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In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.

This conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.

Through the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care have been affected by accounting as a performative device. Special attention has been paid to how accounting brings about performative consequences in shaping the medical profession and its context.

The article employs qualitative research methods and draws its analysis on empirical data from in-depth interviews at an emergency health-care unit in Sweden.

It is demonstrated how accounting, in the form of calculations of treatment time and number of patients, enables performative consequences for medical professional work. It is also demonstrated how the use of accounting engages (re)descriptions of practices and roles, creates accounts of patients, and helps to sustain such (re)descriptions. Accounting terms (such as efficiency and control) have been reframed into medical terminology (such as health-care quality and security), ensuring and retaining (re)described medical professional work in terms of practices and emerging roles.

This article contributes to (1) the literature on accounting practices within health-care contexts by demonstrating a case where the accounting ideas and practices of medical professionals are coexistent and interwoven and (2) the increasing body of literature focusing on accountingization by showing how emerging calculative technologies carry performative power over medical professional work through formative (re)descriptions.

This paper aims to investigate the process by which performative technologies (PTs), in this case accreditation work in a business school, take form and how humans engage in making up such practices. It studies how academics come to accept and even identify with the quantitative representations of themselves in a translation process.

The research involved a longitudinal, self-ethnographic case study that followed the accreditation process of one Nordic business school from 2015 to 2021.

The findings show how the PT pushed for different engagements in various phases of the translation process. Early in the translation process, the PT promoted engagement because of self-realization and the ability for academics to proactively influence the prospective competitive milieu. However, as academic qualities became fabricated into numbers, the PT was able to request compliance, but also to induce self-reflection and self-discipline by forcing academics to compare themselves to set qualities and measures.

The paper advances the field by linking five phases of the translation process, problematization, fabrication, materialization, commensuration and stabilization, to a discussion of why academics come to accept and identify with the quantitative representations of themselves. The results highlight that the materialization phase appears to be the critical point at which calculative practices become persuasive and start influencing academics’ thoughts and actions.

Members of an organization facing change often struggle to adapt and may create new routines. Drawing on insights from a case study of bariatric robotic surgery, the authors illustrate how a new ecology of space transforms the ostensive and performative aspect of a routine during the introduction of a new technological artifact. The authors discuss two types of space: experimental and reflective. The authors show that the reflective space through debriefings enables practitioners to discuss the new patterns of interdependent actions. Practitioners explore the different aspects of the performative struggle with new artifacts and try to integrate new actions and delineate the boundaries of this change during experimental performances. The findings of this study throw light on the role of the reflective space in addition to the experimental space in routine change, and suggest that socio-material ensembles can produce opportunities for reshaping routines.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a visual method, snaplog (snapshots and logbooks) from a performativity theory approach.

The paper uses empirical examples from a three‐year qualitative research project where snaplogs are used as an experimental method. The paper presents a reading of performativity theory and discusses the performativity of using visual methods in the research process.

The paper concludes that visual methods have a special ability to activate the field in a way that avoids preconceived ideas, and creates possibilities to observe the researched phenomenon and how it practices, resists and revoices the questions asked by the researchers.

The paper explores and discusses the authors’ experiences and reflections on the positioning and scope of using snaplogs as a visual method. It does not report a systematic evaluation of its implications.

Snaplogs offer the researcher the possibility to activate and cooperate with the researched phenomenon.

The potential value of the paper is that it offers inspiration to organization researchers looking for innovative/performative research methods.

The Teaching Excellence Framework was explicitly introduced as a mechanism to ‘enhance teaching’ in universities. This chapter suggests, however, that the highly complex ‘black box’ methodology used to calculate TEF outcomes effectively blunts its purpose as a policy lever. As a result, TEF appears to function primarily as performative policy act, merely gesturing towards a concern with social mobility. Informed by the data and metrics driven Deliverology approach to public management, I suggest the opacity of the TEF's assessment approach enables policymakers to distance themselves from and sidestep the wicked problems raised by the complicated contexts of contemporary higher education learning and teaching. At the same time, however, I argue that the very indeterminacy through which the framework achieves this sleight of hand creates a space in which engaged teaching practitioners can push through a more progressive approach to inclusive success.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new conceptual framework that reflects network dynamics in Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled service innovation processes.

Based on literature on service innovations, business networks and IoT, dynamic concepts are selected. Aided by information about an evolving case “The connected vehicle”, propositions about interaction between the variables in the framework are formulated.

A conceptual framework consisting of four interacting variables: overlapping, intermediating, objectification of actors and business modelling is developed, linking several streams of research. Propositions are motivated and issues for further research questions formulated.

The framework may stimulate further research on IoT-enabled service innovations.

Understanding network dynamics for developing and implementing business models for service innovations.

The conceptual framework provides an original contribution to understanding IoT-enabled service innovations.

The study aims to analyse international studies on the impact that new forms of control and performativity in higher education have on academics’ identity. The aim was threefold, namely, to provide an overview of the main published findings; to establish biases and future lines of research and to offer a starting point to stimulate a debate on the future of universities.

The present study consists of a systematic review aimed at providing an overview of the main professional identities (PIs) described in the literature in the past 10 years. A bibliographic search was conducted on the Web of Science, SCOPUS and Education Resources Information Centre, which yielded a total of 26 articles that were subsequently subjected to thematic analysis.

The study provides an overview of the types of identities developed by academics as a result of the new forms of control. Among the main findings, this study reveals a clear predominance of PIs characterised by submission to the new neoliberal demands. The professional, social and health consequences associated with these identities are also highlighted. Finally, a proposal is made for future research to better understand how these new PIs are constructed and developed.

Because of the chosen filters or databases, the study could have omitted possible articles relevant to this review. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to replicate such a study by expanding, for example, the languages used.

This study helps us to obtain a detailed description of the different identities generated as a consequence of the new governance of higher education. Furthermore, possible implications for mitigating this situation are mentioned.

This paper has been written in the style of a provocative essay. This paper aims to show how neo-liberalism has become the leading “policy doctrine” in higher education (HE) systems across the globe. This has put increasing systemic political and economic pressure on many universities which not only undermine but also “colonize” the Lebenswelt or “lifeworld” (Habermas, 1987) of academics.

This study draws on concrete empirical examples based on the authors’ subjective experiences within the higher educational sector and secondary sources.

The authors highlight and illustrate how the increasing dominance of “neo-liberal science” principles (Lave et al., 2010) severely damage the quality of knowledge production and working conditions of ordinary academics in both national and international academic communities.

This paper provides insights into the practical implications of the spread of “neo-liberal science” principles on the work and employment of academics.

The authors aim to trigger critical discussion concerning how emancipatory principles of teaching and research can be brought back into the Lebenswelt of academics to reverse some of the destructive effects to which this paper refers to.