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This chapter explores the role of informal sport in the development of top-level Icelandic athletes. The approach is explorative and intended to develop an empirically grounded theory. We conducted semistructured interviews with 10 Icelandic elite athletes. Our analysis suggests that the development of free play may be of central importance to the development of elite athletes. Free play offers the opportunity to foster intrinsic motivation, mastery of skills, flow, craftsmanship, and aesthetic experience. We suggest that these qualities are important in the development of top athletes, especially in their early sport career. Our analysis also highlights the importance of unsupervised informal peer interaction. A pool of unsupervised peer networks can serve as a prerequisite for the development of informal sport that may promote qualities that are desirable for the development of top-level athletes. Our analysis further suggests that the contribution of informal sport depends on how it interacts with other elements in the social context and its relationship to formal sport.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the multi-faceted contexts, which influence the motives, decisions and actions that underpin the mundane and lively entrepreneurial practice of migrant youth entrepreneurs (MYEs) within a developing economy context. Moreover, the paper explores the under-researched linkages between migration and informal entrepreneurship.

Inductive, qualitative field data from a migrant destination, the Ashanti Region in Ghana are analysed, comprising 15 interviews with MYEs who hail from 12 communities in the three Northern Regions of Ghana. The authors introduce a narrative-based approach, which has previously been under-employed within empirical studies of informal entrepreneurship.

The findings showcase the complex array of opportunities and challenges, which influence individual decisions to engage in informal entrepreneurship. The findings highlight the importance of not only economic rationales but also non-economic rationales for engaging in informal entrepreneurship. Such rationales emerge from the legitimation of informal practices, the social embeddedness of migrant youth within family and community networks and the precarious nature of informal entrepreneurship.

The fine-grained discussion of the findings contributes explicitly to theory by underscoring the diversity of informal entrepreneurship activities. Theoretically, the article demonstrates the need to look beyond narrow economic explanations for why individuals engage in informal entrepreneurship. Taking a more holistic approach to explaining motivations for engaging in informal entrepreneurship, enables more nuanced understandings of the importance of non-economic rationales for individuals, located in specific contextual settings.

This paper investigates the informal learning processes through which family physicians develop an understanding of the social context shaping the health of marginalized patients. The paper is based on the results of a qualitative study, informed by institutional ethnography, involving individual interviews with 10 family physicians working in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The analysis explores what knowledge of social context is for family physicians, emphasizing its hybrid, socio-clinical character. We also explore key aspects of the informal processes through which this knowledge is developed including learning about ‘the other,’ the reflexive unlearning of medical school training, and learning from clinical doing where we discuss patient-based epiphanies and learning from other health care providers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interrelationship between trust, socialization, and information sharing on the buying firm’s innovation capability in the context of the buyer-supplier relationship (BSR). A nomological model is developed that examines the mediating role of relational capital (supplier trust) on the relationship between structural capital (socialization and information sharing) and innovation capability.

A survey was conducted on 357 US executives. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the hypothesized relationships.

Information sharing and formal socialization activities increased the buying firm’s trust in its key supplier. However, formal socialization activities within the context of the business environment did not have a significant direct impact on buyer’s innovative capabilities; but when mediated by trust, it positively impacted innovation capabilities. Informal socialization within the context of the social environment directly impacted innovation capabilities but trust did not mediate the relationship. Information sharing impacted trust and innovation significantly and trust mediated the impact of information sharing on innovation capabilities.

This study defines the formal and informal aspects of socialization and investigates its impact on trust and buyer innovation capabilities. This is one of the few studies that highlights the mediating role of trust between firms to facilitate innovation capability.

This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

This study aims to develop a framework based on drew social capital theory and the literature on guanxi to examine and compare a buyer’s willingness to commit to a supplier in the context of informal social-capital networks in the two largest emerging markets of China and India. The two main objectives of the study included an examination of the influence of communication behavior and conflict resolution on the development of social-capital networks and a comparison of the influence of distinct dimensions of social-capital networks on a buyer’s commitment to a supplier.

Data was collected in China and India from random samples of buyers. The model was tested using structural equation modeling.

Findings revealed that communication and conflict resolution contribute significantly to build trust, increase social benefits and promote mutual collaboration between buyers and suppliers in both China and India. However, social benefits were found to have a greater influence on commitment in India, whereas collaboration was found to have a greater influence on commitment in China.

The study demonstrates the importance of social capital theory to explain the informal social capital network and commitment development. Results provide practitioners with specific strategies to build social capital in China and India and improve committed relationships with buyers.

This study advances theory development within the context of emerging markets. It is unique as it includes the two most populous and fast-growing emerging markets in one study.

The study discusses the importance of workplace learning in the current era of work and how organisations are shifting their focus toward employee learning and development. It highlights the need for employees to continuously up-skill themselves to keep up with the demand for skills. The purpose of this study is to introduce a modern approach to evaluating workplace learning to promote and enhance better performance within the workplace.

It introduces a deep modern learning approach called “behavior-oriented drive and influential functions of formal and informal learning”. The study also develops the concept of the “Study, Plan, Do, Check, and Act” framework to simulate practise and theory within and outside of work to allow continuous improvement, learning new workplace tools, and bridging digital transformation challenges. The study highlights that workplace learning occurs in a variety of contexts and uses various tools, which poses challenges for the design and development of technology that supports and analyses workplace learning.

Based on behaviour-orientated drive and influential functions for formal and informal learning, a grade of 6.54% days was registered for formal learning tools and 4.89% days for informal learning tools. From the statistics in this study, This study concluded that informal learning tools contribute more to the development of the workplace than formal learning. In informal learning, employees act autonomously at their own will and pace to obtain the required knowledge. The time to acquire knowledge through informal learning tools is shorter than in formal learning. Future relevant research should review more learning tools for formal and informal learning.

Modern workplace learning is a key tool for organisations to gain a competitive advantage. Learning based on formal training and development programs, informal learning and knowledge sharing influence the development of human capital resources.

The study combines social science and engineering approaches to enable non-engineers to pioneer execution of tasks and examine their performance based on the approach detailed in the results, methodology and discussion sections. It contributes to the field of learning organisations and organisational learning by exploring the learning processes of modern professionals. By investigating the learning practices and experiences of knowledge workers, this study seeks to identify the factors that promote or learn and the impact of learning on the workplace.

Management thinking has seen organisations group product development activities in a number of ways in the quest to improve performance. The implementation of multi‐disciplinary teams has been recognised as a means of rapidly improving the way product development activities are managed. However, such an approach is not without its ills. Moreover, Henderson's research (Henderson, R., “Managing innovation in the information age”, Harvard Business Review, January, 1994, Reprint no. 94105) indicates that what governs product development success is the ability of the company to overcome the boundaries of any organisational grouping, rather than the type of organisation structure adopted. This research seeks to corroborate Henderson's propositions in a number of different industrial settings. Social network analysis helped embody the theory into a specification for a model to visualise and manipulate the informal organisation and the on‐going research activities further developed the specification into a working model that has been trialed in a number of different industrial settings. This paper sets the research context and presents the results thus far, both in the context of knowledge from academic research and practical application of the model. The working model has been able to manipulate the informal organisation by enabling visualisation of “core knowledge communities”, generating discussion, and supplying focus for individuals and teams to manage relationships more effectively and hence improve product development performance. Implications for further use of the model are reported, together with its potential for improving performance in organisational areas external to product development.

The purpose of this paper is to assess ways in which informality can be understood and reviews an emerging area of management scholarship. The origins and nature of informality are discussed with the aid of two different theoretical tools: “workplace sociology” (WS) and “mixed embeddedness” (ME).

The analysis is grounded in empirical material reflecting different aspects of informality mainly within the ethnic economy, such as a study on the implementation of the National Minimum Wage regulations (Ram et al., 2007; Jones et al., 2004, 2006).

The authors argue that the combination of WS and ME provides a valuable means of content and character of informality. It can also help to explaining variations and patterns within the informal economy, as well as understanding new forms of informality in the ethnic economy and beyond in “superdiverse” contexts.

This paper bridges two different theoretical approaches to explain the interactions between the firm and state regulations, as well as the workplace relations between employer and employees.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Finnish ninth grade pupils’ (15-16 years) perspectives on hot school lunches and consider the potential of these perspectives as a resource for food and health education.

Data include observations, essays, and visually elicitated focus group discussions from a larger qualitative case study. Data were collected during the term 2012-2013.

Pupils considered the lunch break as their free time and valued discussions with friends. The taste of school food was important for them. Pupils solved contradicting expectations connected to school lunches through constructing social hierarchies, making compromises, and conforming to peers’ or general opinions. Desire for social belonging and independence were important justifications for breaking food-related rules.

Due to the focus on one school, further research needs to address contextual variation in different schools and age groups, as well as the viewpoint of teachers.

To genuinely engage pupils, potential contradictions between adults’ and adolescents’ perspectives need attention. Understanding food-related social determinants and justifications for food practices from pupils’ perspective are valuable pedagogical assets for teachers. Pupils’ speech and activities that counteract formal aims can be seen also as possibilities for dialogue, rather than merely problems to be changed by adults.

The paper describes how pupils’ perspectives to school lunch practices are in tension with the educational aims of school lunches, thus contributing to developing adolescent-centered food and health education in secondary schools.