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This study aims to answer two research questions, namely, what kinds of mundane resistance practices emerge in the local food system and which spatial, material and social elements catalyse the resistance practices.

The study adopts a post-humanist practice approach and focusses on exploring the agentic capacity of socio-material elements to generate resistance practices. The data were generated through a multi-method approach of interviews, field observations and Facebook discussions collected between 2014 and 2017.

The empirical context is the rejäl konsumtion local food network in Finland. The analysis presents two types of resisting practices – resisting facelessness and resisting carelessness – which are connected to spatial, material and social elements.

The study focusses on one local food system, highlighting the socio-material structuring of resistance in this specific cultural setting.

The practical implications highlight that recognising the socio-material elements provides tools for better engagement of consumer actors with local food systems.

The study adds to the extant research by interweaving the consumer resistance literature and local food systems discussions with the neo-material approach. The findings present a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which consumer resistance is actualised in a non-recreational, mundane context of consumption. Consequently, the study offers new insights into the agentic socio-material actors structuring the local food system.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of how sensemaking occurs as a holistic, processual phenomenon during an organisational change.

A longitudinal, qualitative case study was conducted by analysing video-recorded meetings among the staff of two recently merged surgical departments in a university hospital. Sensemaking was approached through the lens of socio-material practices.

The analysis revealed that material-discursive practices produce sensemaking in various ways, creating a holistic process and a dynamic agency. Four sensemaking practices were identified through which personnel made sense of the development of ward inpatient rounding: facilitated meetings, a status board, video analysis and humour.

This paper identifies diverse sensemaking practices, each of which increases understanding of sensemaking as a holistic, processual phenomenon that emerges through socio-material practices. The paper also enhances practical understanding of how sense is made of a working practice, as well as how a working practice is developed and improved during an organisational change.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, illustrate, and conceptualize how sustainability service is performed and the role it plays in the promotion of sustainable consumption.

Theoretically, this paper takes a practice theory approach, conceptualizing the provision of sustainability service as a set of complex, socio-material, and performative practices. Methodologically, this paper draws on an ethnographic study of a retail chain – W-Store – and its sustainability service. Interviews with management and focus group interviews with shop assistants and consumers, as well as observations made in-store, make up the material analysed.

The provision of sustainability service is accomplished in this case via three service practices; arranging green shopping trails, answering sustainability questions, and promoting sustainability to green consumers in-store. The analysis shows that the retailing of sustainable products is not simply a matter of including sustainability products in the range and instructing shop assistants to promote them. Sustainability service – as enacted at W-Store – was dependent on the successful combination and configuration of human competence (service staff) and IT and organizational artefacts. There also needed to be congruence between consumers and their images and between retailers and the version of sustainability they were enacting. Finally, the provision of sustainability service required an investigative and adaptive organization capable of keeping up as well as developing vis-á-vis changing sustainability discourses and issues. However, once the necessary conditions had been met, sustainability service worked towards promoting sustainable consumption by making green shopping possible, educating consumers on sustainability issues, and motivating them via positive feedback and dialogue.

Underscores the importance of investigating sustainability service and offers both a conceptual approach to and an analysis of this particular type of retail service work.

This paper aims to provide an account of learning and change in the redesign of a primary health-care initiative in a large metropolitan city in Australia.

The paper is based on research exploring the place and role of learning in the re-making of health professional practices in a major New South Wales Government health reform called HealthOne. The analysis and findings presented here make reference to data drawn from a longitudinal ethnographic study (2011-2014) conducted by an inter-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney. Socio-material and practice-based approaches for understanding learning are used in working with the data.

There were substantial changes in professional practice, especially in the role of the General Practice Liaison Nurse. Changes, and the learning connected to the changes, were dynamically influenced by the macro-context. HealthOne was a reform initiative with a strong focus on achieving health service redesign and a consistent focus on staff developing new ways of thinking and operating. Although learning was often discussed, it was, for the most part, expressed in general terms, and there was a lack of a formal and well-developed approach to learning collectively and individually.

This research paper will inform future attempts at service redesign in community and primary health contexts and provides a site-specific examination of workplace learning in a context of rapid change.

The present study aims to address the emergence of platform-organized open innovation (OI). The research has the two main aims: the first is to increase the understanding of the performance of OI by investigating how the achievements of OI are measured in situated practices from a performative and strategic knowledge management (SKM) orientation. The methodological disadvantages of not pre-given case selection are partially counterbalanced by the second aim of the research, which is to extend existing SKM theory and examine how platforms create knowledge as they include actors and digital devices, thereby potentially redistributing relations of accountability.

Building on performativity theory, the paper studies how the achievements and knowledge created in OI are managed and evaluated in practice. The case description draws on different sources from a spiral case study, as openness is performed by platform, firm, crowd and innovation intermediaries.

The paper illustrates how a strategy of digitally enabled openness brings its own issues as platforms enable knowledge sharing and perform a redistribution of accountability. In the heterarchies studied through this research endeavor, managers and their team members were accountable not only to multiple units, or teams, across the organization, but also to the crowd. The case material demonstrates that the ecology of devices and their performative struggles create lateral accountability.

While recent streams of research suggest that the context of OI (i.e. distributed sources of knowledge for innovation) shifts the unit of analysis of organization design from the individual firm to networks of actors organized on platforms, the authors find that the focal firm still remains a key conceptual parameter in SKM research, which, in turn, makes it difficult to capture the suggested radicality of OI.

The authors show, that in practice, the firm has to take into account the performance of the external crowd and at times put resources into its training and education. In heterarchy, distributed authority is assumed to be facilitated through lateral accountability, whereby the traditional principles of vertical authority no longer hold, but rather, managers and their team members can be accountable to multiple units, or teams, across the organization.

The paper develops a performative theory of openness. OI is a model, strategy and socio-material practice whereby digital designs create an ecology of devices that can enact all kinds of openness. Ultimately, the current paper proposes that SKM and OI theory need to consider how platforms perform relations of accountability beyond the boundaries of the single organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and explain what organizes the marketing of retail sustainability.

Theoretically, this paper takes a marketing-as-practice approach and makes use of practice theory to conceptualize the marketing of sustainability. Methodologically, an ethnographic study of three Swedish retail chains and their marketing work has been conducted. Interviews with management, observations made at the stores of these three retailers and various marketing texts and images produced by these retailers form the material analysed.

This paper illustrates three different ways of marketing and enacting sustainability. It shows that sustainability is framed differently and, indeed, enacted differently in order to fit various ideas about who are the responsible consumers. The argument is that rather than consumer demand, supply pressure or media scandals, the marketing of sustainability is in each of the cases studied configured around a specific notion of the responsible consumer. What sustainability work is marketed, through which devices it is marketed, and how it is framed is guided by an idea of whom the retailers’ responsible consumers are, what their lifestyles are, and what they will be interested in. Images of responsible consumers work as configuring agents around which retailing activities and devices are organized.

The paper provides an in-depth analysis of the marketing of sustainability and offers a new explanation about what it is that influences the various approach to sustainable marketing taken by retailers.

The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional organizing. The term intra-activity refers to relationships between multiple elements (human and more-than-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries. The paper aims at reframing organizing, as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements, by introducing the metaphor of shadow organizing. It offers examples as diverse as knowledge spillover, evidence-based medicine and improvisation, and the mafia’s organizational rules.

The frame of reference is metaphorical theorization, based on the metaphor of shadow organizing, and is explored through three metonymies: the forest and its sheltered spaces in penumbra; the shadow as a grey zone between canonical and non-canonical practices; and secret societies, hidden in the shadow. The shadow is the symbol of what is “betwixt and between.”

Shadow organizing focuses on the way that situated elements (people, technologies, knowledge, infrastructures, society) intra-relate and acquire agency. Whilst organizing as the effect of intentional coordination, planning, and strategizing represents a well-established theorization, shadow organizing sheds light on what happen in the interstices of intentional and structured processes. The paper identifies the dimensions of shadow organizing as performativity, liminality, and secrecy.

The passage from elements in interaction to intra-acting relations that form elements is a challenge both for theory and methodology. To face this challenge, metaphorical thinking proves useful since it enhances scholars’ imaginations and emotional participation.

This paper aims to propose the phenomenography as an approach that may contribute to the organizational studies based on the practice perspective, considering that it analyzes the phenomenon through the practitioner’s view and experience.

It is a theoretical essay about phenomenography as a theoretical-methodological perspective, considering its concept, its relation with practice theories and how its theoretical-methodological approach is capable of bringing a new perspective over the organizations, in the practice perspective.

The phenomenographic method, together with the practice perspective, enables mapping, identifying, describing and relating all the different ways by which an organization, in each one of its structuring dimensions, is effectively experienced. It argues that aspects such as the phenomenographic interview, the second-order perspective, the collective conceptions stated in the outcome space and their relations, the complexity of hierarchy and the abductive theorization about the emerging concepts of collective perceptions form, all together, an alternative and promising theoretical approach to analyze the entanglement between action and the material dimension that constitutes the organizational practices.

The phenomenographic outcome space may become a catalyst of a theorization about practices, which is capable to modify them or modify the way they are understood.

It discusses the possibility of phenomenography to theorize from the agents’ collective consciousness.

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 purpose of this commentary is to comment on Fischer's et al. (2022)

This commentary responds to Fischer's et al. (2022) call on envisioning alternate conceptualizations of learning for the digital era. In doing so, the author argues for reconsidering learning in its socio-material condition, situated and made of a web of social and technological relations. In this context, the author takes a relational lens on learning to interrogate taken-for-granted views of (1) personalizing data increasingly used for student learning, (2) emerging educational infrastructures for higher education and (3) the student–teacher relationship mediated by data and algorithms.

In this commentary, the author suggested unpacking assumptions about learning that get reflected in the design and discourses about socio-technical arrangements and transformations in education. Taking the example of personalized learning, the author has illustrated a relational mode of thinking that leads the author to argue that, renewed definitions of learning must be discussed multidimensionally and, most importantly, situated in the material world that learning is already part of.

Following Fischer et al. (2022, this issue), the author agrees that the focus should be on finding “new ways of organizing learning by exploring opportunities for radically new conceptualizations and practices.” In order to do that it is of utmost importance to problematize the social and material conditions that actively configure learning today and infrastructure tomorrow's learning. Hopefully, these observations will entice others to discuss further the educational transformations at stake in the age of datafication and algorithmic decision-making.

The author argues for reconsidering learning in its socio-material condition, which is situated and made of a web of social and technological relations. In this context, the author argues that any attempt to reconceptualize learning from a transformational perspective in the 21st century, as mentioned by Fischer et al. (2022), needs to interrogate views and assumptions about the socio-technical relationships researchers, practitioners and educators are contributing to via their practices and discourses.