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Cultural heritage archiving is experiencing an increase in digitalisations of artefacts in the last 15 years. The reason behind this trend is a demand for providing information about the artefact in a more accessible way to the audience, for example, through online delivery or virtual reality. Other reasons might be to simplify and automate the management of artefacts. Having a ‘digital copy’ of artefacts, allows one to search an archive and plan its storage and dissemination in a comprehensive manner. With the increased digitalisation comes an increased use of artificial intelligence [AI] applications. AI can be very beneficial in classifying artefacts automatically through machine learning [ML] and natural language processing [NLP]. For example, an algorithm can identify the source and age of artefacts based on an image and can do this much faster for a large collection of photos than a human. Although AI provides many benefits, it also presents challenges: Sophisticated AI techniques require certain insights on how they work, need specialists to customise a solution, and require an existing large dataset to train an algorithm. Another challenge is that typical AI techniques are regarded as black boxes, which means they decide, but it is not obvious why a decision has been made. This chapter describes a project in collaboration with the South Australian Museum [SAM] on the application of AI to extract material lists from a description of artefacts. A large dataset to train an algorithm did not exist, and hence, a customised approach was required. The outcome of the project was the application of NLP in combination with easy-to-customise rules that can be applied by non-IT specialists. The resulting prototype achieved the extraction of materials from a large list of artefacts within seconds and a flexible solution that can be applied on other collections in the future.

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.

The author distinguishes between state, process, and object perspectives on institutions and institutionalization. While all-purpose process approaches dominate the literature, the author argues that these are analytically insufficient without theorizing the nature of “institutional objects.” Building on recently developed analytic disaggregations of the culture concept in cultural sociology, the author argues that doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts exhaust the broad classes of potential objects subject to institutionalization processes. The proposed approach provides a coherent ontology for future empirical work, features robust microfoundations, places institutional routines and practices in a material context, and acknowledges the importance of semiotic codes and vocabularies in organizational fields.

Organizational paradoxes must first be recognized by managers before they can respond to them. Yet scholars have adopted different perspectives on how paradoxical tensions become salient and engender management responses. Some approaches have focused on the socially constituted nature of paradoxes, and others on the inherent aspects of paradoxes in the environment. The authors propose an approach that gives ontological meaning to both the socially constituted and inherent nature of organizational paradoxes. Our approach, which is inspired by quantum physics, opens up new opportunities for engaging with the socio-materiality of paradoxes, how they are measured, and the implications this has on the probabilities of managing organizational responses to paradox.

This chapter highlights the collaborative efforts of committed partners engaged in four distinct yet inter-related programs designed to build leadership capacity across schools serving rural Alaska. The Rural Alaska Principal Preparation and Support (RAPPS) program has built a comprehensive system of leadership development programs that develop aspiring leaders, induct and coach new principals, promote the professional learning of practicing principals, and support the school improvement efforts of the state education department. Each program is described in detail with special attention devoted to the unique elements of the program designs, including summer institutes; cohort models; distance learning offerings; targeted coaching; blended learning models using webinars; critical friends’ conversations; and a festival of ideas. Lessons learned are highlighted, and impact and evaluation results are also detailed.

To present a cross-case analysis of two pre-service teachers who studied their own teaching using video within a teacher inquiry project (TIP) – a teacher education pedagogy we are calling video-mediated teacher inquiry.

Activity theory is used to examine how inquiry groups collaboratively used video to mediate shifts in goals and tool use for the two pre-service teachers presented in the study. This chapter addresses the question of how video-mediated teacher inquiry supports the appropriation of teaching tools (i.e., classroom discussion) in a teacher education program.

The findings indicate that shifts in goals and tool use made during the TIP suggest greater appropriation of the pedagogical tool of classroom discussion. We also consider how these shifts may be bound by the inquiry project.

The use of video cases of teachers’ own teaching is an emergent pedagogy that combines elements of both case study methods and practitioner inquiry. We argue that this pedagogy supports tool appropriation among pre-service teachers in ways that may help them develop as reflective practitioners.

In this chapter, we propose a blended methodological approach (critical) educational ethnography, to address problems of education. The chapter includes a brief overview of critical and educational ethnography, which inform the methodology, followed by a discussion of the essential elements and pedagogical objectives that undergird and operationalize the methodology. The essential elements include articulating a critical context, defining and understanding culture, establishing relationships and embeddedness, and multiple ways of knowing. Rather than articulate a curriculum and content for teaching (critical) educational ethnography, pedagogical objectives are provided to support the development of novice researchers (i.e., doctoral students, researchers-in-training).

Based on a critique of reductive understandings of physicality, this chapter explores the significance of embodied materiality, the artefactual physical, the role of the living body and embodiment in relation to ‘intra and inter’ practices of leadership from a phenomenological perspective. Using a phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approach, issues of an embodied physicality in leadership are systematically explored and implications discussed beyond physicalist empiricism and meta-physical idealism. Furthermore, the chosen phenomenological approach reveals problematising limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches.

Following Merleau-Ponty an extended understanding of physicality as well as the significance of the co-constitutive role of embodiment, inter-corporeality and intra-action in and of leadership practices in organisational life-worlds are identified and discussed. Insights into the role of corporeal materio-socio phenomena and expressions of meaningful practices of leading and following are rendered. The chapter concludes by noting limitations and implications of embodied physicality and physical inter-becoming of ‘bodiment’ for a more integral and sustainable conception of leader-and followership in organisations. Through its specific post-dualistic approach the chapter provides an innovative perspective on the interrelations between living, material, bodily and embodied dimensions of physicality in leadership.