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The purpose of the paper is to show how professional tools trigger workplace learning. The daily mundane work of Swedish police officers has been studied to investigate how the use of police tools triggers learning through discussions in police practice.

Data were collected through a field study consisting of extensive observations and interviews. The interviews mainly took place in the actual practice of the officers. Situated learning and communities of practice served as an analytical lens.

The study revealed how the use of specific police tools resulted in conversations among the officers. Theses conversations are claimed to be vital parts of the community, and thus the learning of the community of police practice. The paper shows how tools make the ways of working, i.e. police practice, available for discussion and collective reflection.

The paper is an in‐depth investigation of a relatively closed sector of society. The paper can inspire researchers to embark on similar studies of other practices. The paper provides novel ways of thinking about how learning takes place in everyday work, not planned and organized by management, but rather as a necessity driven by new tools, and how tools are involved in work.

The purpose of this paper is to deflate some of the pressure-orienting teachers toward following a curricular script.

The authors connect effective classroom teaching and learning practices to a dialogic instructional stance that values local resources and student perspectives and contributions. The authors argue that effective teachers have agency to make decisions about content and pacing adjustments (they call this agentive flow) and that they practice response-able talk. Response-able talk practices are responsive to what is happening in the classroom, responsibly nurture joint purposes and multiple perspectives, and cultivate longer exchanges of student exploratory talk. These talk practices are not easily scripted.

The authors show what these effective, local and dialogic instructional practices look like in a second-grade urban classroom.

The authors call upon every teacher to robustly find their local ways of working.

In this paper, the authors argue that harnessing the local is an essential aspect of dialogic instruction and a critical component of a dialogic instructional stance.

This paper examines in what ways cultural representations of money reveal deprivation and empowerment in poverty.

The study draws on Finnish poor consumers’ narratives of their daily lives to identify the discursive practices involved in money talk. Poverty is seen as a frame in which the tacit cultural knowledge of money and the ways of enacting discursive practices are sustained and produced.

The research constructs a theoretical illustration of consumer empowerment and deprivation in poverty, which is based on four discursive practices: Moneyless is powerless, Capricious money, Wrestling with money, and Happiness cannot be bought with money. The illustration shows the dynamic evolution of empowerment and deprivation as they grow from and vary within the discursive practices.

The study highlights the practical carrying out of life in poverty, which does not emerge only as deprived or as empowered, but instead involves a tension between them.

To explore the use of video-stimulated reflection during read aloud activities in early childhood to promote self-awareness, reading comprehension, and metacognitive literacy practices.

The increasing visibility and accessibility of video recording devices across learning environments is the cause for investigating their potential utility as effective instructional tools. This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach to the implementation of video reflection in early childhood education. Grounded theory is used to build an understanding of how video can support effective emergent literacy and metacognitive strategy instruction.

Video recordings facilitated students’ reflection. Common reflective themes include revisiting the recorded event in reflective discussion, elaboration on story elements toward increasing comprehension, and explaining students’ own thinking. These findings indicate students’ ability to engage in emergent practices fundamental to a disciplinary literacy perspective.

The use of tablets as a video device in early childhood can be utilized to promote reading instruction and metacognition. Video reflection can leverage practices that are necessary for disciplinary literacies.

To explore annotated video-based portfolios and the communicative practices embedded in this technological mediation as a means for teacher candidates to construct pedagogical knowledge and develop self-examination skills leading to a deeper reflection on practice, greater perceived value of the reflection process, and the ability to identify specific behaviors for improvement.

In this chapter, we present the development of an online graduate practicum course in a Masters in Reading program, and the supportive measures put into place so students could reflect on their own and others’ practice within a video-based portfolio construction.

Observations indicate course members’ discussion regarding teaching follows a clear progression: the importance of teachers’ management of materials, space and time; developing their ability to discern patterns in student behavior; and a growing recognition of the impact teacher talk and habits have on their students. To support practicum students’ progress, we have developed a set of assumptions to guide talk about practice during annotation and discussion of video, as well as ways of using talk effectively during a video lesson.

We share this glimpse into the design of our practicum course as a means to make transparent the support systems developed so students could capture and discuss quality practice within the context of their own work with a student. We hope sharing our journey will provide others engaged in this work with a common language and lens for discussion about quality, resulting in positive outcomes for students.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether race-specific language use can advance organizational learning about the racialized nature of school problems. The study addressed two questions: first, is teacher use of racial language associated with how they frame school discipline problems during conversational exchanges? Second, what do patterns of associations suggest about racial language use as an asset that may influence an organization’s ability to analyze discipline problems?

Co-occurrence analysis was used to explore patterns between racial language use and problem analysis during team conversational exchanges regarding school discipline problems.

When participants used race-specific and race-proxy language, they identified more problems and drew on multiple frames to describe school discipline problems.

This paper substantiates that race-specific language is beneficial for organizational learning.

The findings suggest that leading language communities may be an integral, yet overlooked lever for organizational learning and improvement. Prioritizing actions that promote race-specific conversations among school teams can reveal racism/racial conflict and subsequently increase the potential for change.

This paper combines organizational change and race talk research to highlight the importance of professional talk routines in organizational learning.

This study sets out to explore how people account for their translation, negotiation and shaping of environmentally relevant practices as information practices in their everyday life during the holidays and asks further how these narratives can be seen as accounting for situated information practices. It aims to focus on how summer guests holidaying in southern Sweden talk about how they connect different kinds of common everyday life practices to environmental information.

The investigation was carried out over a period of five months during 2008. It is based on seven semi‐structured interviews with nine owners of summer cottages in a holiday village in southern Sweden, three field visits to the village, one including a guided tour, as well as textual analysis of official documents and a local journal. A qualitative thematic analysis, together with a theoretical reading, brings together the intertwined narratives on environmental and information practices, which emerged in the interviews with close readings of textual documents. The resulting themes were given additional meaning by relating them to observations from field visits.

First, there is no obvious link between people's theoretical knowledge of environmental issues and their actual practices in everyday life. This is also the case for those aware of the impact individual practices are said to have on the environment and on society at large. Second, certain objects and the practices tied to them seem to have become carriers of environmental information in themselves. They are so routinely connected to environmental issues that people “think” through them, when they account for how they think about the environment in a way that has meaning to them.

Focusing on the situated information practices involved in creating meaning on environmental issues could have implications for how we think about information campaigns and policy making regarding environmental issues and lifestyles.

This paper suggests that a strong focus on the various perceived and constructed roles of information might contribute to conceptualise more robustly the role of objects and practices for conveying and enacting environmental issues and help to counter the de‐coupling of private and institutional responsibilities.

IT governance has become the recognized norm system for chief information officers. The purpose of this paper is to understand how CIOs relate to these norms, by studying how they legitimate incompliance with the norms.

The paper uses an interpretive, qualitative, structured interview study with 18 CIOs in large Swedish organizations regarded as having excellent IT governance practice, using motive talk as analytical lens to identify the informants’ relationship to norms.

The study identifies norm‐specific patterns for how CIOs legitimate incompliance with IT governance, finding that CIOs use a combination of excuse and justifications as strategies of legitimation. The study also finds that CIOs display a tendency of not contesting IT governance‐related norms unless these are in conflict with neighboring professional jurisdictions. This is regarded as an identification of the “margins” of IT governance.

The study illustrates how the theory of motive talk is a viable road ahead for future studies of IT professionals. The generalizability of the identified patterns of legitimation is limited by the selection of large organizations with solely male CIOs, as well as the selection of solely organizations that have succeeded in establishing external legitimacy concerning IT governance and the organizations being Swedish.

CIOs aspiring to increase their legitimacy should avoid direct conflicts with neighboring professions. In addition to this, they should also aspire to be clear in a separation of motive talk and actual practice, since full norm compliance may be detrimental to their factual operations.

The originality of this paper lies in the methodological approach of combining motive talk and speech acts to investigate CIO legitimation practices.

Human resource development (HRD) is a concept associated with human resource management, and, by this association, one component of the broader concept of management. Much work has examined management practices from a critical stance and this article provides a brief review. However, HRD is a more recent concept, still emerging and finding space in both academic and practitioner spheres. This article begins a critical examination of HRD by applying some of the strands of critical thinking to HRD practices and discourses. It also critically examines the attempt to conceptualise HRD as a social and discursive construction to connect ways of thinking, talking about and practising HRD to help academics and practitioners reflect critically on their occupational activities. By examining discourses associated with “being critical” as well as the emerging and eclectic discourses of “HRD”, this article contributes to a deeper understanding by evaluating whether this is indeed a critical time for HRD.

This paper aims to introduce the AAAJ special issue on “Accounting as codified discourse”, explicate the idea of codification and locate the notion of a “codified discourse” within the broader tradition of discourse studies in management.

The approach is conceptual and discursive, and provides a theoretical framework for understanding codification and a discursive context for the accepted papers in this special issue.

Theoretically, consideration of the more determinate relationship between codified discourse and practice can add to the general understanding of the discourse/practice dynamic in organisation studies. Several issues are identified that call for further empirical investigation. First, some of the broad‐spectrum accounting codes (e.g. historic cost) are currently under review in the expectation that change will enable constructive accounting innovation. Second, the impact of more codified accounting on management practice in organisations requires evaluation. Third, how far “intangibles” and “externalities” can be codified is a pertinent current agenda. Fourth, work is needed on whether and to what extent professional power is curtailed when politicians and policy makers introduce more codified discourses.

Currently “codification” is not well understood in the literature. This AAAJ special issue opens up the debate but there remains considerable scope for future work to take this agenda forward – to enable more detailed understanding of accounting as codified discourse.

Although “discourse studies” and “discourse analysis” are now firmly embedded in the organisational/management literature, “codified discourses” have not featured in the debate. This is a significant omission as codification is a key feature of many discourses – especially in professional fields like accounting, law, and medicine. Moreover, codified discourses are becoming more widespread. The value of this paper lies in its exposition of accounting as codification in relation to discourse.