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The purpose of this paper asks how workplace learning environments change as firm size increases, and how employees respond to this. In doing so, it looks beyond an exclusive focus on formal training and incorporates more informal, work-based learning processes.

The study uses a comparative, qualitative research design, using semi-structured interviews with an under-researched group of workers – waiting for staff in restaurants. The data were collected from six restaurants of different sizes.

As formally instituted human resource development (HRD) structures expand as firm size increases are more extensive in larger firms, this leaves less room for individual choice and agency in shaping the learning process. This does not inevitably constrain or enhance workplace learning, and can be experienced either negatively or positively by employees, depending on their previous working and learning experiences.

Future research on HRD and workplace learning should acknowledge both formal and informal learning processes and the interaction between them – particularly in small and growing firms. Insights are drawn from the sociomaterial perspective help the authors to conceptualise this formality and informality. Research is needed in a wider range of sectors.

There are implications for managers in small, growing firms, in terms of how they maintain space for informal learning as formal HRD structures expand, and how they support learners who may struggle in less structured learning environments.

The paper extends current understanding of how the workplace learning environment – beyond a narrow focus on “training” – changes as firm size increases.

This paper aims to examine the everyday practices of academic work in social science to understand better academics’ learning. It also asks how academic work is enacted in relation to the discipline, department and university, taking temporality as its starting point.

The study sought to trace academic activities in practice. Within three universities, 14 academics were work-shadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and where possible connections and interactions were traced (including beyond the institution). This paper reports on a subset of the study: the academic practices of four early-career academics in one discipline are analysed.

Email emerges as a core academic practice and an important pedagogic actor for early career academics in relation to the department and university. Much academic work is “work about the work”, both in and outside official work time. Other pedagogic actors include conferences, networks and external Web identities. Disciplinary work happens outside official work time for the most part and requires time to be available. Disciplinary learning is therefore only afforded to some, resulting in structural disadvantage.

By tracing non-human and human actors, it has emerged that the department and university, rather than the discipline, are most important in composing everyday work practices. A sociomaterial approach enables researchers to better understand the “black box” of everyday academic practice. Such an approach holds the promise of better support for academics in negotiating the demands of discipline, department and university without overwork and systemic exploitation.

This paper aims to trace the relational and material ways in which workplace teams come together (or fail to) in the provision of patient care.

Six interprofessional scholars brought their unique theoretical and disciplinary lenses to understand the contextualized experiences of the patient and the team. Adopting a critical narrative inquiry (CNR) approach, the experiences of 19 participants were documented as they interacted in the care of an elderly patient over a three-week period. Actor network theory constructs enabled the analysis of multiple artefacts implicated in the interactions to learn of their contribution to the enactment of her care.

The study gives empirical insights about ways in which knowledge circulates amongst the workplace and how systemic structures may impede effective and quality patient care. Various types of knowledge are held by different team members, and both individuals and materials (e.g. technologies) can influence the way those knowledges are shared (or not).

Focusing on a rich data set surrounding one patient documented as theatre serves pedagogical purposes and serves as a shared “boundary-breaking” object to interrogate from multiple stakeholder perspectives. CNR provides for recursive, dynamic learning as readers critically consider experiences within their own contexts.

Despite research that documents competing political, systemic and economic goals, sedimented policies and practices persist in ways that undermine care goals.

Tackling the urgent issue of an aging population will require expanding collaboration (for planning, research and so on) to include a broader set of stakeholders, including operational, administrative and post-discharge organizations. Attention to social infrastructure as a means to assemble knowledges and improve relationships in the care process is critical.

Building a boundary-breaking shared object to represent the data offers a unique opportunity for multiple stakeholder groups to enter into dialogue around barriers to workplace interaction and collaboration progress, linking problems to critical perspectives.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the embedded process that enables or constrains low-income low-qualified employees’ access to workplace learning in small organizations.

Informed by the sociomaterial approach and cultural historical activity theory, this study adopted a qualitative cross-case study method. Data were collected from three small business owners in Central Texas, USA. Data included interviews and organizational artifacts and were analyzed using a constant comparative and inductive thematic data analysis.

This study extends existing literature for low-income low-qualified employees by elucidating business owners’ motivations to develop supportive employment relationships. Despite incongruent value systems, subordinates were provided equal access to workplace learning based on organizations’ needs and business owners’ value systems.

The organizations’ small size and business owners’ position as the sole decision maker potentially create a different embedded context from supervisors who are subordinates in larger organizations. Further, findings from this qualitative study cannot be generalized without caution.

The findings from this study suggest that workforce professionals should consider the advantages of small organizations for low-qualified clients seeking employment and adult education opportunities. More research is needed to generalize findings that delineate work situations where low-qualified employees can gain equal access to workplace learning and gain access to adult learning opportunities that lead to job mobility.

This study identified an organizational context where business owners support workplace learning for low-income low-qualified employees with incongruent value systems.

The purpose of this study is to contribute with knowledge about how valid research data in biodiversity citizen science are produced through information practices and how notions of credibility and authority emerge from these practices.

Data were collected through an empirical, interview-based study of the information practices of 15 participants active in the vicinity of the Swedish biodiversity citizen science information system Artportalen. Interview transcripts were analysed abductively and qualitatively through a coding scheme by working back and forth between theory and data. Values of credibility, authority and validity of research data were unfolded through a practice-oriented perspective to library and information studies by utilising the theoretical lens of boundary objects.

Notions of credibility, authority and validity emerge through participant activities of transforming species observations to data, supplementing reports with objects of trust, augmenting identification through authority outreach and assessing credibility via peer monitoring. Credibility, authority and validity of research data are shown to be co-constructed in a distributed fashion by the participants and the information system.

The article extends knowledge about information practices in emerging, heterogeneous scholarly settings by focussing on the complex co-construction of credibility, authority and validity in relation to data production.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how meaning is assigned to online searching by viewing it as a mundane, yet often invisible, activity of everyday life and an integrated part of various social practices.

Searching is investigated with a sociomaterial approach with a starting point in information searching as entangled across practices and material arrangements and as a mundane part of everyday life. In total, 21 focus groups with 127 participants have been carried out. The study focusses particularly on peoples’ experiences and meaning-making and on how these experiences and the making of meaning could be understood in the light of algorithmic shaping.

An often-invisible activity such as searching is made visible with the help of focus group discussions. An understanding of the relationship between searching and everyday life through two interrelated narratives is proposed: a search-ification of everyday life and a mundane-ification of search.

The study broadens the often narrow focus on searching in order to open up for a research-based discussion in information science on the role of online searching in society and everyday life.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and understand the contemporary management of electronic identification (e-ID) development to: identify and formulate challenges and reflect upon the use of a combination of perspectives. To generate knowledge on this issue, we investigate e-ID development in Sweden from: an e-government systems development lifecycle perspective and a project challenge and critical success factor (CSF) perspective.

This is a qualitative case study covering an analysis of the three years in a larger project focusing e-ID in a public e-service setting. Empirical sources have been face-to-face interviews; official documents and different kind of forums for presentations and discussions in, for example, hearings arranged by authorities; meetings with the coordinating agency, and practitioners’ networks events.

This study concludes that there are significant challenges involved in managing e-ID development because of its contextual and integrated character. Challenges involve the organization and management of the program and can be traced back to e-government, general project management literature and theory on path dependency. Based on this study, we can question, e.g. governance models, centralization and a narrow focus on the technical artefact. Our study is also an illustration of a possible way to analyse e-ID within an e-government initiative.

The present study shows that an e-ID can be considered as a back office-enabler for launching e-services, but also highlights the need for management of the artefact as an integral part of e-service development because it is intertwined with the use of e-services from a user perspective. This aspect together with the insights related to challenges and success factors including path dependency provides implications for future practice of e-ID management and development in particular and information systems artefact development in general.

This paper addresses challenges related to the development of e-ID in a public e-service setting. Few studies have theoretically combined a lifecycle perspective on challenges and success factors related to e-ID development while also focusing different dimensions of path dependency as an example of a challenging area within a program frame. Studying e-ID as a contemporary phenomenon from a contextual perspective in line with sociomaterial thinking – with a focus on the interplay between technology and people –can also help us to understand and discuss artefact development in general.

In this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.

This conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.

Through the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the dynamics and considerations of professionals regarding the sharing of tacit, personal knowledge in their practice.

Adopting a social-constructivist ontology, the qualitative design deploys semi-structured interviews and focus groups. Data were coded, and analysed through interrelating and reasoning.

Personal knowledge is difficult to share precisely, but can be shared to some extent using reflection and stories. Knowledge also provides a position and professional agency, emphasising boundaries and impacting the decisions on interaction and sharing. As such, professional commitment is vulnerable and contextual and, by extension, material becomes part of this interplay of professional practice and collaborative development.

Findings imply that exchange and use of knowledge and material present in organisations are impacted by individual professionals’ autonomy and decisions, which consequently impact on employees’ practice. This calls for research that focuses on individual factors such as autonomy, professionalism and attitudes in addition to organisational and facilitative matters.

Stimulating professional commitment and interpersonal learning is a matter of valuing personal knowledge and practice to avoid protectionism, boundaries and segregated agency. Management and professionals should consider how and why individuals exchange their personal knowledge, paying attention to social structures and individuals’ voices and objectives in forming communities.

This study combines the concept of tacit knowledge with the younger field of practice theory. By connecting personal knowledge to practice, it extends agency to the material world and offers a more individual perspective to knowledge sharing in and between entities.

The purpose of this paper is to inspire a different way of thinking about digitalization and organizational change by theorizing simultaneity as an alternative to the otherwise dominant root metaphor of sequence in the literature on digitalization and organizational change.

The theoretical argument is based on a reading of central contributions to the literature on digital technology and organizational change, and particularly inspired by the work positing a constitutive entanglement of technology and organization. We argue for an extension of this line of thinking with a reading of Latour’s notion tonalities. The relevance of the theoretical argument is demonstrated through an illustrative empirical example of the phenomenon digital-ready legislation.

The paper identifies sequence as a root metaphor in the organization and digital change literature. It develops a simultaneity view and illustrates its relevance through the example of digital-ready legislation, pinpointing how technological, organizational and legal elements are attuned to one another at the same time rather than in sequence.

The sequentiality view has dominated the change management research, which has travelled from research into practice. The simultaneity view has the potential to offer a new approach to planning change, with a focus on the simultaneous alignment of, e.g. legal, organizational and technological elements.

The paper offers an alternative to dominant views on digitalization and organizational change, drawing on an overlooked notion in Latour’s scholarship, namely tonalities. This has potential to qualify the entanglement thesis and develop simultaneity as a new metaphor for understanding digital change.