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This paper forms part of the social and environmental accounting literature. The purpose of this paper is to study how the strategy of development and dissemination of a carbon accounting tool by a public organisation affects the actions of companies.

It is based on the Foucaldian concept of a strategic dispositif whose components and evolution over time will be analysed. The methodology will be based on a case study of ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, through the preparation and dissemination of Bilan Carbone® – the French greenhouse gas accounting tool – between 2000 and 2017.

The results highlight the specific features of the dispositif formed by carbon accounting in France, namely, the integration of small companies, use of the tool to directly support actions and financial independence.

The theoretical contribution of this work consists in showing the benefits of the concept of a strategic dispositif to understand the action of companies in terms of the transition towards low-carbon strategies.

Its empirical contribution lies in the emphasis placed on the specific role of public authorities in tackling climate change within the sphere of carbon accounting methodologies largely dominated by private organisations.

The theoretical contribution of this work consists in showing the benefits of the concept of a strategic dispositif to understand the action of companies in terms of the transition towards low-carbon strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing‐in‐practice and knowledge, in learning processes.

The paper focuses on a distributed, knowledge‐intensive and instrumented activity at the core of any collective action: qualification. The particular case of breeding activities in the livestock sector has been studied, where collective practices of animal qualification for collective breeding have been studied. Qualitative data stemming from in‐depth interviews and observation of daily practices have been analysed, combining practice‐based approaches on knowing processes and science philosophers' theories on the use of instruments during action.

The study of instruments used in daily practices allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between opposite types of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge seen as a stock, and sensible knowledge seen as purely tacit and equated to non‐instrumented practices. Instruments are not merely mediators in learning processes; they also take an active part in shaping and activating knowledge and learning processes.

Further research is needed on the designing of reflexive instrumentation, which takes knowing and knowledge articulation into account better.

Using instruments as a key concept to analyse knowing‐in‐practice processes has both methodological and managerial implications for identifying those instruments that favour learning processes.

This paper complements more classical practice‐based approaches by proposing a new perspective on instruments in learning processes, which is particularly relevant to the study of pluralistic organisations where power is diffuse.

The aim of this introduction to the special issue is to furnish a panorama on how practice‐based studies (PBS) concerned with organizational learning have developed in recent years, and to describe the topics that such studies have debated.

The articles in this special issue were first presented at the standing working group on “Practice‐based Studies of Knowledge and Innovation in Workplaces” of the European Group for Organizational Studies, and will therefore provide the background to PBS and an idea of its methodology.

The practice‐ based approach may be useful for: a renewed conception of organization as a texture of interrelated practices which extend to form an action‐net sustained by a knowing‐in‐action which renews itself and transforms itself into being practiced; a renewed conception of knowledge as a situated, negotiated, emergent and embedded activity; a renewed conception of materiality as a form of distributed agency and an intimate relationship with humans; a methodology for analysis of the new forms of work as knowing‐in‐practice; and a lexicon which comprises new expressions and concepts for the renewal of organization studies.

The special issue does not represent an extended review of the literature on PBS.

This paper offers an overview of an emergent field of studies.