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This paper aims to analyze the strategizing and organizing practices in the innovation process by using a processual approach. Three types of practices are examined: discursive, episodic and administrative. Their arrangement and their influence are also studied in the innovation process. The final objective is to understand the making process of the strategizing/organizing (S/O) duality, which remains today one of the major challenges of the strategy-as-practice.

The paper uses a longitudinal and qualitative methodology applied to a single case study. Primary data are based on 18 semi-directive interviews during a three-year period. Secondary data came from various meeting and reports, Web sites, newspapers and newsletters.

The results show that strategizing and organizing practices are preconditioned by the phases of the innovation process. In the idea generation, commercialization and diffusion phases, strategizing takes precedence over the organizing, whereas in the R & D phase, it is the opposite. In the industrialization phase, strategizing and organizing are carried out simultaneously. Other results highlight the influence between discursive, episodic and administrative practices in the innovation process.

This research offers guidance to practitioners of innovation who want to attain a deeper understanding of the innovation-making process and its close ties with strategizing and organizing.

The authors empirically validate the making process of the S/O duality and examine the theoretical and empirical relevance of an innovizing concept, when the innovation-making process implicitly generates the production of a new inseparable S/O duality.

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.

Working to improve organizations is the mainstay of organization development (OD) practice and includes figuring out the sources of workplace disruptions and dysfunctions. Casting aside the focus of most change-management initiatives, the organization, organizing intelligence (OQ) relies on paying attention to what people actually do, making meaning of complex, messy human-social organizing activities, in the interests of fostering productive workplaces. Resting on dialog with and among participants “feeling their way” as they organize their work, OQ is an exercise in synthesis rather than analysis. A holistic understanding of organizing activities is helped by exploring the roles of a triad of closely interwoven factors – organizing structures, work-practices, and relationships – in how people get things done, while understanding how these are interconnected. This chapter examines why the capacity for OQ matters, why and how OQ differs from widely practiced, technically framed, organizational analysis, and what distinguishes people with OQ from those with a more conventional interest in organizational change. A case study of the Dutch home-nursing organization, Buurtzorg, illustrates OQ in practice. With small groups of nurses who self-organize, this is a structure that changes both the way people work and their relationships, to the benefit of nurses and the quality of life and care of their patients, while reducing costs; clearly an example of a more productive workplace.

This paper aims to generate a better understanding of how challenges and opportunities for sustainable change during digitalization relate to the organizing work of change agents mandated to facilitate technology adoption from within local work organizations.

This study examines the work of welfare technology coordinators, health-care professionals who are mandated to facilitate the use of technologies in home-based services in a Norwegian city. Data comprise ethnographic observations of meetings and work practices, interviews and documents collected over one year. A practice-based approach was applied to analyze how the welfare technology coordinators go about integrating technologies with the work practices, and the forms of negotiations this work implies in their work community.

The analysis identified four sets of practices in the coordinators’ work: exploring and integrating new technologies into work practices, legitimizing aims and values, formalizing routines and responsibilities and critically considering existing and envisioned service practices. Through these practices, emerging problems and disconnections in the service organization were attended to in a continuous manner.

The study contributes to the literature by examining the work of internal change agents mandated to facilitate multiple and simultaneous technology adoption and demonstrates the importance of recognizing the continuous efforts and negotiations of these agents as significant to sustainable organizing.

The purpose of this paper is to present a part of a research study, undertaken over three years, in which the author observed the organization of an annual, community-based, arts and crafts festival in rural central Sweden. By examining the participation of a specific village community group in the organization of the festival, this paper sets out to explore links between the practices of organizing and the culture of a community group engaged in them.

The research study was conducted over three annual cycles of the festival, and its methods reflected the author's position as both a tourist visitor to the festival and a volunteer participant. This paper presents a “thick-description” of the work of a single community volunteer group in the annual organization their village's festival contribution, based on observational and informal interview data from the author's position as a member of that group, and some of the photographic data gathered.

The account presented in this paper offers an examination of the annual routines of a small village community group in organizing their contribution to the broader multi-site festival event observed in the research study. The introduction of anthropological concepts linked to ritual practices extends the understanding of organizing in this setting.

A contribution to the development of an understanding of organizing in recurring, group-organized event settings through a detailed consideration of a micro-level ethnographic study data.

Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges that require new ways of working without abandoning what is valuable about conventional arrangements. However, the processes through which shadow organizing is accomplished are not well understood; there is a need to go beyond traditional notions of mimicry and metaphor. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper demonstrates how a Tardean approach to imitation can address this gap. It deploys imitation as an explanatory concept, based on contemporary readings of Tarde, as well as understandings of organizing as an unfolding process. Child and Family Centres in Tasmania (Australia), are used as an example of shadow organizing, delivering integrated health and education services in an emerging parallel arrangement.

The analysis highlights an imitation dynamic which is far from straightforward mimicry. Rather, it comprises repetition and generation of difference. This dynamic is conceptualized in Tardean fashion as three patterns: the imitation of ideas before expression; the selective nature of imitation; and insertion of the old alongside the new.

The paper moves beyond metaphors of shadow organizing, and understandings of shadow organizing as mimicry. Conceptualizing imitation in an alternative way, it contributes fresh insights into how shadow organizing is accomplished. This enriches and expands the conceptual apparatus for researchers wishing to understand the betwixt and between of shadow organizing.

What if we were to take an explicit relational perspective on organizing? What if we put our organizational conversations and interactive practices right in the middle of our scholarly focus on organizations? In this contribution, I wish to document how the concept of “relational practices” can be formulated as a generative approach to organizing in emergent and multiplex organizational contexts. Starting from the main concern of developing “actionable knowledge” about organizing, I will compare and contrast a relational constructionist approach with a mere instrumental approach to organizing. Beyond the purposive coordination of the means to attain intended goals, organizing will be considered as an essentially relational activity. Actors acknowledge mutually meaningful contributions and, at the same time, mutually enact organizational membership through joint engagement in “relational practices.” Relational organizing is as much a goal in itself as a means to an end.

This paper explores the contradictory pressures for standardisation and customisation in reorganisation processes. Taking a ‘practice lens’ (Orlikowski, 2000), it examines eight on-going reorganisations, from both private and non-private sectors, using photography, observation and extensive interviews. This practice lens goes both outside and inside the processes of reorganising. Outside these processes, it highlights the pervasive influence of standard, even banalised practices, from those embedded in the technologies of Microsoft to the frameworks of McKinsey & Co. Inside these processes, it emphasises the detailed improvisation around these standard practices, with customising the norm. The paper concludes by arguing for the effectiveness of the practice lens in negotiating the contradictory pressures between standardisation and customisation, and by offering provisional implications for the teaching of organisation design in business schools.

This paper is positioned at the intersection of the spatial and the practice turn in management research. The purpose of this paper is to address the phenomenon of transgressive small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) formations and the limitations of SME globalisation research in capturing the connectivity of businesses in disjointed locations, and propose a qualitative case-study design to overcome these limitations.

The paper critiques existing approaches to SME globalisation, which are informed by an interpretative community that conceives of territorial geography as the nodal point of SMEs and does not distinguish between internationalisation and globalisation. The paper thus addresses related methodological challenges. Based on a synthesis across disciplines and theoretical perspectives, the paper offers a reflexive method for case-study research, in the hope that such a method may increase the productiveness of analytical exploration of the multidimensional quality of SME organising and managing at the focal point of current transformations.

The paper makes the case for SME globalisation research to move beyond societist and individualist ontologies to embrace social-constructionist thinking, to make practice the unit of case-studies, and to appreciate process geographies of managing and organising.

The paper contributes to business research on SMEs at the nexus of globalising flows. The theoretical, conceptual, and methodological implications are discussed and are substantiated by details and illustrative selected examples from an ongoing study.

The study of social SME landscapes, including from the perspective of the reflexive case-study method, is open to multilingual and international research collaboration.

The paper contributes a multidisciplinary research design that extends SME studies so as to embrace contemporary transformations, by offering a reflexive case-study method for the improvement of research practice. In the field of SMEs, the paper contributes a new concept social “SME landscapes” that could enrich and improve the understanding of contemporary business. In the fields of SME and entrepreneurship studies, the paper implements expressed demands for social constructionist, multidisciplinary approaches.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.