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This paper aims to show agential realism as the basis for a pertinent framework with regard to the entwined, on-going and interpretative aspects of knowledge.

The knowledge flow phenomenon in the form of entanglement and agential “cuts” within the workplace is studied and described across a phenomenological ethnographic case study of two workgroups within an aircraft engine manufacturing context.

The boundary construction phenomenon is a key process helping us to depict knowledge entanglement (tacit and explicit) across dialogue and non-verbal actions. Dialogue brings forth the aspect of knowledge as interpretations or “cuts.” A phenomenological analysis allows us to identify and describe various levels of tacit–explicit knowledge entanglement depending on the mode of coping at hand. Also highlighted was the importance of heuristics carried out by knowledge experts, often in the form of abduction (i.e. leading to rules of thumb).

It is acknowledged that the relatively narrow context of the empirical work limits the ability to generalize the findings and arguments. As such, additional work is required to investigate the validity of the findings across a wider spectrum of workgroup contexts.

Agential realism allows for the analysis of organizations as a world of practice and actions, whereby long-established categories can be requestioned and challenged with the aim of sharing the full richness and benefit of embodied knowledge between human actors.

Ethnographic descriptions of the entwined nature of tacit and explicit knowledge, the embodied and activity-based dimension of knowledge and learning, as well as the characteristic of knowledge as possession, correspond well to an agential realist concept of phenomenon, entanglement and cuts. Furthermore, agential realism offers the opportunity to view the workplace as individuals (or groups) who act out embodied tacit-explicit knowledge in conjunction with non-human entities (such as objects, as well as communication and information technologies), with the latter acting as enhancers of knowledge creation and sharing.

Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus of the study is on health promotion in a context of illness and/or decline, which form the core of the studied organizational activities. The paper addresses the following question: how do care workers working in elderly care and mental health care organizations accomplish health promotion in the context of illness and/or decline?

The article develops a performative approach and analyses material-discursive practices in health promoting care work. The empirical material includes 36 semi-structured interviews with care workers, observations and organizational documents.

Two central material-discursive health promoting practices in care work are identified: confirming that celebrates service users as residents and the organizations as a home, and balancing at the limits of health promotion. The practices of balancing make the limitations of health promotion discernible and involve reconciling health promotion with that which does not neatly fit into it (illness, unachievable care aims, the institution and certain organizing). In sum, the study shows how health promotion can structure processes in care homes where illness and decline often are particularly palpable.

The paper explores health promotion in a context rarely explored in organization studies. Previous organization studies have to some extent explored health promotion and care work, but typically separately. Further, the few studies that have adopted a performative approach to material-discursive practices in the context of care work have typically primarily focused on IT. We extend previous organization studies literature by producing new insights: (1) from an important organizational context of health promotion and (2) of under-researched entanglements of human and non-human actors in care work providing a performative theory of reconciling organizational tensions.

The idea of “best practice” is very much built into information systems and the ways in which they organise and structure work. The purpose of this paper is to examine how “best practice” may be identified (produced) through a community-based evaluation process as opposed to traditional expert-based evaluation frameworks. The paper poses the following research questions: how does “best practice” (e)valuation in online communities differ depending on whether they are produced by community members or experts? And what role play these two practices of valuation for online community performance?

The paper is based on a three-year ethnographic study of a large-scale online community initiative run by the European Commission. Participant observation of online and offline activities (23 events) was complemented with 73 semi-structured interviews with 58 interviewees. The paper draws on Science and Technology Studies, and in particular actor-network theory.

Promoting the idea of “best practice” is not just an exercise about determining what “best” is but rather supposes that best is something that can travel across sites and be replicated. The paper argues that it is crucial to understand the work performed to coordinate multiple practices of producing “best practice” as apparatuses of valuation. Hence if practices are shared or circulate within an online community, this is possible because of material-discursive practices of dissociation and association, through agential cuts. These cuts demarcate what is important – and foregrounded – and what is backgrounded. In so doing new “practice objects” are produced.

The research was conducted in the European public sector where participants are not associated through shared organisational membership (e.g. as employees of the same organisation). An environment for determining “best practice” that is limited to an organisation’s employees and more homogeneous may reveal further dynamics for “best practice” production.

This paper sheds light on why it is so difficult to reach commensuration in crowd-sourced environments.

The paper provides an analysis of how online community members collaborate in order to identify relevant and meaningful user-generated content. It argues that “best practice” is produced through a process of commensuration.

While recent theoretical discussions around discourse–material relationality have facilitated important conceptual and analytical advancements within the broader field of CMS, less progress has been made methodologically with regard to innovating empirical methods and data modes. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to contribute to strengthening the methodological focus in the literature when grappling with the relationality of discourse–materiality and co-constitution. This includes a method-retooling framework inspired by new materialism.

In this article, the authors engage at the methodological level by developing a method-retooling framework that combines insights from organizational discourse studies and new materialist thinking. This framework enables a retooling of existing methods to become sensitive to multimodality and offers two concrete examples that were developed during fieldwork for a multi-sited and multi-method case study in 2018.

Based on the framework for retooling methods for multimodality, two illustrations are offered. These include retooling interviews by employing multimodal vignettes and retooling observations by using multimodal mappings. They are unfolded and discussed regarding their appropriation of discourse–material relationality.

This paper includes original research and method developments – adding a critical focus on the methodological aspects and potential advancements that are necessary in the wake of the ongoing debates around discourse–materiality across CMS and specifically within studies of organizational discourse and CCO. By suggesting a framework, the authors stimulate methodological explorations and contribute to furthering method developments that are equal to the rich conceptual progress made within the field.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory of sociomateriality to exhibit how the social and material are entangled and (re)configured over time and in practice in a particular organization of study.

The authors conduct an ethnographic case study of the North-South metro line project in Amsterdam and use the methods of participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and a desk study.

The authors showcase the process of sociomaterial entanglement by focussing on the history and context of the project, the agency and performativity of the material and sociomaterial (re)configuration via ritual performance. The authors found the notion of performativity not only concern the enactment of boundaries between the social and material, but also the blurring of such boundaries.

Sociomateriality theory remains difficult to grasp. The implication is the need to provide new lenses to engage this theory empirically.

The authors provide a multi-layered lens for organization researchers to engage sociomateriality theory at a contextual, organizational and practice level.

Insights from a historical and contextual perspective can help practitioners to become aware of the diverse and dynamic ways in which social and material entities are entangled and (re)configured over time and in practice.

The authors provide a unique empirical account to exhibit the entanglement and (re)configuration between the social and material in a particular organization of study. This paper studies a tangible organizational setting whereas prior research in sociomateriality mainly focussed on routines in IT and IS. Finally, the authors suggest the ethnographic method to study sociomaterial entanglement from a historical and contextual perspective.

Although the case for case studies is now well established in accounting and management research, the exact nature of their contribution is still under discussion. This paper aims to add to this debate on contribution by arguing that case studies explore not one reality but several.

This is a theoretical paper that discusses ontology using a deductive approach.

The paper argues that reality is differentiated into physical, structural, agential, cultural and mental realms.

The paper begins to draw out some of the implications of “differentiated realities” for case studies, but there is much more that could be said.

Because case studies encompass differentiated realities, the paper discusses how expectations about the contribution of case studies should be intimately linked to the nature of the differentiated realities being researched.

“Differentiated realities” provides a fresh look status of case study findings and challenges the idea of a single social reality – as portrayed by both social positivism and social constructivism.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how posthumanism can contribute towards reframing responsible management education (RME) after the pandemic. Ethics has been a growing concern in management education for some time now, but the need to acknowledge the limitations and side effects of the global economy and the interdependences between biological and societal systems has come to the forefront in dramatic fashion during the pandemic.

Posthumanism proposes moving beyond traditional dichotomies such as nature-culture and social-material to introduce a relational epistemology in which attention is focused on local sociomaterial entanglements. This also introduces a new moral posture that is not based on formal principles but on a strong commitment to assembling the world and a capacity to cultivate response-abilities. As far as responsible management is concerned, it means moving the focus from managers to managing practices.

The contribution casts an original and critical eye on the reframing of RME and encourages a movement towards a “decolonisation” of educational methodologies. Posthumanist research acknowledges that pedagogical practices are the loci power relations and inclusion or exclusion come into play and are inscribed in the materiality of education, in the sense of objects as well as human bodies. Then, by applying on the author's experience as teacher, the paper provides inputs for developing a posthumanist research agenda for RME after the pandemic.

The contribution uses posthuman lens to explore RME and develops an original research agenda starting from the author’s teaching practices.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the current developments to “mainstream” and standardise sustainability reporting and the consequences of those changes. Those changes give rise to the colonisation of sustainability reporting through the adoption of financial reporting concepts.

This research draws on critical theory, particularly the work of Foucault, to understand the dynamics of accounting change. This approach provides an alternative to the current narrative that the concepts that underpin reporting are universal and timeless.

It is suggested that if the aim of mandatory sustainability reporting is to promote companies adopting sustainable business models, then it must properly reflect the context of the company. Both transactive and relationship information is critical to providing an account that can be used to judge the performance of the corporation beyond its production of short-term net positive cash flows.

The design of standard setting arrangements for sustainability reporting needs to recognise that it may be unhelpful to simply adopt financial reporting concepts for the purposes of directing corporate behaviour towards sustainable development.

Continuing to adopt a view of the corporation as a nexus of contracts with no clear accountability to stakeholders is likely to stymie efforts to deal with the environmental and social crisis facing people and planet.

Whilst other works have considered the development of sustainability reporting, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to consider the impacts of “mainstreaming” it within mandatory corporate reporting.

This paper introduces the concept of posthuman co-production. It explores how processual and relational onto-epistemologies inform an artful, response-able (Barad 2007) feminist new materialist praxis that decentres the human and re-centres matter.

Posthuman co-production gives prominence to crafting “dartaphacts” (Renold, 2018); creative research artefacts, carrying “what matters” and enacting change that can be mapped across time and multiple “problem spaces” (Lury, 2020), as an expansive, post-qualitative praxis of slow, co-production.

The paper stories this praxis across three “fugal figurations” providing glimpses into the post-qualitative journeys of assembled dartaphacts in the policy and practice field of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Wales. Each fugue hints at the polytical, resourceful and living potential of dartaphacts in the making and their mattering over a period of six years. Collectively, they chart a rhizomatic journey that re-configures co-production as a response-able, becoming-with what matters.

As more-than-human forces for change, dartaphacts continue to surface “the cries of what matters” (Stengers 2019) for children and young people well beyond the periods of funded research and engagement, giving new meaning to the sustainability and material legacies of research impact.