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The authors examine infrastructures of valuation by asking how the specific materializations of categories and ratings make a difference in practice. Drawing on the notion of apparatus, the authors explore how different valuation schemes entail specific inclusions and exclusions that have material consequences for the valuations that are produced. Focusing on agential realist conceptualizations of apparatus allows a shift in attention to a particular reading of performativity in which different valuation infrastructures perform different phenomena in the world. The authors focus on two specific valuation systems within hospitality – star ratings of the Automobile Association and regional rankings on TripAdvisor – and examine how these make boundaries, direct agencies of observation and condition the possibilities for action. The authors consider the conditions of possibility that are increasingly being produced through digital infrastructures and highlight the performative uncertainties that are generated as a result of their materializations in practice.

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.

Tonya and Anete are new players at sc’MOI, but this theme emerges at the tail end of sc’MOI so they are best to explicate it. This chapter describes the theoretical contributions of quantum storytelling theory (QST) and practice. Building on the application of complexity theory in the hard sciences as well as social contexts and theory on multimodal constituency, this chapter considers the areas of overlap and difference between quantum storytelling and its theoretical fellows, with special attention given to sociomateriality, storytelling, feminism, fractal, and complexity theory.

Based on a critique of reductive understandings of physicality, this chapter explores the significance of embodied materiality, the artefactual physical, the role of the living body and embodiment in relation to ‘intra and inter’ practices of leadership from a phenomenological perspective. Using a phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approach, issues of an embodied physicality in leadership are systematically explored and implications discussed beyond physicalist empiricism and meta-physical idealism. Furthermore, the chosen phenomenological approach reveals problematising limitations of naturalist and constructionist approaches.

Following Merleau-Ponty an extended understanding of physicality as well as the significance of the co-constitutive role of embodiment, inter-corporeality and intra-action in and of leadership practices in organisational life-worlds are identified and discussed. Insights into the role of corporeal materio-socio phenomena and expressions of meaningful practices of leading and following are rendered. The chapter concludes by noting limitations and implications of embodied physicality and physical inter-becoming of ‘bodiment’ for a more integral and sustainable conception of leader-and followership in organisations. Through its specific post-dualistic approach the chapter provides an innovative perspective on the interrelations between living, material, bodily and embodied dimensions of physicality in leadership.

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 chapter proposes a quantum relational process philosophy as an approach for studying organization-in-becoming as a world-creating process. Furthermore, the quantum relational process philosophy is tied to quantum storytelling. Whereas the quantum relational process philosophy outlines a philosophy of a processual ontology, epistemology, and ethic, quantum storytelling provides the storytelling medium through which such an ontology, epistemology, and ethic emerges through articulation and actualization. As such, the two approaches are introduced as inseparable from each other.

The focus of this chapter is to unfold the ties between the quantum relational process philosophy and quantum storytelling through the perspective of the quantum relational process philosophy itself.

The proposed quantum relational process philosophy is defined as Being-in-Becoming. Thereby, this approach is suggested as an alternative to the “Being” perspective and the “Becoming” perspective or at least as a further development of the becoming perspective. These latter two perspectives present two different ways of viewing organizational change: development and transformation.

The being perspective relies on substance ontology acknowledging the existence of entities: that “which is.” In substance ontology, however, entities such as individuals and organizations are viewed as existing in themselves in fixed space-time frames. This view entails a rather static and stable ontology, perceiving the organization as a ready-made world of stable, unchanging entities. This perspective is often referred to as the approach of building the organizational world through intervention and control of change.

As a contrast, the becoming perspective relies on a process ontology while the organization is perceived as a sea of constant flux and change through which the organization emerges on the way. In this process-oriented perspective, attention is directed toward “that which is becoming.” In this perspective, the organization is perceived as a world-making phenomenon emerging through ceaseless processes of transformation. This approach is often referred to as the dwelling approach, that is, to dwell in the world-making phenomenon letting it happen. This perspective tends to ignore that which exists, that is the ready-made forms, and only focus on that which is becoming.

In this chapter, the proposed being-in-becoming perspective views the tension between being and becoming as a dialectical interplay that is decisive to organizational transformation. However, in the being-in-becoming perspective, “entities” are viewed from a quantum perspective whereby being-in-becoming differs from the substance ontology in its view of the nature of “entities.” In this perspective, the organization is viewed as a dialectical interplay between, at the one hand, the organizational form(ing) of life and, at the other hand, the aliveness of unfolding and transforming living life-worlds of being-in-the-world in fluid space and open time. This dialectical interplay is conceived as central in organizational world-creating processes.

The aim of the chapter is to develop a conceptual framework of a quantum relational process philosophy that embraces the dialectics of transforming organizations. The contribution is to be capable of understanding the performative consequences of dialectic to organizational transformation viewed from the being-in-becoming perspective of the quantum relational process philosophy.

Through the contribution of Heidegger, Hegel, Aristotle, and Boje, and further enriched by Barad, Bakhtin, and Shotter, a conceptual framework is developed for understanding, analyzing, and problematizing dialectical organizational world-creating.

This framework is called “Fourfold World-Creating.” The fourfold world-creating framework keeps the dialectic of organizational transformation at its center while it at the same time take into consideration the dialectical interplay of ontology, epistemology, and ethic. In this sense, the framework is proposed as quantum relational process philosophy. The incorporation of ethic in the quantum relational process philosophy represents an additional contribution of the chapter.

The fourfold world-creating framework is furthermore suggested to be conceived as a quantum relational process philosophy of the antenarrative dimension in David Boje’s quantum storytelling triad framework encompassing: (1) the narrative, (2) the living stories, and (3) the antenarrative. In his recent research, David Boje has a developed a dialectical perspective on his storytelling framework. Following in line with this thinking, this chapter suggests viewing (1) the narrative as the ready-made form, (2) the living stories as the living life-worlds, and (3) the antenarrative as fourfold world-creating.

In this sense, the proposed dialectical fourfold world-creating framework and its embeddedness in the quantum relational process philosophy contributes to our understanding of the research contributes of antenarrative storytelling in organizational studies.

As findings, the chapter proposes what could be considered as ontological, epistemological, and ethical key constituents in dialectical organizational world-creating. The contribution of these findings encompasses an analytical framework for (1) understanding the dialectical, transformative movements of the organization as well as (2) analyzing and problematizing the cease of dialectical tensions that seems to lock the organization in a particular state of being, only capable of repeating and reproducing its ready-made world in fixed space-time frames.

South African scholars, like most scholars in the developing world, have sold the idea that social constructivism is the gold standard of qualitative management research. In this chapter, we caution against this subordination to unquestioned conventions and offer a process relational ontology as an alternative to social constructivism that is often punted by most qualitative research programmes and textbooks. We also debunk the idea that ‘grounded theory’ exists by delving into epistemology and showing how science is ‘self-correcting’ rather than ‘tabula rasa’. Instead of boxing business ethics knowledge, as has been done by the case study gurus, we encourage business and organisational ethicists to own their indigenous heritage through storytelling science based on the self-correcting method underpinned by Popperian and Peircian epistemological thought. This chapter encourages business management researchers to move towards more profound ethical knowledge by refuting and falsifying false assumptions in each phase of the study, in a sequence of self-correcting storytelling phases. This is what Karl Popper called trial and error, and what C.S. Peirce called self-correcting by the triadic of Abduction–Induction–Deduction. We offer a novel method for accomplishing this aim that we call ‘Conversational Interviews’ that are based on antenarrative storytelling sciences. Our chapter aims to evoking the transformative power of indigenous ontological antenarratives in authentic conversation in order to solve immediate local problems ad fill the many institutional voids that plague the South(ern)-/African context.

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.

In this chapter, we explore a form of young people’s activism taking place in a central societal institution and a central forum in the lives of young people – school – that we conceptualise as ‘active equity’. We present three cases from northern Finland: reindeer herders smashing potatoes, immigrant youth requesting a key and young people lying on sofas during breaks between lessons. We suggest that these acts, in the contexts in which they took place, were an unrecognised form of social action for equity undertaken by young people. We argue that the concept of active equity helps examine the assertion of rights and claims for justice by children and young people. In each case we present, young people make visible an inequity in their contexts: the reindeer herding way of life was overlooked in school, asylum-seeking or refugee immigrants were excluded from the main school building, and non-high-performing young people were excluded from comfortable areas during lessons. These, in turn, linked to broader societal inequities in Finland, a country commonly known for its equality. In school, young people are commonly viewed through intersecting discourses of democracy and education. In both discourses, they are commonly positioned as learners rather than speakers. Through active equity, young people subtly imprint themselves on the scene of education in new ways. For this reason, their acts of active equity remain typically either unrecognised or seen as oppositional in school.