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We have not learned to manage human civilization to live well on and with the earth. Sustainability as currently narrated from the destructive myth of scarcity that underlies speculative market capitalism forces humanity out of socio-material spacetime, destroys Bakhtin’s answerability and the Rabelaisian chronotope, and therefore cannot bring about a material solution to our existential crisis. A re-created critical science of management and organization inquiry is needed to bring forth a socio-material era of sustainability. Critical scholarship in subversive and creative form to confront injustice became possible at sc’MOI because of the group’s primal alienation from the dominant discourse in management and organization. An active critical perspective offers guidance for the future of sustainability in pursuing the strategy of the avoided fate, a future that entails disentangling ourselves from a narrative-imposed destiny and of reasserting the power to choose another path to sustain all life on earth.

This paper aims to propose LARPnography as a more holistic method to probe the emergence of plausible futures, drawing on embodied embedded cognition literature and the emerging consumer practice of live-action role-playing (LARP). Current research methods for probing the future of markets and society rely mainly on expert judgment (i.e. Delphi), imagery or simulation of possible futures (i.e. scenario and simulation) and perspective taking (i.e. role-playing). The predominant focus on cognitive abstraction limits the insights researchers can extract from more embodied, sensorial and experiential approaches.

LARPnography is a qualitative method seeking to immerse participants within a plausible future to better understand the social and market dynamics that may unfold therein. Through careful planning, design, casting and fieldwork, researchers create the preconditions to let participants experience what the future may be and gather critical insights from naturalistic observations and post-event interviews.

Owing to its interactive nature and processual focus, LARPnography is best suited to investigate the adoption and diffusion of innovation, market emergence phenomena and radical societal changes, including the rise of alternative societies.

Different from previous foresight methods, LARPnography creates immersive and perceptually stimulating replicas of plausible futures that research participants can inhabit. The creation of a fictional yet socio-material world ensures that socially constructed meaning is enriched by phenomenological and visceral insights.

This study aims to provide insight into how the implementation and management of an integrated workplace concept (IWC) in multiple office locations are affected by local management practices and other contextual and cultural aspects.

A triangulated case study design was applied to evaluate an on-going process to roll out a new branch office concept. The core method was semi-structured interviewing.

The findings indicate that when an IWC meets different local cultures and realities, the concept and its different aspects may transform in different directions – ultimately affecting concept interconnectedness and strategic value. The findings further suggest that the concept’s socio-material implications vary between locations and actors at different levels. For IWCs to serve strategic aims, they must be continuously aligned and re-aligned with changing organisational strategies.

The study was conducted in one organisation. Additional empirical research, investigating implementation and management of different concepts in different organisational contexts, is needed to provide more definite conclusions and to develop guidelines for design, implementation and decision-making.

The findings highlight the importance of applying an iterative process approach in implementation and management of IWCs. Such an approach is essential for striking the right balance between standardisation and local adaptation, and for aligning the concept with organisational strategies.

Although much has been written on IWCs, the role of culture and social negotiations in the implementation and operations phase is often neglected.

The study aims to provide insight on the relationship between a newly implemented workplace concept, its intentions, the actual use and ultimately its ability to function as a strategic tool. By addressing the intended and unintended consequences of planned spatial arrangements, the interest lies in studying underlying factors affecting the concepts’ ability to function as a strategic tool.

The case study builds on semi-structured interviews and observational studies from a larger Norwegian organisation that recently implemented an activity-based workplace concept. Concept descriptions and architectural drawings have also been important sources to study how the concept was interpreted and used by different groups.

Taking a socio-material perspective, the findings illustrate that spatial aspects and different concept structures, together with issues such as employee mobility and time spent in the office, different work processes, management style and departmental cultures influenced the way the activity-based workplace concept was perceived and taken into use.

The findings indicate that social and cultural aspects may play a more significant role in the adaptation process than previously emphasised. The article further provides knowledge on how organisations, in planning and implementation of such concepts, may address the right issues to overcome challenges and achieve the higher strategic ends.

Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context.

This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces.

The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures.

There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.

This paper aims to explore how the entertainment economy excludes individuals and facilitates private investment, the problematic shift towards a “creative economy” and increased regulations within Sydney’s entertainment sector. It also examines how a grass-roots, rural festival can be regarded as an extension of the urban context. It discusses the alternative counterculture(s) that exist despite (or perhaps because of) increasing inaccessibility and regulation, using as a case study an activist collective created in this climate, the Marrickville Warehouse Alliance, focusing specifically on its Star Shitty River Retreat festival.

A phenomenological, mixed-method approach is used with a focus on qualitative in-depth interviews with festival organisers.

This paper demonstrates how politics, embedded within urban place, can be transported to a rural festival site. The phenomenological accounts recorded with the festival organisers, paired with key theories within the literature, demonstrate how organising committees can shape the understanding of place and politics in grass-roots festival environments.

By leaving “no trace” on the site and engaging with and contributing to the indigenous community, the Star Shitty River Retreat festival can be categorised as a type of “creative enhancement”, in which a shared environment of political and communal understanding creates a unique, yet temporary, sense of place within a rural setting.

There is limited literature on the Australian festival context. The finding that rural festival sites can be regarded as an extension of the urban context lends itself to the concept of de-territorialisation or blurring of city boundaries, reinforcing how a festival’s geographical location is of little significance when supported by “portable communities”.

This paper aims to show agential realism as the basis for a pertinent framework with regard to the entwined, on-going and interpretative aspects of knowledge.

The knowledge flow phenomenon in the form of entanglement and agential “cuts” within the workplace is studied and described across a phenomenological ethnographic case study of two workgroups within an aircraft engine manufacturing context.

The boundary construction phenomenon is a key process helping us to depict knowledge entanglement (tacit and explicit) across dialogue and non-verbal actions. Dialogue brings forth the aspect of knowledge as interpretations or “cuts.” A phenomenological analysis allows us to identify and describe various levels of tacit–explicit knowledge entanglement depending on the mode of coping at hand. Also highlighted was the importance of heuristics carried out by knowledge experts, often in the form of abduction (i.e. leading to rules of thumb).

It is acknowledged that the relatively narrow context of the empirical work limits the ability to generalize the findings and arguments. As such, additional work is required to investigate the validity of the findings across a wider spectrum of workgroup contexts.

Agential realism allows for the analysis of organizations as a world of practice and actions, whereby long-established categories can be requestioned and challenged with the aim of sharing the full richness and benefit of embodied knowledge between human actors.

Ethnographic descriptions of the entwined nature of tacit and explicit knowledge, the embodied and activity-based dimension of knowledge and learning, as well as the characteristic of knowledge as possession, correspond well to an agential realist concept of phenomenon, entanglement and cuts. Furthermore, agential realism offers the opportunity to view the workplace as individuals (or groups) who act out embodied tacit-explicit knowledge in conjunction with non-human entities (such as objects, as well as communication and information technologies), with the latter acting as enhancers of knowledge creation and sharing.

Organizational paradoxes must first be recognized by managers before they can respond to them. Yet scholars have adopted different perspectives on how paradoxical tensions become salient and engender management responses. Some approaches have focused on the socially constituted nature of paradoxes, and others on the inherent aspects of paradoxes in the environment. The authors propose an approach that gives ontological meaning to both the socially constituted and inherent nature of organizational paradoxes. Our approach, which is inspired by quantum physics, opens up new opportunities for engaging with the socio-materiality of paradoxes, how they are measured, and the implications this has on the probabilities of managing organizational responses to paradox.

Due to the global outbreak of Covid-19, Swedish teachers in upper secondary education were forced to conduct emergency remote teaching. As of today, there is a stream of research that addresses digitalization in education in light of the pandemic. Previous studies show that the challenges with the sudden intensification of digitalization have been particularly challenging in practical and aesthetic subjects. The research question is as follows: What challenges did vocational teachers experience during the emergency remote teaching caused by Covid-19 and what emergent tactics can be identified in vocational teaching practice?

The empirical data consists of (1) interviews with two vocational teachers and, (2) workshops with 25 teacher students from different vocational programmes that addressed vocational teaching during the Covid-19 crisis.

Emergency remote teaching meant challenges due to the changed socio-material environment that cannot easily be transformed to a vocational teaching setting. The challenges were related to authentic situations and material, problem solving and dexterity. Tactics that emerged as a response to the challenges were mainly connected to attempts to mimic vocational practices.

Contributions include explaining specific challenges and possibilities in developing vocational competence when teaching is digitalised. Furthermore, it increases the understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in vocational education. By adopting a socio-material perspective on vocational competence, the authors enhance the understanding of the importance of a shared socio-material environment.

Business process modeling faces a difficult balance: on the one hand, organizations seek to enact, control and automate business processes through formal structures (procedures and rules). On the other hand, organizations also seek to embrace flexibility, change, innovation, value orientation, and dynamic capabilities, which require informal structures (unique user experiences). Addressing this difficulty, the authors propose the composite approach, which integrates formal and informal process structures. The composite approach adopts a socio-material conceptual lens, where both material and human agencies are supported.

The study follows a design science research methodology. An innovative artifact – the composite approach – is introduced. The composite approach is evaluated in an empirical experiment.

The experimental results show that the composite approach improves model understandability and situation understandability.

This research explores the challenges and opportunities brought by adopting a socio-material conceptual lens to represent business processes.

The study contributes an innovative hybrid approach for modeling business processes, articulating coordination and contextual knowledge. The proposed approach can be used to improve model understandability and situation understandability. The study also extends the socio-material conceptual lens over process modeling with a theoretical framework integrating coordination and contextual knowledge.