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The purpose of this paper is to go beyond the market–consumer intersection and investigate consumer collecting as a network constellation, which includes a range of material and human actants.

This research adopts a qualitative research process that includes non-participatory netnography and semi-structured online interviews to collect both textual and visual data. Researchers drew from the field of visual anthropology to analyse the visual data. In addition, thematic analysis was used to identify, analyse and report the patterns within textual data.

Findings of this research reveals key agentic properties of collection constellations and explains how they contribute to the development of seriality and the experience of novelty by shaping curatorial practices within collection pursuits. From the time a collection has been assembled to its countless re-configurations, the network that is composed of a focal collector and a host of other actants interacting within a particular collecting ecology plays an essential role in challenging the agency of the market and the individual collectors.

Although this research investigated consumer collecting from a network perspective, it did not explore changes within those constellations and how such changes implicate collecting behaviour. Therefore, future research may benefit from investigating network transformations on consumer collecting, particularly on curatorial practices and how they shape the trajectory of consumer collections.

Understanding collecting as a relational and iterative “network constellation” enables marketers to engage with their consumers in a more meaningful way. By actively seeking to use the network agentic properties, brands can aid avid handbag consumers and passionate collectors to keep their collections relevant and meaningful. It allows brands to play a role beyond the purchasing stage that characterises the market–consumer intersection and build comprehensive relationships with their consumers. Particularly, by adopting a networked approach, brands can provide collectors with privileged and scientific brand knowledge to help them caretake and experience their cherished possessions.

This study goes beyond the market–consumer intersection and atomistic explanations of collecting phenomena in its investigation and theorises collecting as a relational and iterative “network constellation”. It challenges the subject-oriented ontology of collections literature through explaining how such network interactions inspire collecting behaviours, help collectors maintain and celebrate their cherished collections and change the trajectory of collections pursuits.

Networking is deemed important for women in careers. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the interaction of a specific networking practice with a religious practice and its implications on British Muslim women (BMw). The practice ‘happy hours’ is closely linked with drinking alcohol (Flores-Pereira et al., 2008), while alcohol consumption is forbidden in Islam.

A qualitative research approach was used to interview 37 participants who were in managerial or professional positions.

The findings demonstrate that the presence of alcohol in work-related socializing is a norm, making the practice of ‘happy hours’ invisible and legitimate (Acker, 2006), thereby contributing inadvertently to reinforcing inequality regimes in organizations. Furthermore, the interaction of contradictory religious beliefs/practices of individual employees and organizational practices presents challenges for Muslim women, who feel they have to participate in happy hours as a networking practice in order to progress in careers. While it involves emotional effort, as they persuade themselves to join in activities where alcohol is being served, it paradoxically results in feelings of exclusion and marginalization within the group, as they do not drink alcohol.

This paper focuses on the micro/individual level of analysis, singling out the Muslim female voice while positioning ‘happy hours’ as a ‘networking practice’. It also contributes to the underexplored area of the role of religion and individual behaviour in organizations (Tracey, 2012).

This article positions actor–-network theory (ANT) as a practice perspective and deploys it to explore the performative practices of internal consultancy teams as they implemented major programmatic change projects within a global telecommunication company. The change process required the creation of a “change network” that emerged as a boundary spanning and organising network as the consultants sought to implement and translate a highly structured change methodology and introduce new meta-routines within the organisation.

By combining the methodological datum of ANT to “follow the actors” (whatever form they take) with the guiding principle of practice theory to focus on practices rather than practitioners, the research explored the in-between temporal spaces of performative practices as they unfolded in relation to standardised routines, material artefacts and the tools and techniques of a systematic change methodology. By a method of “zooming out” and “zooming in” the research examined both the larger context of action and practice in which the change network emerged and the consultants' performative practices; but without falling into static macro–micro dualism, or a purely ethnographic “thick description” of practice. The research is based on interviews (25), participant observation and a review of the extensive documentation of the change methodology.

The findings indicate both how consultants' performative practices are embedded in the social and material arrangements of a change network, and why the intentional, expert or routine enactment of a highly standardised change methodology into practice is intrinsically problematic. Ultimately, the consultants could not rely on knowledge as a fixed, routine or pre-given empirical entity that predefined their actions. Instead, the consultants' performative practices unfolded in temporal spaces of in-betweenness as their actions and practices navigated shifting and multiple boundaries while confronting disparate and often irreconcilable ideas, choices and competing interests.

As an ANT practice perspective, the research blends mixed methods in an illustrative case study, so its findings are contextual, although the methodological rationale may be applicable to other contexts of practice.

The theoretical framing of the research contributes to repositioning ANT as practice theory perspective on change with a central focus on performative practice. The illustrative case demonstrates how a boundary spanning “change network” emerged and how it partly defined the temporal spaces of in-betweenness in which the consultants operated.

Cooperative relationships between actors located in the same geographical area that are economically independent and culturally distinct are the heart of functioning innovation clusters. This can slow down the creation of common innovation projects, particularly in French innovation clusters where cooperation is influenced by the governmental financing devoted to this system. This research focuses on knowledge brokering activities implemented in this inter-organizational context, showing how they cross knowledge boundaries, structure cooperative dynamics and participate in common strategy-making. The mobilization of the strategy as practice theory allows for an in-depth analysis, shedding light on various practices, resources and practitioners related to the brokering activities taking place within an innovation cluster in Paris. Findings show a widespread development of brokering activities that emerges from cluster governance unit to its networks according to a reflexive relationship progressive structured over time.

This research is based on a longitudinal exploratory analysis of the Parisian cluster Advancity. To capture its organizational dynamics, two databases of the cluster (focused on innovation projects and integration of members), 24 power point files presented to negotiate strategy and 13 interviews with managers and members of the cluster were used. The whole data was triangulated and generated categories of data that can be compared with the concepts of the literature on innovation clusters (governance), brokering activities (knowledge access, learning, networking and implementation) and strategy-making (recursive process and adaptation of the strategy).

The analysis shows the effects of each type of brokering activities on strategy-making across knowledge and organizational boundaries. The practices of implementation activity initially absent from the cluster become, in its mature phase, one of the central activities. Moreover, all the brokering activities are initially handled by the managers of the cluster and progressively are extended to their members, then becoming a widespread activity within the internal networks. The maturation of these practices goes together with the maturation of its own cluster. The practice of experimentation particularly affects brokering activities and produces learning and networking effects within the cluster.

From a managerial point of view, considering the organization of the clusters as a constellation of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) emphasizes that the knowledge brokerage activities can be extended and delayed within each community that makes up the organization. A top-down approach could therefore suffocate the network. It would be interesting to develop this research approach in future work and complete this research by reinforcing microscopic analysis enabled, for example, by tracking a small number of innovation projects during their lifecycle.

The empirical foundation proposed in this research strengthens the scientific nature of the theory of the activity that is itself integrated in the perspective of the practice (Seidl et al., 2006). The multilevel approach and wealth of the mobilized and analysed empirical data allowed making more visible how a social activity builds itself, develops and creates aperture effects on the strategy driven by innovation at the intersection of different boundaries.

The results of this research provide a theoretical contribution in that they allow to revisit the classification of the activities of a knowledge broker (Hargadon 1998, 2005) in a new organizational context representative of the knowledge-based innovation (Amin and Cohendet, 2004). They are also contributing to the current emerging from the knowledge-based view of clusters (Bahlmann and Huysman, 2008; Arikan, 2009) by mobilizing the theory of the practice (Whittington, 2006; Jarzabkowski, 2005). This perspective helps to discern a particular form of strategy-making within the clusters.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the work practices of network security professionals and to propose a new and robust work practices model of these professionals.

The proposed work practices model is composed by combining the findings of ten notable empirical studies performed so far this century. The proposed model was then validated by an online survey of 125 network security professionals with a wide demographic spread.

The empirical data collected from the survey of network security professionals strongly validate the proposed work practices model. The results also highlight interesting trends for different groups of network security professionals, with respect to performing different security-related activities.

Further studies could investigate more closely the links and dependencies between the different activities of the proposed work practices model and tools used by network security professionals to perform these activities.

A robust work practices model of network security professionals could hugely assist tool developers in designing usable tools for network security management.

This paper proposes a new work practices model of network security professionals, which is built by consolidating existing empirical evidence and validated by conducting a survey of network security professionals. The findings enhance the understanding of tool developers about the day-to-day activities of network security professionals, consequently assisting developers in designing better tools for network security management.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations in Denmark and the United States, this chapter compares discourses and experiences of young unemployed professionals engaged in networking. Common across both sites is the kind of emotional labor perceived to be required for effective networking, with workers frequently drawing on romantic dating as a key metaphor. However, engagement in such emotional labor is more intense and pervasive for American jobseekers, while Danish jobseekers express greater concern about potential exploitation of the other party, corruption, and pressure to conform to norms of marketability. The chapter discusses possible links among networking experiences, hiring practices and political-economic contexts in the United States and Denmark.

Small to medium enterprises (SMEs) are often perceived as a fertile area for the formation of effective networks. However, research to date has focused primarily on large companies. There seems to be a lack of rigorous research reported in the literature that tests the relationship between networking practices and business excellence. Quantitative data was gathered from a stratified random sample of SME site managers in the Australian manufacturing industry. A total of 550 manufacturing sites were sent the questionnaire from which a response rate of 20 percent was achieved. Networking practices regression (NPR) models were developed in order to test the strength of the relationship between key components of networking practice and several dimensions of business excellence such as success rate of new products, reduction in waste, increased market opportunities, etc. The data was analyzed using techniques available on the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) for Windows software package. The paper concludes that groupings of network practices are required to explain business excellence. This means that a single networking practice is not sufficient to explain business excellence significantly. The most significant networking practices were found to be: searching and incorporating diverse points of view; challenging the status quo; learning from failures; communicating with people outside the company, including experts; allocation of resources to support communication linkages. The main implication of the research results for SME managers is that a typical manufacturing SME is more likely to improve its chances of achieving business excellence with networking practices than without these practices.

This chapter examines key drivers of variation in adaptive capacity of project network organizations (PNOs). PNOs are defined as strategically coordinated sets of longer-term, yet project-based relationships, which provide for both stability and change in volatile project businesses. While prior research has emphasized the adaptive role of flexible structures and agency, the author focuses on the role of project variety and contextual embedding and disembedding in building adaptive capacity. Comparing two PNOs in TV movie production, the author argues that differences in adaptive capacity are a function of inter-context connectivity, that is, the level of task and team linkages among diverse project contexts, and the degree to which network ties and relational practices have “dual quality” in being valuable both within and beyond specific project contexts. Findings have important implications for project, network, and organization research.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss empirical findings from a study that investigated the work practices within an education network, with the aim of understanding the processes of knowledge development and learning process.

The research is interpretatively positioned through a qualitative case study methodology. This enabled a holistic portrait of the network activity using three different methods of data collection. These were a preliminary focus group, followed by documentary analysis of a significant number of artefacts/documents produced by the network which were triangulated with data from interviews using a cross-case analytical framework.

Empirical insights are provided into the practice of the network through a lens of social capital. It suggests that having a strong bonding social capital is an informal learning factor which develops the individual participants “skills and knowledge” within the framework of Boyers scholarly practice. The findings also indicate a “dark side” to this informal learning factor which impeded collective learning through exclusivity and a maintenance of the status quo within the network.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

The paper considers social capital within a network and the implication that this has on learning and development.

This paper provides insight into informal learning factors employed within work-related learning and the duality of social capital. It also offers a novel approach in understanding how nurse academics frame work-related learning through scholarly practice.

This study aims to extend literature on academic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial networking by examining how academics, in their role of entrepreneurial educators, network for the creation and execution of novel teaching practices in cooperation with external actors.

The empirical investigation is based on qualitative inquiry, using a case study approach. Specifically, eight cases originating at three universities in Germany, The Netherlands and Mexico were examined. The cases which constituted innovative teaching practices were selected following a replication logic. Each involved extensive participation of societal actors in course development or delivery and aimed to stimulate students to work on real life challenges and disseminate novel knowledge back to the world of practice. All courses were either introduced or taught by educators who possessed different levels and types of academic and industrial or entrepreneurial experience.

Based on eight cases the authors found that the networking behaviour of entrepreneurial educators is crucial for the generation of proximity with external actors and for the acquisition of key resources, such as an external actor to participate in teaching practice and for the generation of legitimacy for their innovations in teaching. The entrepreneurial and industrial experience of entrepreneurial educators emerges as an affordance to network with external actors, helping them to achieve a common understanding of the opportunity and to generate trust among them.

This study equips managers of higher education institutions with critical insights into innovating the teaching mission of the university and developing closer and stronger relationships with external actors of the university.

This study seeks to advance the literature on academic entrepreneurship by shifting the attention away from academic entrepreneurs as merely founders of spin-offs and collaborators with business on research and development towards entrepreneurial educators who see opportunities in establishing collaborations with external actors as part of their teaching activities. Further, it introduces the “social networking perspective” to this field. Vissa (2012) and Stam (2015) introduced this perspective as a logical extension to the study of the generation of social capital to reach entrepreneurial goals.