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Purpose – Addresses labor control in fields where familiar organizational and occupational controls are weak, notably postindustrial arenas characterized by networks, heterogeneity, and change.Methodology/approach – Proposes that labor control operates via socio-technical networks composed of diverse ties to social actors, technologies, and typifications. Data from an interview-based study of early website production work is used to examine the impact of such a network.Findings – Socio-technical networks constrained web workers#x02019; actions but also offered opportunities for autonomous discretion. Some shifting between networked and hierarchical controls occurred in larger organizations.Research implications/limitations – The role of networks in the labor process is not well understood; this study provides a starting point.Social implications – Socio-technical networks are heterogeneous and lack common status metrics, making inequality among workers difficult to gauge and address. Further, since networked controls are decentralized, their pressures are not easily identified or resisted by workers.Originality/value – This chapter describes a form of labor control that may characterize some postindustrial fields more closely than traditional models. In addition, it contributes new insights on how work is shaped by technical networks and abstract typifications.

To investigate how the United Kingdom’s public museums, libraries and archives (collecting institutions) might, in the future, take strategic advantage of the dramatic changes in individual and social behaviours and expectations driven by the socio-technical determinism of the Internet since 2000.

The chapter summarises the evidence and outcomes of PhD research completed in 2015 that used the tools of hermeneutic phenomenology and systems theory to examine the current state of digital strategy within the United Kingdom’s collecting institutions and to compare this with the Internet’s fundamental drivers of change and innovation. The research sought not to predict the future, but to define the key opportunities and challenges facing collecting institutions in face of sustained socio-technical change to maintain strategic fit, delivering maximum value in the digital space.

The outcomes of the research demonstrated that libraries, like museums and archives, are ill-prepared to face continued socio-technical determinism. The key drivers of the Internet are single channel convergence, rapid innovation, instant two-way communication driving social interaction and dramatic change in the relationship between the supplier and the user. Collecting institutions, on the other hand, operate within vertically integrated silos restricting horizontal collaboration that has led to fragmentation of developments and constraints on strategy across and within the various institutional sectors. The major challenges that libraries must consider are summarised.

The research takes an approach that has never before been attempted, either in scope or depth of analysis. The conclusions may not make comfortable reading for practitioners, but they offer an agenda for new ways of thinking about how public institutions must change to sustain their strategic fit in a digital future.

We argue that in order to address the contemporary challenges that organizations and societies are facing, the field of organization development (OD) requires frameworks and skills to focus on the eco-system as the level of analysis. In a world that has become economically, socially, and technologically highly connected, approaches that foster the optimization of specific actors in the eco-system, such as individual corporations, result in sub-optimization of the sustainability of the natural and social system because there is insufficient offset to the ego-centric purposes of the focal organization. We discuss the need for OD to broaden focus to deal with technological advances that enable new ways of organizing at the eco-system level, and to deal with the challenges to sustainable development. Case examples from healthcare and the agri-foods industry illustrate the kinds of development approaches that are required for the development of healthy eco-systems. We do not suggest fundamental changes in the identity of the field of organizational development. In fact, we demonstrate the need to dig deeply into the open systems and socio-technical roots of the field, and to translate the traditional values and approaches of OD to continue to be relevant in today’s dynamic interdependent world.

This chapter explores a pathway towards achieving a sustainable and inclusive future through the implementation of systems innovation, systems leadership and systems change. The author highlights the importance of understanding complex systems and identifies several models that can be employed to drive systems change, including the iceberg model and multi-level perspective. The author stresses the significance of systems leadership and innovation in creating a sustainable and inclusive future. This means that leaders and managers need to shift their mindset from reductionism to systems thinking. Reductionism views complex systems as a collection of separate parts that can be studied independently. In contrast, systems thinking acknowledges the interconnectedness of all parts and how they influence each other. When they embrace systems thinking, leaders and managers can make systems innovation and drive systems change to achieve sustainable and inclusive growth. Achieving a sustainable and inclusive future requires a collective effort from individuals, organizations and governments. It demands a comprehensive understanding of the interdependencies and interactions within complex systems, as well as a willingness to adopt new ways of thinking and leading. This chapter presents a compelling case for adopting systems innovation, systems leadership and systems change as critical components in building a sustainable and inclusive future.

This chapter aims at building a conceptual framework that could inspire innovation policies able to take into account the emerging agricultural and rural agenda, based on a comprehensive conceptualization of the innovation system. The systems of innovation and the broader processes of knowledge creation (and co-creation), transfer and adoption represent a crucial set of conditions influencing family farms' trajectories in response to the various opportunities and drivers of change, as well as their capability to contribute to sustainable food systems and FNS. This chapter analyzes the concept of innovation in relation to transition towards new configurations with a non-linear and multidimensional vision based on actors assembling themselves in a geographical space where resources and information are used to generate change. This leads to consider knowledge as an asset co-generated by the interaction of different actors within agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS) (Leeuwis & van den Ban, 2004). Agriculture and countryside are experiencing deep transformations towards concentration and globalization on one side and post-productivism and rural development on the other (Van der Ploeg et al., 2000). These processes of change require innovation policies aimed at pursuing ‘second-order’ innovation based on new goals and new rules. From a transition perspective (Geels, 2004) these radical innovations can develop within niches to a certain extent protected from mainstream market forces, to be then progressively embodied into higher structuration levels (the ‘regimes’).

How can large international financial firms go green in authentic ways? What enhances ‘Net Zero action’? Changes in global banks, fund managers, and insurance firms are at the heart of green finance. External change pressures – combined with problematic firm predispositions – exacerbate barriers to change and promote scepticism about authentic Net Zero change. Field research reveals main elements, connections, and interactions of this question by considering financial firms as complex socio-technical systems (Mitleton-Kelly, 2003). An interdisciplinary/holistic narrative approach (De Bakker et al., 2019) is adopted to design a conceptual framework that can support a green ‘behavioural theory of the financial firm’ (green BTFF). The BTFF presents an international version (Peng, 2001) of the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Hart, 1995; Teece et al., 1997).

The approach of this chapter is aimed at closing knowledge gaps and realign values in financial markets and society. By raising awareness about organised hypocrisy and facades (Brunsson, 1993; Cho et al., 2015; Schoeneborn et al., 2020) in financial firms the chapter aims at overcoming the gap between ‘talking’ and ‘walking’ in the financial sector. The chapter defines testable firm-level hypotheses for ‘Green Finance’ (Poterba, 2021) as well as – by implication – tests for ‘greenwashing’.

Social and environmental standards-development organizations (SDOs) have been collaborating together to construct “meta-standards.” These exercises in standards-setting are part of a longer term process of transitioning innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture from diverse niches such as organic, fair trade, and environmental conservation into a regime of certified sustainability. Using participant observation during the development of an Assurance Code, we examine how actors construct the tools that enable them to influence the broader transition to sustainability. We do this by focusing on intermediation activities by “experts” during the development of a “meta-standard” for assurance. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we propose that in order to understand transitions in progress, we should be attentive to how these processes are accompanied by intermediation activities. Second, we argue that intermediate objects (or boundary objects) are important in these processes as they help actors to create actionable knowledge. These intermediation activities and the production of actionable knowledge contribute to the ability of actors to govern markets in the transition toward sustainable agriculture.

Studies on the socio-technical relations between bodies and self-tracking apps have become more relevant as the number of digital solutions for monitoring our bodies are increasing and becoming even more embedded in our everyday lives. While a strong body of literature within the fields of self-tracking and the quantified self has evolved during the recent years, the author suggests it is time we (once again) start paying attention to the specific bodies in question when we look into the quantification of bodies, particularly about the question as to whose bodies are we talking about when we say, ‘quantified bodies’. The author also proposes that, when discussing the quantification of bodies, we take interest in the bodies designing, producing, and guiding the logic behind the algorithms embedded in the technological solutions in question. By suggesting this focus on bodies as knowledge producing, the author draws from a feminist perspective of situated knowledges (Haraway 1988; Harding, 1986, 2004) with a particular interest in knowledge production and the understanding of bodies as active, epistemological objects. Feminist theory of science replaces, so to speak, the idea of a universal human identity with a knowing subject who can occupy many different positions – in co-creative and transforming constellations. Following this line of thought, all kinds of knowledge production must be bodily anchored and situated. However, knowledge production always takes place in relation to or with something/someone else/other. As explained by philosopher Rosi Braidotti ‘[t]he post-human knowing subject has to be understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness’ (Braidotti, 2018, p. 1). Thus, the bodies in this chapter are the bodies who menstruate. The author wishes to discuss a particular socio-technical relation between smartphone applications (apps) to track and monitor the female cycle; period-apps, and the menstruating bodies engaging with these apps. Building on early feminist thoughts from the science and technology studies (STS), the author seeks to move beyond the algorithmic quantification of bodies to study the network of knowledge production formed by bodies, materialities, technology and history with all its reminiscence of stigma and taboo surrounding these leaking bodies (Shildrich, 1999). These inquiries are not only theoretical accounts but are also rooted in empirical soil. Based on a feminist ethnography of Danish women’s everyday engagement with period-apps, the female developers from the Femtech-industry and the women-only groups within the quantified self-movement, the author aims to provide a broad perspective on what the author defines as the gendered data body. The author argues for a feminist approach to better understand the socio-technical relations and the socio-cultural discourses the menstruating body is situated in, as well as to better understand the unique relation between knowledge production and technology as being constitutional for the gendered data body.

This concluding chapter not only summarises the key discussions and arguments of the preceding chapters but also reflects on organisational, managerial, supervisory, behavioural, social and cultural factors shaping the miners’ reactions to the restructured and formalised deep-level mining work processes and their unofficial job tactic of making a plan (planisa). The chapter provides suggestions on how the positive aspects of planisa could be harnessed and negative aspects addressed towards efficient, productive and safer organisational, managerial, supervisory and operational practices at the rock-face down the mine.