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The implementation of mobile health (mHealth) in developing countries seems to be stuck in a pattern of successive pilot studies that struggle for mainstream implementation. This study addresses the research question: what existing health-related structures, properties and practices are presented by rural areas of developing countries that might inhibit the implementation of mHealth initiatives?

This study was conducted using a socio-material approach, based on an exploratory case study in West Africa. Interviews and participant observation were used to gather data. A thematic analysis identified important social and material agencies, practices and imbrications which may limit the effectiveness of mHealth apps in the region.

Findings show that, while urban healthcare is highly structured, best practice-led, rural healthcare relies on peer-based knowledge sharing, and community support. This has implications for the enacted materiality of mobile technologies. While urban actors see mHealth as a tool for automation and the enforcement of responsible healthcare best practice, rural actors see mHealth as a tool for greater interconnectivity and independent, decentralised care.

This study has two significant limitations. First, the study focussed on a region where technology-enabled guideline-driven treatment is the main mHealth concern. Second, consistent with the exploratory nature of this study, the qualitative methodology and the single-case design, the study makes no claim to statistical generalisability.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to adopt a socio-material view that considers existing structures and practices that may influence the widespread adoption and assimilation of a new mHealth app. This helps identify contextual challenges that are limiting the potential of mHealth to improve outcomes in rural areas of developing countries.

The construction industry is one of the least automated industries. In the aspect of automation, the technical understanding is very dominant. Focus has mostly been on tools, robots and industrialisation. sociomaterial design shows us that what may first appear technologically deterministic can be replaced and actually call for reinvisioning the traditional focus. The purpose of this study is to introduce the agency of a sociomaterial designer in construction.

This is a conceptual paper with an empirical example. To understand the sociomaterial complexity and dynamics of automation, practice theories are applied. To test this approach, the authors give an example from a Danish (global) supplier engaged in a development project about technical aid (tools) in mounting and assembling gypsum walls.

The sociomaterial-designer can help to understand and make innovation happen when doing automation in construction; as the centre of innovation in construction processes, she works all day with practice, together with practitioners, focusing on material arrangements as located not only in practice, but also in the artefacts. She can help the supplier of construction materials in understanding different professional practices and the transformation to use smarter tools.

This research is within a new practice domain “sociomaterial-design” and it has to follow up with an empirical study that covers a development project with a sociomaterial-design approach.

Developing competences (agency) as a sociomaterial-designer when linking the sociotechnical understanding of Automation with practice.

This research showcases how sociomaterial perspectives can inform automation in construction.

Due to the global outbreak of Covid-19, Swedish teachers in upper secondary education were forced to conduct emergency remote teaching. As of today, there is a stream of research that addresses digitalization in education in light of the pandemic. Previous studies show that the challenges with the sudden intensification of digitalization have been particularly challenging in practical and aesthetic subjects. The research question is as follows: What challenges did vocational teachers experience during the emergency remote teaching caused by Covid-19 and what emergent tactics can be identified in vocational teaching practice?

The empirical data consists of (1) interviews with two vocational teachers and, (2) workshops with 25 teacher students from different vocational programmes that addressed vocational teaching during the Covid-19 crisis.

Emergency remote teaching meant challenges due to the changed socio-material environment that cannot easily be transformed to a vocational teaching setting. The challenges were related to authentic situations and material, problem solving and dexterity. Tactics that emerged as a response to the challenges were mainly connected to attempts to mimic vocational practices.

Contributions include explaining specific challenges and possibilities in developing vocational competence when teaching is digitalised. Furthermore, it increases the understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in vocational education. By adopting a socio-material perspective on vocational competence, the authors enhance the understanding of the importance of a shared socio-material environment.

This study aims to answer two research questions, namely, what kinds of mundane resistance practices emerge in the local food system and which spatial, material and social elements catalyse the resistance practices.

The study adopts a post-humanist practice approach and focusses on exploring the agentic capacity of socio-material elements to generate resistance practices. The data were generated through a multi-method approach of interviews, field observations and Facebook discussions collected between 2014 and 2017.

The empirical context is the rejäl konsumtion local food network in Finland. The analysis presents two types of resisting practices – resisting facelessness and resisting carelessness – which are connected to spatial, material and social elements.

The study focusses on one local food system, highlighting the socio-material structuring of resistance in this specific cultural setting.

The practical implications highlight that recognising the socio-material elements provides tools for better engagement of consumer actors with local food systems.

The study adds to the extant research by interweaving the consumer resistance literature and local food systems discussions with the neo-material approach. The findings present a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which consumer resistance is actualised in a non-recreational, mundane context of consumption. Consequently, the study offers new insights into the agentic socio-material actors structuring the local food system.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the concept of information in relation to temporality within the context of climate change communication. Furthermore, the paper aims to highlight the empirical richness of information as a concept by analysing its use in context.

The discussion is based on 14 semi-structured interviews with initiators and collaborators of 6 open letters on climate change published in 2018–2019. By taking three specific notions the interviewees introduced—fast food information, information quality and information gap–as the analytical point of departure, the study aims for a contextual understanding of information grounded in temporal sensitivity.

The paper finds that information in the context of open letters is informed by different, and at times contradicting, temporalities and timescapes which align with various material, institutional and discursive practices. Based on this finding, the paper argues that notions of information are intrinsically linked to the act of communicating, and they should be viewed as co-constituting each other.

The paper contributes with an empirically informed discussion regarding the concept of information as it is used in a specific context. It illustrates how “information” is far from being understood in a singular fashion, but is made up of multifaceted and at times contradictory understandings. Ultimately, they correspond to why and how one communicates climate change information.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the dynamics and considerations of professionals regarding the sharing of tacit, personal knowledge in their practice.

Adopting a social-constructivist ontology, the qualitative design deploys semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Data were coded, and analysed through interrelating and reasoning.

Personal knowledge is difficult to share precisely, but can be shared to some extent using reflection and stories. Knowledge also provides a position and professional agency, emphasising boundaries and impacting the decisions on interaction and sharing. As such, professional commitment is vulnerable and contextual and, by extension, material becomes part of this interplay of professional practice and collaborative development.

Findings imply that exchange and use of knowledge and material present in organisations are impacted by individual professionals’ autonomy and decisions, which consequently impact on employees’ practice. This calls for research that focuses on individual factors such as autonomy, professionalism and attitudes in addition to organisational and facilitative matters.

Stimulating professional commitment and interpersonal learning is a matter of valuing personal knowledge and practice to avoid protectionism, boundaries and segregated agency. Management and professionals should consider how and why individuals exchange their personal knowledge, paying attention to social structures and individuals’ voices and objectives in forming communities.

This study combines the concept of tacit knowledge with the younger field of practice theory. By connecting personal knowledge to practice, it extends agency to the material world and offers a more individual perspective to knowledge sharing in and between entities.

How to improve healthcare for the ageing population is attracting academia attention. Emerging technologies (i.e. robots and intelligent agents) look relevant. This paper aims to analyze the role of cognitive assistants as boundary objects in value co-creation practices. We include the perceptions of the main actors – patients, (in)formal caregivers, healthcare professionals – for a fuller network perspective to understand the potential overlap between boundary work and value co-creation practices.

We adopted a grounded approach to gain a contextual understanding design to effectively interpret context and meanings related to human–robot interactions. The study context concerns 21 health solutions that had embedded the Watson cognitive platform and its adoption by the youngest cohort (50–64-year-olds) of the ageing population.

The cognitive assistant acts as a boundary object by bridging actors, resources and activities. It enacts the boundary work of actors (both ageing and professional, caregivers, families) consisting of four main actions (automated dialoguing, augmented sharing, connected learning and multilayered trusting) that elicit two ageing value co-creation practices: empowering ageing actors in medical care and engaging ageing actors in a healthy lifestyle.

We frame the role of cognitive assistants as boundary objects enabling the boundary work of ageing actors for value co-creation. A cognitive assistant is an “object of activity” that mediates in actors' boundary work by offering novel resource interfaces and widening resource access and resourceness. The boundary work of ageing actors lies in a smarter resource integration that yields broader applications for augmented agency.

This paper aims to investigate three promotional publications produced by the Postum Cereal Company – A Trip Through Postumville (1920), How I Make Postum (1924) and The Wonderful Lunch Boxes (1925) – with the aim of understanding how language and other semiotic resources are used to promote its products as good and healthy choices.

The three publications were collected from the HathiTrust Digital Library and University of South Florida Tampa Special Collections. They were subjected to multimodal critical discourse analysis to tease out their subtle characteristics and how a combination of language, image, colour, typography and composition are used to represent certain ideas and values related to health and well-being.

The publications subscribe to three distinct genres – “inside the factory”, “friendly spokesperson” and “fictional world” – each of which are aimed at different target audiences. The first seeks to promote Postum as an open and transparent company; the second to promote Postum as a company that cares about its consumers; and the third to promote the health benefits of Postum in a fun and accessible manner. Nonetheless, they are united in their overall objective to link the regular consumption of Postum as essential for good health.

To date, few studies have been conducted on the Postum Cereal Company, while the limited research conducted on promotional publications has tended to overlook discourses of health and well-being. The three genres outlined in this study, thus, have the potential to foster a reappraisal of promotional publications and showcase their ability to offer new understandings on historical approaches to marketing, particularly the link with health and science.

This paper aims to use the advertisements of three major brands – Chymol, Formamint and Lifebuoy Soap – to examine how advertisers responded to the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic in Great Britain influenza pandemic. It looks particularly at the ways in which marketing strategies changed and how these strategies were enacted in the lexical and semiotic choices (e.g. language, image, colour, typography, texture, materiality, composition and layout) of advertisements.

A total of 120 advertisements for the three brands were collected from the British Newspaper Archive and analysed using the theory and analytical tools of multimodal critical discourse analysis. The general themes and semiotic structures of the advertisements were identified, with the aim of deconstructing the meaning potentials of verbal and visual resources used to convey ideas about the pandemic, and how they work to shape public understanding of the products and make them appear as effective and credible.

Each brand rapidly changed their marketing strategy in response to the influenza pandemic, using such techniques as testimonials, hyperbole, scaremongering and pseudoscientific claims to persuade consumers that their products offered protection. Whilst these strategies may appear manipulative, they also had the function of fostering reassurance and sympathy amongst the general public in a moment of turmoil, indicating the important role of brands in building consumer trust and promoting a sense of authority in early twentieth-century Britain.

Exploring the way in which advertisers responded to the 1918‐1919 influenza pandemic reminds us of the challenges of distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate medical advice in a fast-moving pandemic and highlights the need to cast a critical eye to the public health information, particularly when it comes from unofficial sources with vested interests.