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The purpose of this paper is to describe how organizational members became storywriters of an important process of organizational change. Writing became a practice designed to create a space, a time and a methodology with which to author the process of change and create a learning context. The written stories produced both the subjectivity of practical authors and reflexively created the con/text for their reproduction.

A storywriting workshop inspired by a processual and participatory practice-based approach to learning and knowing was held in a research organization undergoing privatization. For six months, 31 organizational members, divided into two groups, participated in writing one story per week for six weeks. The written story had to refer to a fact that had occurred in the previous week, thus prompting reflection on the ongoing organizational life and giving a situated meaning to the change process.

Storywriting is first and foremost a social practice of wayfinding, that is of knowing as one goes. Writing proved to be an effective practice that involved the authors, their narratives and the audiences in a shared experience where all these practice elements became connected and through their connection acquired agency.

Narrative knowledge has been studied mainly in storytelling, while storywriting by organizational members has received less attention. This paper explores storywriting both as a situated, relational and material practice and as the process that produces narratives which can be considered for their content and their style.

The paper aims to provide an overview of the vocabulary for materiality which is used by practice‐based approaches to organizational knowing.

The overview is theoretically generated and is based on the anthology Knowing in Organizations: A Practice‐based Approach edited by Nicolini, Gherardi and Yanow. The overview is built by cross‐reading the analyses in this book. The intellectual traditions which are scrutinized all agree that action is materially embedded – objects and artifacts are central to both knowing and learning. But what is their understanding of materiality? The paper explores which concepts are used, how the interaction between social and material realities is presented, and the role materiality is perceived to have in relation to action.

Findings are that, within the practice‐based approach, common terms for materiality are “artifact” and “object”. The interaction between social and material realities is grasped as several processes: object‐oriented activity, symbolization, embodiment, performance, alignment and mediation. Material artifacts both stabilize and destabilize organizational action. They may ensure coordination, communication, and control, but they may also create disturbance and conflict.

The paper lists a range of options for conceptualizing how organizational action may be materially mediated. It points out that material entities may both stabilize and destabilize organizational action. It contributes to the further understanding of the tangible, artifactual and object‐related side of organizational knowing.

The paper sets out to suggest that knowledge in the SME enterprise is embodied as evident in such notions as tacit knowing and learning, and embedded grounded in the situated social historic contexts of individual lives and work. This supports the view that the nature of knowledge is inherently indeterminate and continually evolving.

A practice‐based approach focuses towards, the point of action, enabling the researcher to observe knowing as an intimate recursive feature of organisational life, the local in which traditional dualisms lose their meaning, in the specific context of real time practices, in that the knowing subject and the known objects cannot be treated in isolation and opposed to one another, the given and the emergent co‐exist and presuppose one another.

The paper offers the suggestion that a social process perspective offers a means of engaging the SME enterprise in more effective knowledge creating activities, and fostering innovation, which is both relevant and useful to them.

The paper offers the suggestion that a social process perspective offers a means of engaging the SME enterprise in more effective knowledge creating activities, and fostering innovation, which is both relevant and useful to them.

The paper seeks to extend the current conceptualisations of organisational learning developing the view that learning is no longer associated with the diffusions of pieces of knowledge, but rather it is viewed as the process of developing of situated identities based on participation in a process of social engagement and interaction.

This article sheds light on the legal services offered by antiviolence centers through a discursive practice-based analysis of women who have experienced domestic violence and the lawyers who volunteer in the center.

Using a practice-based framework, the article utilizes a case study of the first legal meeting between a lawyer and a woman who has experienced violence. The case study illustrates how the legal advisors' expertise is deployed in the use of “discursive practices” in dealing with women who have experienced domestic violence. Through a systematic analysis of the verbatim narrative, the case shows how the lawyer performs her legal help through expert “discursive practices” which are situated in recognition of the texture of practices experienced by women in the legal system.

The case study shows how a practice-based approach is able to account for lawyers' discursive and interactional knowledge in dealing with domestic violence. This expert doing and saying includes the ability to read the complexities of abusive situations, using “professional vision” to identify, highlight and codify clues and patterns of a partners' violent behavior; the mastery of “co-implication” with women to support the development of a narrative of the abuse as a crime recognizable both by the victim and the legal system.

The analysis shows that practice-based approaches to knowing and learning in investigating discourse practices can provide insights on practitioners' interactional expertise as well as the relevance of the service. While a close look at the actual practices illustrates the lawyer's interactional mechanisms, the crucial role of legal aid in the antiviolence center can be appreciated by contextualizing within the texture of practices that characterizes women's experiences with violence.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the value and limitations of a practice-based approach (PBA) to studying the adoption and use of information systems, through a summary of the theory and exploration of empirical data about the use of collaborative software.

A selection of theoretical resources from the practice-based approach, namely, its view of routine and change, socio-materiality, relational thinking and knowing are introduced. They are employed to analyse the adoption of a collaborative technology in a corporate setting. The empirical data is 30 interviews with human resource (HR) professionals involved in a project in a large Mexican University.

The adoption and use of the collaborative technology is shaped by collective, historical, social and contextual factors that permeate the HR practices being supported by the information system. Among the factors that shaped participation are the interconnection of HR practices to other practices of the University; the existence of habits and the sense of routinisation reflected in HR practitioners’ patterns of interaction and media use; the concern of practitioners that participation in the community did not fit the way HR practices are performed; and the political manoeuvring taking place between actors to persuade potential users to participate in the community.

The strength of the analysis using key tenets from a PBA is to deepen our understanding of context as shaped by collective and historical conditions. The sociology of translation can be used to further increase understanding of the political process around the adoption of the collaborative technology. Remaining issues point to a major issue with the theoretical resources from the PBA used in this study, namely the adequacy of its treatment of structural power.

The paper reports research of significance to those interested in information systems by providing an alternative perspective that sheds light on contextual, social and historical factors affecting the adoption and use of information technologies. The paper is also valuable in suggesting how the PBA can benefit from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This will be relevant to the field of praxeological studies.

Although the number of studies that investigate supply chain sustainability learning has increased, little is known about the way sub-suppliers build knowledge and learn sustainability practices. Thus, moving beyond merely investigating the accumulation of knowledge, this research explores sub-suppliers’ knowing that supports the learning of sustainability practices in a multi-tiered food supply chain.

In the conduct of this interpretive research in South Brazil, two ethnographies were completed during 74 days of observations to understand similarities and differences between certified and non-certified sub-suppliers with respect to sustainability practices. As part of our research conducted in the context of poultry production, secondary data and data gathered through semi-structured interviews with representatives of the buyer and first-tier supplier firms were used to provide a better comprehension of the multi-tiered supply chain context. Then, we executed an interpretive textual analysis.

Our investigation explored six vignettes to reveal ways of learning sustainability practices in terms of waste management, biosecurity and animal welfare. Although the buyer firm requested these practices, we noted that the first-tier supplier was responsible for translating the practices to sub-suppliers. Moreover, we found that sustainability learning was shaped by the sub-supplier context embodied in knowledge through knowing. The ways of learning were related to sharing knowledge between experts and novices with the support of material practices; however, knowledge was also gained by unlearning some knowledge shared by the supplier. Sustainability practice learning, thus, was performed in a space of learning via knowledge creation among practitioners.

Recognising how sustainability learning happens in a multi-tiered supply chain context can help managers to develop plans to implement sustainability practices that will broaden their sustainability knowledge.

Unlike previous studies on supply chain sustainability learning, we reveal ways that sustainability practices emerge from knowledge that results from sub-suppliers’ knowing. We also explain how unlearning can consciously occur in several situations of sustainability learning.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing‐in‐practice and knowledge, in learning processes.

The paper focuses on a distributed, knowledge‐intensive and instrumented activity at the core of any collective action: qualification. The particular case of breeding activities in the livestock sector has been studied, where collective practices of animal qualification for collective breeding have been studied. Qualitative data stemming from in‐depth interviews and observation of daily practices have been analysed, combining practice‐based approaches on knowing processes and science philosophers' theories on the use of instruments during action.

The study of instruments used in daily practices allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between opposite types of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge seen as a stock, and sensible knowledge seen as purely tacit and equated to non‐instrumented practices. Instruments are not merely mediators in learning processes; they also take an active part in shaping and activating knowledge and learning processes.

Further research is needed on the designing of reflexive instrumentation, which takes knowing and knowledge articulation into account better.

Using instruments as a key concept to analyse knowing‐in‐practice processes has both methodological and managerial implications for identifying those instruments that favour learning processes.

This paper complements more classical practice‐based approaches by proposing a new perspective on instruments in learning processes, which is particularly relevant to the study of pluralistic organisations where power is diffuse.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the knowledge generation in a cross‐disciplinary group in Norway that developed a new medical device. The aim is to shed light on how knowledge was generated and how the relationships between different communities of practice were mediated. In particular, the paper seeks to examine how material objects and contextual conditions influenced the innovation process.

In this longitudinal case study an innovation process was followed for five years, and the research material was constructed through extensive observations, interviews and document analysis.

The innovation process exhibited different themes in varying degrees of blend throughout the process. First, the practices of constructing the device and ascertaining technical feasibility are described. Then the enacted nature of the work is outlined; how it was significantly dependent on circumstantial factors, but also strongly shaped by the need to ensure clinical usability of the device. Finally, the work to package the innovation and turn it into a commercial product is explored.

In contrast with many previous studies, this study follows large parts of the innovation process, and it emphasises how knowing and practice are a result of networked, and changing, relations between both human and non‐human actors. Rather than one community of practice emerging around the innovation work, what can be called an object‐centred assemblage of communities of practice was seen, which grew and changed according to the changing nature of knowledge needs for the project to continue and succeed. This has interesting implications for the understanding of cross‐disciplinary innovation processes.

The study aims to revisit six previously defined challenges in information security risk management to provide insights into new challenges based on current practices.

The study is based on an empirical study consisting of in-depth interviews with representatives from public sector organisations. The data were analysed by applying a practice-based view, i.e. the lens of knowing (or knowings). The results were validated by an expert panel.

Managerial and organisational concerns that go beyond a technical perspective have been found, which affect the ongoing social build-up of knowledge in everyday information security work..

The study has delimitation as it consists of data from four public sector organisations, i.e. statistical analyses have not been in focus, while implying a better understanding of what and why certain actions are practised in their security work.

The new challenges that have been identified offer a refined set of actionable advice to practitioners, which, for example, can support cost-efficient decisions and avoid unnecessary security trade-offs.

Information security is increasingly relevant for organisations, yet little is still known about how related risks are handled in practice. Recent studies have indicated a gap between the espoused and the actual actions. Insights from actual, situated enactment of practice can advise on process adaption and suggest more fit approaches.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how practices creating knowing can be enabled in project work.

The study is based on an exploratory, in‐depth case study of an international professional service firm (IPSF) and local and transnational project work to deliver services. Project work is investigated through a practice approach.

In transnational project work, three knowing practices are identified – networking, doing, and sorting – and three practices of creating new knowing – finding, learning, and probing.

Although only one organization was studied, the research presented shows that knowledge creation and project work benefit from a practice perspective to highlight the enacted aspects of knowing and new knowing.

The findings show that different project phases enable the necessary knowing and/or new knowing practices through a differentiated focus on social interaction and contacts on the one hand and the use of materials, documents, systems and infrastructure on the other.

The paper extends earlier research and shows that practices of knowing involve more than doing and practices of creating knowing involve more than learning. A conceptual understanding of knowing‐who, knowing‐how, and knowing‐what is developed to identify the knowing and new knowing while appreciating their interrelations. Further, the paper shows how the project phases and the practices can be better enabled through a differentiated focus on the social and the material use.