mothers each at different stages in motherhood. The interviews focussed on inducing uninterrupted narratives detailing the lived experiences of these women as they transitioned into and across motherhood. These interviews highlighted key stages in the transition into motherhood where a woman’s identity and sense of self would become destabilised and reformulated as a result of changes in her everyday lived experiences and routines.

Findings – Transitioning into motherhood proved to be a multifaceted process that comprises numerous stages where the new mothers identities would become unstable and deterritorialise as they faced new routines in their everyday life as they became a mother and settled into the role. Four dominant themes emerged during data analysis; emotional turmoil, the reconstruction of relationships, getting comfortable with their baby as well as rediscovering the self. The women largely experienced emotional turmoil as their identities became deterritorialised and reported that the relationships they held with others around them often changed or broke down entirely. It was not until they became comfortable with their baby and their role as a mother that they were able to rediscover their ‘self’ beyond simply being a mother. Once they reached this stage in the transition their identity was able to reterritorialise, becoming more stable as a result.

Originality/Value – This study not only presents an innovative method for conceptualising identity but also demonstrates the value of assemblage theory for conceptualising identity formulation and capturing the fluid and emergent nature of such processes. It demonstrates how assemblage theory can be utilised to further understandings of the multifaceted and ongoing nature of life course transitions. This study sheds light on the potential for assemblage theory to be utilised across a range of sociological topics relating to identity formulation, with such studies having the potential to really broaden the scope of sociological understandings of identity formation and life course transitions.

This chapter discusses how media use changes when everyday life undergoes change, focusing on major life transitions. I briefly introduce different perspectives on evolving media repertoires across the life course, and argue for the relevance of studying periods of destabilization and reorientation, when elements of media repertoires and modes of public connection are temporarily or more permanently transformed. I argue that easily adaptable media technologies such as smartphones tend to become more important in unsettled circumstances, as easy-to-reach for tools for new forms of self-expression, information-seeking or social contact, in accordance with shifting social roles and everyday circumstances. The primary empirical material analyzed in the chapter is a small qualitative interview study with mothers, about their media use the first year with a new-born.

The purpose of this paper is to study the phenomenon of organizational change failure through an emic approach. Grounded in empirical examples, the paper unfolds why the phenomenon seems to be missing from the literature of the becoming view (e.g. Tsoukas and Chia, 2002).

Inspired by the methodological strategy of “studying through,” organizational changes are followed through space and time within the setting of a Nordic bank, from where the empirical data have been collected via longitudinal study. The empirical data are generated through a combination of methods: shadowing, interviews, in situ observations and desk research in order to capture the ever-changing phenomenon of organizational change.

The paper finds that organizational changes drift away, either by slipping into the everyday practices of the organization, or by drifting away in time when history is reinterpreted. The paper concludes that organizational change failures suffer the same fate as organizational changes more generally and drift away in space and time.

The paper contributes to the becoming view by illustrating how methodologically an ever-changing phenomenon such as organizational change can be studied. Further, it contributes to the field of organizational change failure by unpacking the fate of organizational change failure when change is natural and slippery in nature. The paper includes reflections on what the consequences might be for praxis.

Considerable research on the experiences of contemporary workers theorizes everyday acts of resistance as inconsequential, emphasizing their limited impact on overarching structures of inequality. This chapter offers a different perspective. Drawing on a feminist interpretivist paradigm, I argue that such characterizations of everyday resistance fail to account for the ways in which workers themselves make sense of power dynamics at work. Incorporating such accounts complicates conventional understandings of low-income workers engaged in everyday resistance as either dupes, as is often suggested by academic research, or schemers, as is frequently articulated by the self-perceived targets of worker rule-breaking – their managers. Based on 10 months of ethnographic observation and interviews with nurses and nursing assistants in a long-term care facility, I demonstrate that while workers recognize the constraints within which they act, they nonetheless make sense of their acts of everyday resistance as defiant. The realities of precarious labor and family responsibility do not combine to prevent resistance at work for these women; they combine to transform it. Asserting their agency through a series of relatively mundane and covert acts that gain them autonomy and dignity, workers readily acknowledge their policy refusals while at the same time recognizing the factors that shape them. Describing subversions of authority as strategic collaborations, the constrained agency these workers articulate hinges on their own and their coworkers’ identities not just as workers, but in many cases as low-income working mothers.

This paper aims to explore articulations of how individuals internalise official demands on handling COVID-19 and the function of social media in this process, and further to discuss this from a human rights’ perspective.

A thematic analysis of qualitative data from an international survey on COVID-19 and social media. The analysis was inspired by Berger and Luckmann's theory of reality as a social construction.

Articulations expressed an instant internalisation and externalisation of the officially defined “new normal”. However, negotiations of this “new normal” were articulated, whereby everyday life activities could proceed. Resistance to the “new normal” appeared, as routines and common sense understandings of everyday life were threatened. Health-care professionals were put in a paradoxical situation, living in accordance with the “new normal” outside work and legitimately deviating from it at work. The “new normal” calls for individuals’ “oughtonomy” rather than autonomy. Social media were used to push individual’s re-socialisation into the “new normal”. The latter both promoted and challenged human rights as the individual's right to self-determination extends beyond the self as it risks threatening other people's right to life.

With the means of a theoretically based thematic analysis inspired by Berger and Luckmann, the current study shows how articulations on COVID-19 and social media can both support and challenge human rights and reality as a facticity as dictated by dominant organisations and discourses in society.

This paper aims to explore four disruptions that practice theory makes to traditional social marketing approaches to school physical activity (PA) intervention.

The paper draws on existing literature from sustainable consumption, sociology of health and illness and the authors’ experiences working with primary schools in the UK to plan and execute social marketing approaches to PA, targeting interconnected social practices from which PA emerges or fails to emerge. The paper explores a practice-oriented theoretical framing, engaging with calls from interdisciplinary areas for PA interventions to shape the PA emerging from a school’s everyday routines, rather than promote PA participation at an individual level.

The paper argues first that a practice perspective would focus on situation research rather than audience research, with practices rather than people as the focus. Second, the purpose of practice-oriented social marketing would be to achieve transitions in practices rather than behaviour change. Third, the planning and management approach of practice-oriented social marketing would account for unintended consequences and complex interconnections between practices. Finally, an evolved evaluation approach to practice-oriented social marketing would take a longer term approach to understand how cultural transitions are emerging.

This paper contributes to an important stream of critical social marketing scholarship that seeks to advance social marketing away from its individualist routes. It sets an agenda for further research that considers the ontological and practical possibilities for practice informed approach to social marketing.

This chapter provides both methodological and cultural insights from an empirical research in German trade unions. In my chapter, I explore to what extent organizational research profits from linking procedures of narrative analysis to Symbolic Interactionism (SI) and explain the analytical outcome connected with it. In order to understand the great empirical variety of “becoming a trade union worker,” its regularities and sense for trade unions as a culture, a theoretical approach was needed that would grasp social processes, especially educational and learning processes in social groups and organizations. Therefore, SI is a useful methodological soil. This chapter clarifies the relationships between social group socialization through life course and everyday member work in German trade unions. It points out what is specific for German trade unions, what kind of deviations are peculiar for them, and why we have to think of them as a cultural order of trade unions at least in Germany. This study introduces a theoretical model on German trade unions, which is quite different from usual organizational studies, because it grasps not only some of their aspects, which prevails in association research rather than the organization as a whole.