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This study explores the yet understudied productive aspects of uncertainty in the organization of creative collaboration and scrutinizes the practices that allow participants to fruitfully use it as a resource for the creation of novelty. In contrast to former conceptualizations of uncertainty as a quantity to be reduced through organizing, we apply a qualitative heuristic where uncertainty may shift different dimensions regarding participation (who?), procedure (how?) and content (what?). Based on eight creativity biographies in two creative fields, music production and pharmaceutical development, encompassing 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews, we identify embracing, ignoring, and fixing uncertainty as three distinct, yet interrelated practices to engage with uncertainty and thereby enable the emergence of valuable novelty in interaction. We further discover that the participants shift these practices between the different dimensions of uncertainty during the process of creative collaboration. Moreover, we argue that these shifts are necessary to maintain creativity in collaborative processes. Thereupon, we contribute insights to the so far enigmatic notion of organizing for collaborative creativity.

In this chapter, the authors analyze the relationship between academia, organization, and gender in Chile. In particular, the connection between academic practices, management, and hegemonic masculinity throughout the history of Chilean universities. The authors took a critical approach from the field of gender and organizational studies, shedding new light on a longstanding problem: gender-based violence in universities. The authors will discuss how the centrality of management in Chilean universities makes sense in a late and globally connected capitalist scenario, characterized by the introduction of managerialism and business logic in higher education. Consequently, the practice of management acquired a central and hegemonic status that articulates the rest of the academic practices, organizing them not only in terms of the hegemony of management but also in terms of male hegemony.

The purpose of this study is to analyse organizing professionalism and its consequences for the work of lawyers in large Brazilian corporate law firms.

The study used qualitative interviews with lawyers linked to six of the Brazilian’s leading law firms. The focus of the interviews was to explore the work organization form considering the changes to the legal profession in recent years.

The results indicate that the institutional changes had substantial consequences for lawyers: a need to organize work, to integrate professional and management logic and to develop typical managerial skills to be more connective when performing tasks in work teams.

Socio-economic changes that gave rise to more flexible forms of work organization have imposed professional restructuring and leading law firms to adopt a business model of organizing. The study is based on qualitative interviews, meaning that the findings cannot be generalized.

Lawyers need to develop typical managerial skills to align their competencies with the management logic incorporated by law firms.

Despite the increase of studies on professions, the integration of professional and managerial logic and its consequences to lawyers has been underdeveloped. Furthermore, research has focussed mainly on macro-level changes and given less attention to how institutional changes impact individual level.

This article investigates the implementation of a compliance programme (CP) in terms of how practitioners conceive of and execute the responsibilities arising from this corporate governance mechanism.

This study involves a practice lens approach forms the case study analysis and interpretation, involving both interviews and documentary materials collected from an Italian company with prolonged compliance experience. Schatzki's (2002, 2010) practice organisation framework guides the interpretation of CP as a practice organised by rules, practical and general understandings and teleoaffective structures.

CP practice evolves over time. A practical understanding of daily actions required to accomplish the CP and a general understanding of the responsibilities connected with the CP, such as the attitudes with which the CP is performed, are mutually constitutive and jointly favour this evolution. Dedicated artefacts – such as IT platforms, training seminars and compliance performance indicators – help spread both of these types of understanding. These artefacts also align practitioners' general understanding with the CP's teleoaffective structures imposed, including the CP's assigned objectives and the desired reactions to them.

The findings have theoretical and practical implications by revealing the relevance of practitioners' understanding of corporate governance mechanisms in their implementation processes.

This study reveals the potential benefits of practice lens approaches in corporate governance studies. It responds to the call for qualitative studies that demonstrate corporate governance as implemented in daily activities.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge regarding the nature of successful and unsuccessful value co-creation processes between firms and brand communities and the strategies used to address the latter.

The paper draws on a netnographic study of the online collaborative platform known as Alfisti.com, which carmaker Alfa Romeo launched to enhance co-creation with its most devoted consumers, the “Alfisti”.

The findings identify three groups of collaborative practices: interacting, identity and organizing practices. The paper details how firm and brand community members enact the elements – procedures, understandings and engagements – of collaborative practices and how the alignment of these enactments impacts value co-creation.

The paper suggests that co-creation of value succeeds when the enactment of collaborative practices aligns, i.e. when firm and brand community members enact practices in a similar way, and that co-creation fails when the enactment of practices misaligns. Firms and brand communities use three realignment strategies – compliance, interpretation and orientation – to address the misalignment and failure of co-creation. The fact that the research draws on a single qualitative case study is a limitation.

Managerial implications include using realignment strategies to manage firm-brand community co-creation.

Creating an empirical-based framework regarding successful and failing co-creation and how the latter is addressed in the context of brand community makes the paper original.

This paper discusses how a small business experiences professional management by examining the relationship between organisational networking and cultural organising in the workplace. A network perspective is presented in order to evaluate the ways in which workplace relations are enacted to cultural organising. A social constructionist perspective of organisational networking is proposed which emphasises how individuals attribute value and meaning to the interactions they have with co‐workers in the workplace. A work place ethnography is presented which discusses the recruitment of a “professional” manager and his attempts to introduce new working practices into the family business. The analysis highlights how organisational members shape cultural organising by invoking emotional categories to produce mutuality and a sense of belonging in the workplace. In continually re‐enacting workplace relationships in this way, it is found that individuals attempt to trade away variance, divergent views and new organising practices concerned with change. The paper concludes with a final analysis of the ethnography and its implication for small business research and training.

This paper seeks to provide a critical review of the theoretical conception and practical implications of the notion of mindfulness (introduced to organization theory by Karl Weick and colleagues). As this concept aims at clarifying the mechanisms of knowledge creation and knowledge re‐configuration, the notion of mindfulness is used and refined to contribute to explaining some of the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities. Thus, the paper aims to show how putting “new wine” (mindfulness) into “old bottles” (dynamic capabilities) can add to the clarification of the nature and development of dynamic capabilities.

The paper explores and reviews the literature on mindfulness as well as dynamic capabilities and engages in conceptual development based on this literature. Based on this literature review, propositions are developed that regard mindfulness as a micro‐foundation of dynamic capabilities.

It is shown that the literature neglects opportunistic behaviour, issues of power, and self‐contradictory aspects of the principles for mindful organizing. It is argued that mindfulness should neither be understood as an attribute of an entity nor be simply contrasted with routine, but should rather be depicted as a medium and outcome of social practices which involves enacting power and drawing pre‐reflectively on a background that is built up by routines. Five propositions describe how such a refined understanding of mindfulness can contribute to explaining the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities such as “sensing opportunities and threats”, “seizing opportunities”, and “reconfiguring a company's assets”.

While there are apparent parallels between the notion of mindfulness and the concept of dynamic capabilities, there are also some notable differences. The discussion of dynamic capability puts more emphasis on routines that introduce instability and ambiguity rather than coping with (externally posed) the unexpected. As a consequence, the propositions regarding the relation between mindfulness and dynamic capabilities should be further elaborated and validated or refuted empirically.

First, the paper delineates the limits of (organizing for) mindfulness which has been applied quite uncritically by organization scholars. Second, it derives five propositions that highlight previously neglected mechanisms of how dynamic capabilities develop, therefore adding to one's understanding of the micro‐foundations of dynamic capabilities.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

This paper seeks to explore the recruiting and organising methods used by Irish full‐time union officials to recruit new members in the private sector of the economy.

The analysis is based on a survey of full‐time union officials in eight Irish trade unions.

Results indicate that the use of organising techniques by officials had no significant impact on changes in membership numbers but did have a significant and positive impact on reported changes in new members. However, the variance explained was extremely modest.

A potential limitation is that the organising model is assessed solely from the perspective of full‐time union officials. An area for future research would be to capture the attitudes and experiences of local activists involved in organising.

The demands of the organising approach require great commitment in terms of time and financial resources for unions. Yet the returns from this investment may be slight as only a relatively weak relationship was found between the number of organising methods used and changes in membership numbers and the recruitment of new members.

To date there has been little systematic study of either the recruitment methods used by Irish trade unions or the relative success of different approaches. Based on a survey of Irish full‐time union officials, this paper attempts to address this lacuna.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the embedding of hospital-based medication review attending to the conflictual and developmental nature of practice. Specifically, this paper examines manifestations of contradictions and how they play out in professional practices and local embedding processes.

Using ethnographic methods, this paper employs the activity-theoretic notion of contradictions for analyzing the embedding of medication review. Data from participant observation (in total 290 h over 48 different workdays) and 31 semi-structured interviews with different healthcare professionals in two Swedish hospital-based settings (emergency department, department of surgery) are utilized.

The conflictual and developmental potential related to three interrelated characteristics (contested, fragmented and distributed) of the activity object is shown. The contested nature is illustrated showing different conceptualizations, interests and positions both within and across different professional groups. The fragmented character of medication review is shown by tensions related to the appraisal of the utility of the newly introduced practice. Finally, the distributed character is exemplified through tensions between individual and collective responsibility when engaging in multi-site work. Overall, the need for ongoing “repair” work is demonstrated.

By using a practice-theoretical approach and ethnographic methods, this paper presents a novel perspective for studying local embedding processes. Following the day-to-day work of frontline clinicians captures the ongoing processes of embedding medication review and highlights the opportunities to learn from contradictions inherent in routine work practices.