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In today’s business settings, most firms strive to closely integrate their resources and activities with those of their business partners. However, these linkages tend to create lock-in effects when changes are needed. In such situations, firms need to generate new space for action. The purpose of this paper is twofold: analysis of potential action spaces for restructuring; and examination of how action spaces can be exploited and the consequences accompanying this implementation.

Network dynamics originate from changes in the network interdependencies. This paper is focused on the role of the three dual connections – actors–activities, actors–resources and activities–resources, identified as network vectors. In the framing of the study, these network vectors are combined with managerial action expressed in terms of networking and network outcome. This framework is then used for the analysis of major restructuring of the car industries in the USA and Europe at the end of the 1900s.

This study shows that the restructuring of the car industry can be explained by modifications in the three network vectors. Managerial action through changes of the vector features generated new action space contributing to the transition of the automotive network. The key to successful exploitation of action space was interaction – with individual business partners, in triadic constellations, as well as on the network level.

This paper presents a new view of network dynamics by relying on the three network vectors. These concepts were developed in the early 1990s. This far, however, they have been used only to a limited extent.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the IT‐related public sector transformation by reintroducing the question of employees' organisational power and position in technological and technocratic systems.

To examine how formal organisational positions, together with the way in which employees position themselves in relation to technology, affect how employees interpret their accessible action space (position and action strategy), a survey in a local municipality was conducted.

As indicated in the hypothesis, the empirical results verify that the techno‐relational action space is two‐dimensional, consisting of both a formal position (how the organisational members are positioned) and a certain amount of action space outside a formal position (i.e. how they are position themselves). Elaborating on these dimensions generates rewarding insights into a micro‐change perspective where technology‐related innovation processes are concerned.

Identifying and acknowledging employees perceived techno‐relational action space is of great importance in understanding organisational members' participation, cooperation and innovative capability in government transformation.

The paper combines analysis of how the organisational members position themselves in relation to technology with how they are positioned organisationally in relation to technology and structures of power. Instead, the authors claim that the techno‐relational space is both a matter of how the organisational members position themselves in relation to technology and a matter of how they are positioned organisationally in relation to technology and structures of power.

According to Ludwig Von Mises (1949/1963), economics studies the causes and consequences of goal-directed action. Each of us seeks to improve our situations as we see it. But just how each of us perceives our situation, and what alternative ends and means we believe are available to us, depends crucially on the context.² Action is never without context but is instead undertaken by someone for something at a certain time and a certain place (Hayek, 1945).

The article presents research results of an ethnographic survey within the German police. The focus is on practices of spatial production and the functions of spaces.

The article draws on data from the DFG-funded research project KORSIT (Social Construction of security-related Spaces) based on an ethnographic survey in the German police force (https://www.dhpol.de/korsit). Participant observations were conducted in police stations in two large German cities (pseudonymised as “Dillenstadt” and “Rosenberg”). It involved 60 guided interviews with police officers at different levels of the hierarchy, as well as further interviews with local and societal actors for contrasting purposes. The data was analysed on the basis of grounded theory (Strauss and Cobin, 1996).

This paper shed light on institutional spatial knowledge, which is the basis of police practices, is preceded by experience-based narratives. In an expanded perspective, the paper argues that urban spaces themselves can be understood as materialisations of social practices that serve as social demarcation that legitimise unequal styles of action in the different precinct within the German police. In terms of a relational conceptualisation of space, it is shown that the categories of ethnicity and gender interrelate within the institutional production of space.

The article links organisational research with sociological spatial research and provides basic explanatory models on the conditions of emergence and the persistence of discriminatory practices within the police.

This chapter proposes a material-performative storytelling approach to authentic leadership based on Hannah Arendt's notion of action as storytelling and Butler's rework of Arendt's notion as an embodied and material performance. The author argues that stories are expressions of authenticity to the extent that they disclose who people are and create what Arendt called a ‘space of appearance’. He conjectures that authenticity is enacted when people have the ability and commitment to create stories and inscribe themselves in history. Jørgensen concludes that authenticity implies new leadership practices enacted in the spaces between institutions and organisations to deal with societal challenges and suggests that innovative new models are necessary to address these challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of understanding of the social processes involved in business engagement and understanding of the role of knowledge transfer practitioners. It is also to provide the first outlines of a theoretical framework of business engagement between higher education institutions and business, through the lens of complexity theory.

The paper draws on research that explored the actions of a group of actors within a university Business School as they attempted to develop a range of business engagement activities. The data were analysed using a narrative event sequence methodology designed to deal systematically with the relationship between events occurring over time. The events were linked into a progression to create temporal maps which provided the basis for data collection and conceptual analysis.

A space of possibilities was created by participants in the faculty to engage with industry that was adjacent to the teaching and learning space. The adjacent space set out to provide the business development team different expectations they could exploit to generate new interactions beyond the boundaries of the teaching and learning space. It was for the business development team to exploit the generative potential of the adjacent space by creating emergent events which developed halting as a non‐linear progression that juxtaposed extinction and emergent events. In their interactions the business development managers had continually to reconcile the tension between compliance and generative potential through use of individual judgement.

In developing business engagement activity consideration should be given to the contradictory world the business development managers act within and the constraints they experience. Through the examination of the events, lessons can be learned that enhance the generative potential of the business development manager.

The theoretical outline of this paper provides an initial framework within which to examine the role of the business development manager.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the combination of a qualitative shadowing method called “Commentated Walk” and an ethnographic approach, can be used to analyze the spatial dimension of practices, when space is considered as a co-construction and as an active dimension of individual and collective practices.

The approach is ethnographic and the empirical field work concerns the coordination in ephemeral organizations intended to manage emergent phenomena: the social “problems” often named “urban incivilities,” which occur in public and semi-public spaces in some suburban areas in France and are recurrent.

In these organizations, space appears to be part of individual and collective practices, and a key resource for coordination. Shared “spaces of action” between inhabitants and local institutions contribute to coordination. As a method of data collection, Commentated Walks offer relevant insight into how actors “deal with space” in their day-to-day life or their professional practices. Walking with while talking with – the method's principals – make it possible to capture the materiality of problematic spaces as well as the feelings that the space inspires.

The use of this method is still exploratory. In further research, it would be interesting to consider such Commentated Walks in other organizational contexts, in order to explore different ways of “dealing with” space and different types of spatial competencies that people develop in using space as a resource.

This paper proposes an original combination of methodological approaches which allows us to grasp the formation of spatial practices.