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Despite the growing interest in the field of supply chain sustainability (SCS), little exploration of new theories exists. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce practice theories to SCS studies through a practice turn.

This is a conceptual paper in nature. Hence, based on theoretical arguments, the authors elaborate on how the practice turn can arise in the SCS field.

The theoretical elaboration is rooted in the understanding that sustainability is not limited to the materiality of environmental and social issues, as often observed. Instead, there is a need to include immaterial, emotional and intangible elements to better comprehend SCS practice. The authors argue that a continuum exists for a practice turn, including practice-based view, practice-based studies and critical practice theory.

The authors provide a research agenda with a comprehensive perspective of understanding the application and implications of practice theories to SCS.

The practice turn in SCS studies can support managers to better understand their practices not only through recognizing explicit activities but also mainly by reflecting on hidden elements that affect their performance.

SCS studies can better engage with grand challenges through a practice turn, which helps increase its contribution to solving social problems.

Unlike previous literature, the paper elaborates on how practice theories are powerful in supporting both scholars and practitioners in moving away from an extremely economic focus to genuinely embrace sustainability practice. In doing so, the practice turn appears as an important phase for SCS field maturity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue, positioning the articles in relation to the current “turn to practice” within organisation and management studies.

The paper introduces a schematic classification of ways of putting practice at the centre of the concern of social scientists depending on the interest of the researcher and his/her position with regard to the object of the research.

The paper finds that turning to practice does not necessarily, or simply, equate with becoming more engaged, or with making social science relevant, or with moving social science closer to the practical concerns of separate practitioners. It is argued that the effort should be concentrated on developing a type of theory that helps practitioners articulate what they already do, and therefore somehow know. The model for this way of theorising would therefore be not physics or astronomy but rather grammar – a discipline that although just as old, has been based traditionally on a very different relationship between knower and known.

The paper argues that when conceived after a grammatical model, “theory” may become a resource to be used in action and for action to produce emancipatory awareness and trigger change through critical reflection.

The papers in this special issue constitute an initial contribution in this direction as they indicate different ways in which theory, when developed “with” and “amid” and not “for” or even “about” practitioners, may become a powerful trigger of change and transformation.

Purpose – This chapter presents four different approaches to doing and writing qualitative research in strategy and management based on different epistemological foundations. It describes two well-established “templates” for doing such work, and introduces two more recent “turns” that merit greater attention.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on methodological texts and a detailed analysis of successful empirical exemplars from the strategy and organization literature to show how qualitative research on strategy processes can be effectively carried out and written up.

Findings – The two “templates” are based on different logics and modes of writing. The first is based on a positivist epistemology and aims to develop nomothetic theoretical propositions, while the second is interpretive and more concerned to capture and gain insight from the meanings given to organizational phenomena. The two “turns” (the practice turn and the discursive turn) are not as well defined but are generating innovative contributions based on new ways of considering the social world.

Originality/Value – The chapter should be helpful to researchers considering qualitative methods for the study of strategy processes. It contributes by comparing different approaches and by recognizing that part of the challenge of doing qualitative research lies in writing it up to communicate its insights in a credible way. Thus while describing the different methods, the chapter also draws attention to effective forms of writing. In addition, it introduces and assesses two more recent “turns” that offer promising routes to novel insight as well as having particular ontological and epistemological affinities with qualitative research methods.

The aim of this article is to encourage critical scholars of international business (IB) to engage with scholarship that turns to practice and situates knowledges. The paper contends that such undertakings have the potential to constructively politicize research in the field of international business.

The paper discusses the need for future research in the field to be studied more critically so as to be able to focus attention on those subjects detrimentally impacted by the operation of IB. It further identifies possibilities for doing so.

The paper argues that turning to practice and situating knowledges represents a move towards the emancipation of subjects marginalized – and, all too often, silenced – in the ordinary functioning of IB.

Moving against the grain of positivist orientated approaches to research in the field, whilst simultaneously building on the critical traditions to the study of IB, we consider how future scholarship might account for marginalized subjects.

Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors chose a situated practice – interviewing – focusing on the dynamic character of the intra-actions among its heterogeneous elements. What happens to us, as persons and researchers, when we put ourselves inside the practices we study? The authors tracked the sociomaterial traces left by affect in the transcript of the interviews, in the sounds of the voices, in the body of the interviewers, and in the collective memories, separating and mixing them like in a mixing console.

The reconstruction, in a non-representational text, of two episodes related to a work accident makes visible and communicable how affect circulates within a situated practice, and how it stiches all the practice elements together. The two episodes point to different aspects of the agency of affect: the first performs the resonance of boundaryless bodies, and the second performs the transformative power of affect in changing a situation.

The turn to affect and the turn to practice have in a common interest in the body, and together they contribute to re-opening the discussion on embodiment, embodied knowledge, and epistemic practices. Moreover, we suggest an inventive methodology for studying and writing affect in organization studies.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature on global public relations in order to scrutinize how contemporary transformations are conceptualized in the field, and what this means for the understanding of public.

The authors offer a critical analysis and discussion of recent publications in order to explore the nexus of “public”, “culture” and “global”, questioning whether the increased interest in a specific understanding of culture actually contributes to the field’s ability to deal with complex and transforming publics in a meaningful manner.

The majority of global public relations literature applies redundant understandings of globalization. It attaches prime importance to the concept of culture and contributes little to the understanding of transforming publics. Few scholars acknowledge the limitations of using “culture” for the definition of publics in global contexts. Alternative approaches to understanding “publics” in global public relations research and practice are hardly offered.

The findings imply that global public relations research would benefit from abandoning monolithic social science categories and from working transdisciplinary in order to refine its understanding of contemporary societal and social transformations and their implications for the understanding of public and relationship building.

The discussion indicates that public relations practitioners could benefit from reorienting their understanding of publics in globalizing societies in order to build and nourish mutually beneficial relationships. The authors apply the insight into contemporary business practices to offer public relations practitioners a starting point for reorientation.

The authors contribute to global public relations scholarship with an alternative approach to the understanding of transforming publics which merges the spatial turn and the practice turn known from wider humanities and social science research, and relevant business practices.

The aim of this paper was to review the knowledge and practice‐related literature, as well as to develop a theoretical framework that functions like a sorting device, in order to improve our understanding about how theories are turned into practice.

This is a theoretical paper that discusses the relationships between practice and knowledge using practice‐based lenses.

This paper discusses the relationships between diverse forms of knowledge and practice, and it elaborates the cognitive mechanisms used to know how to shift from the inside to the outside view, and vice versa.

By organising a wide range of knowledge‐ and practice‐related concepts into meaningful categories, this paper contributes to overcoming the use of the concepts of knowledge and practice as universal.

By recognising the implicit epistemological stance associated with the diverse theories and concepts, the framework may be useful in selecting the most suitable practice concepts and theories for specific situations, especially since they are not universal and are usually developed with different purposes.

The proposed framework contributes to improve our understanding about how theories are turned into practice.

This chapter seeks to advance the neglected debate on the ethical issues between formal organization and practice arising from innovation in an organization. To that end, the chapter discusses the sources of possible moral dilemmas for practitioners who belong to a practice with a shared identity, values, and standards of excellence, and who need to conform to new rules of formal organization. While formal organization ideally strives for generalized fairness principles for all organizational members when introducing an innovation, the contextualized nature of practices may lead to particular needs and goals of the practice which can only be recognized as such by practitioners and not by formal management, and to which procedural justice cannot respond. The chapter proposes how practitioners may interpret moral dilemmas, aligned with their practice-based identity and ethical values, and what options for action they may seek. The discussion is illustrated with examples of innovation in the field of information systems design.

The purpose of this paper is to further develop the conceptualization of music consumption in the digital age by examining how contemporary music listening is interweaved with other practices, how it shapes those practices and how it is in turn shaped by them.

The paper draws on extensive, qualitative interviews with 15 Swedish music consumers. During the course of these interviews, specific situations of everyday music listening were discussed in detail.

Drawing on practice theory and more specifically the concepts of dispersed and integrative practices, the authors identify and explore a mode of music listening that they term soundtracking, which involves choosing and listening to music mainly to accompany other everyday practices.

As soundtracking grows in importance, music is increasingly consumed as an affective-practical resource. Its significance is then not derived from its ability to demarcate difference and construct consumer identities but from its capacity to evoke emotions and moods than enable and enrich a set of everyday practices.

When music is consumed as part of soundtracking, issues such as the audio quality of music or ownership of material music media become less important, while aspects such as mobility, accessibility and the adaptability of music increase in importance. This has important implications for how and what music should be produced and marketed.

This paper offers an alternative view of contemporary music consumption compared to previous research, which has considered music listening primarily as an integrative practice on which the practitioner is fully focussed. The paper also contributes to practice theory by offering an empirically based understanding of a dispersed practice, showing that such practices are neither without shape nor necessarily very simple in their structure.

This study aims to examine the effects of leadership behaviors on quality management (QM) practices and their effects on quality performance of manufacturing companies in Thailand. The hypotheses were that leadership leads to infrastructure practices, which in turn support quality practices. These quality practices improve quality performance. This was tested using a structural equation model. In general, the model was supported although all of the individual practices examined here were not statistically significant.

A survey of quality managers of firms located within Thailand was conducted and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) to determine how leadership affected quality practices which in turn affected quality performance. The interactions of leadership with infrastructure and core variables were tested and found to be insignificant.

The SEM established that leadership behaviors supported one infrastructure practice – human resource management, which in turn supported one core QM practice – statistical process control. While six dimensions of transformational and two dimensions of transactional analysis were tested, only two dimensions of transformational and one dimension of transactional leadership were retained. However, these did load onto one leadership second‐order factor. The interactions of leadership with infrastructure and core practices were not significant. The core practices significantly affected three quality performance measures – product returns, product rework and scrap levels.

Further investigation is needed to understand how the Thai culture affects the use of quality practices. Since there was only one respondent per company, the study needs additional validation. Further investigation of the transformational and transactional leadership constructs is necessary.

This suggests to international managers that many of the quality techniques are useful in both developing countries and developed countries. It also suggests that transactional leadership was more effective than prior literature expected it be.

This paper demonstrates that leadership in Thailand is important to the implementation of quality practices. The findings indicate that leadership is an important component of QM and affects infrastructure practices which in turn affect core quality practices. Finally, these core practices affect quality performance. This confirms prior QM models. A major finding is the importance of the contingent punishment dimension of transactional leadership. The confirmatory factor analysis suggests that the individual dimensions of transformational and transactional leadership are not reliable as currently operationalized and further work is needed to develop reliable leadership scales.