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The use of digital marketing technologies remains low in Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), with digital transformation being a concern for governments globally. This study reports on the human-technology interaction process, using digital entrepreneurial marketing (DEM) bricolage and a sociomateriality lens to examine more deeply organisational interaction between marketers and digital marketing technologies in these firms.

A qualitative case study and purposive sampling approach are deployed, using seven SMEs in the same UK region. A bricolage and sociomateriality framework and template analysis are used to identify digital marketing strategies and challenges, levels of digital marketing bricolage and assess the value for each firm.

Firms practice different levels of DEM bricolage depending on the interactions of the marketers with digital marketing tools. Those marketers in firms who had higher levels of interaction between the human and the technological provided greater long-term strategic value for the SME.

This is the first study to apply a sociomateriality lens to bricolage in an SME digital marketing context and allows us to view the way in which employees interact with digital marketing technology and create value. There is scarce empirical data in this area despite numerous calls in the developing field of entrepreneurship and digitalisation in small and growing firms.

This paper aims to understand the key factors affecting collaborative innovation in a destination management organisation from a dynamic capability perspective.

An in-depth case study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with the CEO and Chairman of the destination management organisation (DMO) and internal DMO documents from 2011 to 2016. Thematic analysis was carried out on the data both deductively, with generic themes identified and informed by theory, and inductively, where detailed subthemes were developed from the data.

The success of innovation in the context of a DMO depends on having a strong base of microfoundations that underpin the DMO’s capabilities to sense and seize opportunities and reconfigure its assets for competitive advantage. Collaboration with the key players in the sector has been the essential elements of these microfoundations.

This study has been conducted within a single DMO case study. Future research should test the proposed models in different types of organisations and collaborative contexts.

The proposed dynamic capability framework helps managers achieve collaborative innovation, leading to competitive advantage through better development of relevant capabilities.

The study represents a first attempt to understand the key factors enabling successful collaborative innovation in the context of DMOs, from a dynamic capability perspective. The unique opportunity of accessing information and witnessing the changes in a DMO over a period of five years enabled the authors to gain in-depth insights and comprehensive understanding as to why and how a UK DMO has been successful in enhancing its business performance through a successful collaborative innovation.

Despite intense scholarly interest in social entrepreneurship, opportunity recognition remains a poorly understood facet of the phenomenon. Linkages between the micro- and macro-level forces shaping social entrepreneurship are particularly unclear. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of institutional channeling, the process by which institutions socialize and direct individuals into specific knowledge corridors, as a key mechanism influencing the ability of entrepreneurs to identify and create different types of opportunities.

Through a synthesis of institutional theory and the knowledge corridor thesis, this research offers a theory explaining why some individuals are able to recognize opportunities for social entrepreneurship.

The authors develop a conceptual model that explains how non-contested institutions channel entrepreneurs into homogeneous knowledge corridors, which support the creation of purely for-profit and non-profit organizations. By contrast, experiences involving institutional plurality activate and enable heterogeneous knowledge corridors, which are associated with the ability to recognize opportunities, like social entrepreneurship, that blend institutions.

The central contribution of this paper is an explanation of why certain individuals, because of their institutional experiences, are more likely than others to recognize for-profit, non-profit and social opportunities. This article highlights that previous efforts at addressing this issue were predominantly centered at the micro level of analysis and focus on individual entrepreneurs and their identities, personality traits and social networks. Although these studies have shed light on important facets of opportunity recognition, they do not sufficiently explain the influence that institutions can have on the micro processes involved in social entrepreneurship opportunity recognition.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the increased acceptance of biopolitical research by mainstream political science and examines the potential causes. It demonstrates that the changing status of biopolitics is part of a more general pattern in academia, where biological explanations of social phenomena are increasingly viewed as acceptable and even necessary.

Design/methodology/approach – A brief review of the history of the literature of biopolitics with a content analysis of the three leading general-readership journals of political science and other measures of activity in biopolitics.

Findings – Political scientists until recently have not been receptive to the arguments advanced by proponents of biopolitics, but this resistance is weakening. This case for a more biologically oriented political science is more tenable now in part because of the groundwork done by the early generation of biopolitics scholars but mainly because of changing circumstances.

Philip Selznick has been a central, historical figure in the development of institutional theory. In particular his contribution in TVA and the Grass Roots and Leadership in Administration has been key. However, we put forward the relevance of Selznick’s broader portfolio of ideas, to show that they could inform institutional analysis in new ways. There are important ideas and insights that can be brought to bear on contemporary issues within institutional theory. In particular, Selznick was concerned with the ways in which organizational goals are deflected because of different interest groups. Organizations use various kinds of cooptation to deal with interest groups. Selznick’s perspective implies that institutional theorists need to be concerned with both deflection of purposes and interests. These ideas are explored further in his work, The Organizational Weapon, showing a concern with the nefarious effects of organizational practices, an avenue that institutional theory needs to explore further. Indeed, Selznick was always concerned with the consequences of institutionalization. He dealt with issues of organizational governance, purposes and interests, ideas of unanticipated as well as anticipated consequences, negative as well as positive effects of institutionalization all of which require further analysis in contemporary institutional theory. Also at the heart of Selznick’s work was an emphasis on policy and practice, coming from American pragmatist philosophy. For Selznick, knowledge is to be utilized to produce good policy and practice. Institutional theorists need to consider the applications of their knowledge.

Following Philip Selznick’s lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics – collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames – significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based “institutionalization processes” and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI – a project-centered production network – social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.

Drawing on close readings of Schatzki and Friedland, this paper explores the nexus of practice, logics, and values, and especially the implications of practice-driven institutionalism for the concept of values and vice versa. In essence, the article searches for values in practice-driven institutionalism and articulates how they might be found, deploying practice theory, institutional logics, and values work as guides. The article’s core argument is that both practice theory and institutional logics ascribe an important conceptual role to values, but neither has developed a theory of values that is wholly compatible with the onto-epistemological commitments of practice-driven institutionalism. The article introduces burgeoning scholarship on values work and argues that this approach offers a bridge between practice theory and institutional theory and, by extension, provides conceptual resources and an important research lacuna for those interested in practice-driven institutionalism.