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This paper aims to investigate how families’ sociomaterial experiences in engineering programs held in libraries and a museum influence their creative engineering practices and the creativity expressed in their products derived from their inquiry-driven engineering activities.

This research project takes a naturalistic inquiry using qualitative and quantitative analyses based on video records from activities of 31 parent–child pairs and on creativity assessment of products that used littleBits as prototyping tools.

Families engaged in two sociomaterial experiences related to engineering – collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials – which supported the emergence of novel ideas and feasible solutions during the informal engineering programs. Families in the high novelty score group experienced multiple instances of collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials, co-constructed through parent-child collaboration, that were expansive toward further idea and solution generation. Families in the low novelty score group experienced brief collaborative idea exchange and material tinkering with specific idea suggestions and high involvement from the parent. An in-depth case study of one family further illustrated that equal engagement by the parent and child as they tinkered with the technology supported families’ creative engineering practices.

This analysis adds to the information sciences and learning sciences literatures with an account that integrates methodologies from sociocultural and engineering design research to understand the relationship between families’ engagement in creative engineering practices and their products. Implications for practitioners include suggestions for designing spaces to support families’ collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering to facilitate the development of creative engineering practices during short-term engineering programs.

This study aims to explore how and why employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions differently and the role of sociocultural factors in this process using sociomaterial analysis.

Data were gathered from 34 Sri Lankan knowledge workers using a series of workshop-based activities. The concept of sociomateriality is employed to understand how sociocultural elements are entangled with technology in work-life boundary experiences.

The findings of the thematic analyses suggest how culture is intertwined in the way employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions and how they manage information communication technologies (ICTs) to balance their work and nonwork demands. Participants have been unable to avoid technology-mediated boundary interruptions from work, as organisations have created norms to keep employees connected to organisations using information communication technologies. Traditional gender roles are specifically found to be entangled in employees' boundary management practices, disadvantaging women more.

The findings highlight how national culture and gender norms create challenging work-life experiences for female employees than males. This could create a disadvantageous position for female employees in their career progression. It is crucial to consider factors such as boundary preferences and family concerns when deciding on family-friendly work policies. Also, organisations have to consider the development of explicit guidelines on after-hours communication expectations.

Using the lens of sociomateriality, researchers can understand the contextual entanglement of ICTs with national culture and gender norms in creating different work-life boundary experiences. It seems ICTs are creating a disadvantage for female employees when managing work–nonwork boundaries, especially in power distant and collectivist cultures where traditional gender norms are highly valued and largely upheld. This study also contributes to the current discourse on work-life boundaries by providing insights from non-western perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to compare theoretical conceptions that reclaim and re‐think material practice – “the thing” in the social and personal mix – specifically in terms of work activity and what is construed to be learning in that activity.

The paper is theory‐based. Three perspectives have been selected for discussion: cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT), actor‐network theory (ANT), and complexity theory. A comparative approach is used to examine these three conceptual framings in the context of their uptake in learning research to explore their diverse contributions and limitations on questions of agency, power, difference, and the presence of the “thing”.

The three perspectives bear some similarities in their conceptualization of knowledge and capabilities as emerging – simultaneously with identities, policies, practices and environment – in webs of interconnections between heterogeneous things, human and nonhuman. Yet each illuminates very different facets of the sociomaterial in work‐learning that can afford important understandings: about how subjectivities are produced in work, how knowledge circulates and sediments into formations of power, and how practices are configured and re‐configured. Each also signals, in different ways, what generative possibilities may exist for counter‐configurations and alternative identities in spaces and places of work.

While some dialogue has occurred among ANT and CHAT, this has not been developed to compare more broadly the metaphysics and approaches of these perspectives, along with complexity theory which is receiving growing attention in organizational research contexts. The paper purports to introduce the nature of these debates to work‐learning researchers and point to their implications for opening useful questions and methods for inquiry in workplace learning.

This study aims to discover how leadership emerges in a hospital’s trauma team in a simulated trauma care situation. Instead of investigating leadership from a leader-centric perspective, or using a metrics-based approach to reach generalizable results, the study aims to draw from post-heroic theories by applying leadership-as-practice and sociomaterial perspectives that emphasize the cultural-historical context and emergent nature of leadership.

The study was conducted in a Finnish central hospital through ethnographic observations of 14 in situ trauma simulation trainings over a period of 13 months. The data consist of vignettes developed and written from field notes. The analysis was informed by the cultural-historical activity theory.

Leadership in a trauma team during an in situ simulation training emerges from a complex system of agencies taking place simultaneously. Contextual elements contributed to the goal. Clarity of roles and task division, strong execution of leadership at critical points, active communication and maintenance of disciplined communication helped to overcome difficulties. The team developed coordination of the process in conjunction with the care.

The study considers trauma leadership to be a practical phenomenon emerging from the trauma team’s sociomaterial context. The results can be used to develop non-technical skills training within the field of simulation-based medical training.

The purpose of this research is to study how compliance evaluation becomes performed in practice. Compliance evaluation is a common practice among organizations that need to evaluate their posture against a set of criteria (e.g. a standard, legislative framework and “best practices”). The results of these evaluations have significant importance for organizations, especially in the context of information security and continuity. The author argues that how these evaluations become performed is not merely a “social” activity but shaped by the materiality of the evaluation criteria

The authors adopt a sociomaterial practice-based view to study the compliance evaluation through in situ participant observations from compliance evaluation workshops to evaluate organizational compliance against a information security and business continuity criteria. The empirical material was analyzed to construct vignettes that serve to illustrate the practice of compliance evaluation.

The research analysis shows how the information security and business continuity criteria themselves partake in the compliance evaluations by operating through (ventriloqually) the evaluators on three strata: the material, the textual and the structural. The author also provides a conceptualization of a hybrid agency.

This research contributes to lack of studies on the organizational-level compliance. Further, the research is an original contribution to information security and business continuity management by focusing on the practices of compliance evaluation. Further, the research has theoretical novelty by adopting the ventriloqual agency as a hybrid agency to study the sociomateriality of a phenomenon.

The provision of accommodation devices is said to aid organizational inclusion of employees with a disability. However, devices that are meant to enable might only partially facilitate productivity, independence, and social inclusion if these devices are not accepted by the user's workgroup. The authors outline a conceptual model of accommodation device acceptance through a sociomaterial lens to suggest conditions influencing workgroup device acceptance.

To build the model, the authors draw upon the sociomateriality and disability literature to frame accommodation devices as experienced in ongoing interactions, representing the goals, feelings, and interpretations of specific workgroups. The authors also unpack attributes of devices—instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism—and propose how each of these can pattern social conduct to influence device acceptance. The authors then draw upon the disability literature to identify attributes of workgroups that can be expected to amplify or diminish the effect of device attributes on device acceptance in that workgroup.

The conceptualization, which the authors illustrate with examples particular to visual impairment, presents implications for who and what serves as a gatekeeper to accommodation device acceptance and thereby workgroup inclusion.

Prior research has focused on conditions under which devices are requested by users or made available by organizations, undergirded by the assumption that devices are well-specified once provided and that they operate relatively predictably when used in various workgroups. The authors focus instead on what happens after the device is provided and highlight the complex and dynamic interaction between an accommodation device and the workgroup, which influences device and user acceptance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how participation can be investigated as an open and non‐exclusive sociomaterial practice.

Framed by translation discourse and a view of the social world as a sociology of associations, participation in organisations is conceptualised as a network building practice. Actor‐network theory (ANT) is used as an analytical method to describe the character of everyday constructions of participation practice related to changes in curriculum and its delivery in an Australian independent school.

It was found that participation was performed as an uncertain practice. People in relation with technology and other material entities, co‐constructed and re‐constructed multiple participation practices.

For researchers, an ANT account of constructing participation practices provides an additional analytical tool for investigating participation in terms of relationality. The idea of constructing participation as networked practice provides practitioners with a reflective tool for detecting and enabling multiple (and sometimes inconsistent) participation practices.

Compared to participation research approaches that predetermine and predict variables of relevance, this paper is concerned with the everyday management of participation as an uncertain sociomaterial practice. In pursuing a critical line of inquiry, managerialist informed notions of planning, organising and coordinating are not debunked form relevance. Rather, it is proposed that translation and managerial discourses are co‐implicated in complex investigations of participation practice.

This paper aims to explore how users respond to office design through their use of space. Intentions for how office spaces should be used can be not only understood as sociomaterial scripts that are inscribed into the architecture by designers but also communicated through organisational change processes. The paper elaborates on how users de-script office spaces, that is, how they respond to these scripts through use.

The paper draws on a case study of an office design intervention in a public organisation. Taking a sociomaterial approach, the paper uses the concepts of scripting and de-scripting to analyse the data.

The findings show that users subscribe to, repair, resist or re-script design scripts. This suggests that users can enact agency in use through creative acts of appropriation. Further, both materiality and user participation play equivocal roles in user responses.

The paper is based on a single case study where the design process was studied retrospectively. The case is regarded as typical of contemporary office design processes, but more studies that follow projects from design into use are needed.

This suggests that design solutions should be better adapted to the work practices instead of applying generic concepts to specific situations and that design and use should be understood as overlapping processes.

The originality of this study lies in linking aspects of the design process with user responses and in taking a sociomaterial approach to examine design and use.

At different points in time, energy harnessed from nuclear technology for commercial purposes has been qualified as atoms for peace, too cheap to meter, unsafe, sustainable, and emission free. We explore how these associations – between nuclear technology (a category used in a descriptive way) and qualities such as emission free (a category used in an evaluative way) – are materially anchored, institutionally performed, socially relevant, and entrepreneurially negotiated. By considering all these factors, our analysis shows that it is possible to understand how and why categories and their meanings continue to change over time. We flesh out the implications of these observations and suggest avenues for future research.

This chapter describes the theoretical contributions of Fractal Change Management (FCM) in relation to Quantum Storytelling theory and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts, this chapter considers the areas of overlap and difference between FCM and its theoretical fellows, summarizing selected concepts from FCM, considering the strengths and weaknesses of the method in various contexts, as well as its development over time. Prior studies in the yoga and nonprofit communities are briefly discussed along with ongoing work with software developers. Areas for further study are examined in detail, as a way to establish an antenarrative for this line of inquiry that honors its lineage as well as its contributions to the body of knowledge.