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This paper aims to examine the professional learning of rural police officers.

This qualitative case study involved interviews and focus groups with 34 police officers in Northern Scotland. The interviews and focus groups were transcribed and analysed, drawing on practice‐based and sociomaterial learning theories, by members of the research team.

The two key skills for effective rural policing were mobilising available human and material resources in the moment, and learning how to police and live in a rural community. The professional learning of rural police is spatial, emergent, embodied and deeply enmeshed in specificities, and is developed through interactions between human and non‐human actors.

This paper argues that, in order to understand professional learning, it is imperative to examine how work practices are fully entangled in social and material relations.

Applying sociomaterial approaches to issues of professional learning can illuminate previously obscured actors and gives a fuller picture of how professional practice is developed, sustained and modified. Learning is conceived as attuning to available knowledge resources and drawing on the knowledge strategies that are the most productive in the moment. The issues raised in this paper pertain to other professionals working in rural areas, and more generally to the theoretical framing of professional practice.

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.

Smartphones play an integral part in many children's lives. Their constant presence in various contexts and the multitude of affordances they present have a tremendous effect on how childhoods are lived today. One important aspect is the way children's interaction with smartphones can affect relationships and particularly generational relations. In this explorative study, we investigated Azerbaijani children's interaction with smartphones in the family and at school using the sociomaterial and relational approaches. Thinking relationally, we followed children's stories to unravel how smartphones can mediate different types of behavior and assist children in negotiating their place in generational order with the adults in their lives. Analyses suggest that smartphones can both present children with bargaining power to negotiate pleasure and fun as well as means to reinforce the generational order by children themselves. The findings point out that children often transfer social norms and expectations placed on them to the ways they use smartphones.

This paper aims to introduce, explain and illustrate the concept of “sites of emergent learning” (SEL), which pinpoints particular instances of learning in everyday practice. This concept is located within contemporary practice-oriented and sociomaterial approaches to understanding workplace learning.

This conceptual development has been resourced by a secondary analysis of data from three workplace learning studies. These were: an ethnographic study of a residential parenting service; a case study of learning among engineers working on a railway construction site; and a case study of a multicultural unit that aims to enhance health services for a diverse community. All were based in the Sydney metropolitan area. The secondary analysis was undertaken by identifying regular practices within each setting where professionals discuss past and future work. These were then subjected to theoretical scrutiny, identifying common and distinctive features.

SEL were identified within the handover, site-walks and catch-up meeting practices. They arise through and are constituted in relationships between social practices and the materialities of work. SEL involve negotiating, exploring and questioning practice and knowledge associated with it; they are instances within work practices in which work is done about how work gets done, developing new understandings of the past to reshape visions for the future. Alongside these commonalities, each site of emergent learning displayed distinctive features shaped by the particularities of the practices and materialities of each site.

This concept is presented as a valuable tool to assist researchers of workplace learning. It elucidates particular learning-intensive features of practice, extending sociomaterial conceptualisations of professional and workplace learning.

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.

This paper aims to shed light on the complex multiplicity of domestic violence interagency work. It proposes a new conceptualisation that reflects the entangled nature of professional practice and learning.

The research on which this paper draws is an ethnographic study of practice in an integrated local domestic violence initiative. Data include focussed workplace observations, semi-structured interviews and key documents. The study draws on practice-based sociomaterial approaches and the conceptual framework, and methodology is informed by actor-network theory, in particular, the work of Annemarie Mol.

Findings suggest that interagency work that starts from the victim and traces threads of connection outwards is able to “hang together” as “practice multiple” in integrated service provision. I argue that the learning that happens in these circumstances is a relational effect and depends on who and what is assembled in the actor-network.

The research has significant implications for framing understandings of domestic violence interagency work, as it firmly anchors “working together” to victims. Findings are expected to be of interest not only to practitioners, educators and researchers but also to policymakers.

The paper addresses a current gap in the literature, applies a novel research approach and proposes a new conceptualisation of domestic violence interagency work.

Engineering work is a specific form of sociomaterial practice, drawing on and combining social and material resources to accomplish desirable effects, often combining technological and social resources. A study of an electrical engineering development project suggests that the work unfolds as a process whereby technological artefacts are verified on the basis of testing procedures and whereby events concerning technological failure, what has been called the “back‐talk” of technology, are handled using joint problem‐solving. The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of a new product development project at a multinational telecommunications company.

An ethnographic case study of a new product development project at a major multinational telecommunications company was undertaken.

Engineering work is based on distributed know‐how and joint collaborations, emerging as a patchwork of activities where one single person may know a lot, but not everything, about the technology‐in‐the‐making. The paper concludes that joint concern for the technology, manifested as its gradual advancement, is what serves as the glue holding the community of engineers together.

The paper presents an original study of the work of a team of electrical engineers and inquires into how engineers combine technical and social resources when attempting to make the technology work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore informational structures producing and organising the construction of waste sorting in Sweden. It shows how the issue is constructed by it being searched for in Google and how this contributes to the specific informational texture of waste sorting in Sweden. It is guided by the following questions: who are the main actors and which are the central topics featuring in Google results on popular, suggested searches for waste sorting in Sweden? What do the link relations between these tell the author about the issue space that is formed around waste sorting in Sweden? How is the construction of the notions of waste sorting and waste shaped in the information available through Google’s features for related and other relevant searches?

Waste sorting is discussed as a practice structured along moral rules and as a classification exercise. The study brings together two types of material, results from searches carried out in Google and lists of Google query suggestions for relevant search terms. These are analysed with a mixed method approach, uniting quantitative network analysis and qualitative content analysis of query suggestions. A sociomaterial approach theoretically grounds the analysis.

Waste sorting in Sweden emerges as an issue that is characterised by dense networks of rules and regulation, focused in public authorities and government agencies, which in turn address consumers, waste management businesses and other authorities. Search engine use and waste sorting in Sweden are shown to be joined together in various mundane everyday life practices and practices of governance that become visible through the search engine in form of search results and suggested searches. The search engine is shown to work as a fluid classification system, which is also created and shaped by its use.

The study offers a novel methodological approach to studying the informational structures of an issue and of its shaping through it being searched for. The sociomaterially grounded analysis of Google as a fluid classification system is original.

This conceptual paper aims to argue that times, spaces, bodies and things constitute four essential dimensions of workplace learning. It examines how practices relate or hang together, taking Gherardi’s texture of practices or connectedness in action as the foundation for making visible essential but often overlooked dimensions of workplace learning.

This framework is located within and adds to contemporary sociomaterial- or practice-based approaches, in which learning is understood as an emergent requirement and product of ongoing practice that cannot be specified in advance.

The four dimensions are essential in two senses: they are the constitutive essence of textures of practices: what they are made of and they are non-optional; it is not possible to conceive a texture of practices without all of these dimensions present. Although the conceptual terrains to which they point overlap considerably, they remain useful as analytic points of departure. Each reveals something that is less clear in the others.

This innovative framework responds to calls to better understand how practices hang together, and offers a toolkit that reflects the multifaceted nature of practice. It presents a distinctive basis for making sense of connectedness in action, and thus for understanding learning in work.

The paper offers a novel conceptual framework, expanding the texture of practices through dimensions of times, spaces, bodies and things, rendering visible aspects that might otherwise be ignored.

Business models can be considered as cognitive models that managers or analysts can use to describe, understand, or test business activities. However, the emergence of a new business model requires not only cognitive operations but also concrete modifications to the realities of a company’s operations and structures. In this paper, we adopt a sociomaterial view of organizational change based on actor-network theory, and underline the role of artifacts in the emergence of new business models. We base our discussion on a case study of a French leader in kitchen electric appliances. Despite the fact that the building of its new business model is still in progress, this empirical study provides important suggestions concerning the role of artifacts.