Practice-based Perspective Research Articles

Managing Stability and Change in Interorganizational Projects: The Ambiguous Role of Digital Tools for Relational Dynamics

Focusing on relational dynamics among collaborating organizations, we ask how inter-organizational projects respond to digitalization and ensure that the dynamics remain manageable. Digital tools, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the construction industry, can help to manage relational dynamics but may also cause additional ones. Considering the theorizing of stability and change as a duality, the practice-based perspective adopted, and the empirical evidence from two comparable construction projects investigated, these dynamics are not only mitigated, but also maintained, or even mobilized. With its focus on relationally embedded interorganizational projects, and additional relational dynamics triggered and managed by BIM in face of the recursive interplay between stability and change, the study provides a nuanced manageability framework. With this it contributes not only to project management scholarship, but also to management research more broadly, which is increasingly interested in forms of temporary organizing.

Situational privacy: theorizing privacy as communication and media practice

Abstract Under dataveillance as the “new normal,” datafied societies render privacy seemingly impossible. Communication and media privacy scholars foster relational and contextual perspectives to explore how agents and infrastructures could nevertheless maintain a certain degree of self-determined control over the flow of data. Situational privacy accesses this debate from an alternative practice-based perspective. Putting emphasis on the ongoing transformation of privacy, this contribution leverages recent empirical and theoretical thoughts of practice-based privacy research as well as conceptual work on the notion of the situation in social theory. Shifting the focus onto privacy breakdown, mundane criticism, and pragmatic measures of “good enough privacy,” it anchors privacy in everyday routines and situations. Situational privacy offers a communication and media perspective on privacy as a critical concept in transformation.

Inter-organisational human resource management and network orientation of worker representatives: a practice-based perspective

We develop a practice-based framework of inter-organisational human resource management that puts multi-employer work arrangements in inter-firm networks at its centre. By reinterpreting existing knowledge on multi-employer work arrangements and how they are managed, we delineate four processes in the assemblage of inter-organisational HR management. To illustrate the usefulness of our framework, we explore the question of whether and how an inter-organisational HR management develops in four exemplary cases of multi-employer work arrangements. These cases reveal that the quality and degree of inter-organisational HR management varies considerably, also depending on whether worker representatives show network awareness and orient their activities towards inter-organisational relations.

Something out of nothing

Written from within Lyrik Kabinett, Munich, holding the second-largest poetry library in Europe, this essay provides a practice-based perspective on how the concept of ›literature as social practice‹ can find articulation in an institutional setting. Starting with a brief overview of poetry libraries internationally, the contribution subsequently focuses in on the artist’s book and poetry holdings at Lyrik Kabinett, our user and audience engagement, and on the way we initiate contemporary poetic responses to poetic histories. The concept of social practice is thereby also given a diachronic perspective, yet one that is attentive to the significance of decanonisation as much as of canonisation.

On the attractiveness of clothing libraries for women: Investigating the adoption of product-service systems from a practice-based perspective

Clothing libraries, an application of product-service system in the clothing sector, could potentially combat clothing overconsumption but consumer adoption is limited so far. Research so far has largely overlooked the diversity in adoption barriers depending on the context. Using a practice-based approach, this paper explores how adoption barriers differ across clothing consumption profiles and types of clothing libraries. A focus group methodology is used to examine two types of clothing libraries (occasional vs. everyday) intended for women and four clothing consumption profiles (fashionista, rational, emotional, restrained). This paper shows that occasional clothing libraries are perceived as more attractive than everyday clothing libraries because they require a smaller change of practice. Factors such as the possibility of wearing the garment again, existing alternatives (second hand purchase or exchanges with friends or family), the type of occasion (event, seasonal or daily), the need for garment renewal, and the price interact in a similar way for clothing purchases and occasional clothing libraries. This paper also shows that the barriers to practice change differ between consumption profiles. For example, not feeling the need to renew one's wardrobe is an obstacle to subscribing to everyday clothing libraries for the rational profile, while this same factor, feeling the need to regularly renew one's wardrobe, is a lever for subscribing to everyday clothing libraries for the fashionista profile. The findings can be used to tailor clothing libraries to specific consumption profiles' needs in order to shift their fashion practices towards sustainable consumption.

“That’s what makes me authentic, because what we domakes sense” – Music professionals’ experiences of authenticity: A phenomenological, hermeneutical interview study

Within music education, music therapy, and music performance theory, various perspectives on the concept of authenticity have been discussed and investigated. Authenticity seems to be a concept with wide possibilities for application and likewise wide definitional borders, which makes it hard to investigate. Drawing on the knowledge and framework developed by Bøtker and Jacobsen (2023), we wish to continue the investigation of authenticity within three music professions from a practice-based perspective. For this study, music therapists, music educators, and music performers (six participants) were interviewed twice about their experiences of their own authenticity when facilitating musical activities with children and adults (parents or teachers). The interviews were transcribed and analysed using a thematic coding analysis: deductively using the conceptual framework by Bøtker and Jacobsen as well as inductively by looking for new emerging themes across these three professions. The findings confirm the conceptual framework but also suggest an expansion, adding the element of ‘Values’. The new framework consists of six elements that all pertain to the experience of authenticity: relationship, role, context, professionalism, personality, and values. Furthermore, another theme appeared through the inductive analysis – ‘floating-anchoring’ – describing and synthesising the connection between the reflective and the sensorial awareness that supplement each other in the experience of authenticity within these three music professions. This floating-anchoring synthesis is suggested as a relevant framework for training and education within the three music professions.

A practice-based perspective of discursive change in collegial conversations. Explicit and implicit communication at work.

This paper examines the relationship between explicit and implicit aspects of communication at work and especially how discursive change is enabled in that relationship. The studied context is collegial conversations in Swedish School-age Educare settings. The purpose is to elaborate on practice-based perspectives on reproducing and changing discourse in communication at work, contributing to productive teacher discourse. This paper proposes two aspects contributing to reproduction of discourse: shallow consensus and intersubjectivity; and two aspects enabling discursive change in collegial conversations at work: multivoicing and revisiting events. Identified aspects of (re)production in collegial conversation shows positioning and constructions of group belonging in work teams are important to make conversations productive. This paper contributes to elaboration on the literature of collegial discourse and communication and literature on team-based work.

Testing Open Science Tools

Data management plans (DMP) are an intrinsic part of planning for and implementing openness in scientific research. DMPs contain integral information on research projects: IT requirements, legal and ethical considerations and strategies for opening data. However, all too often, the DMP is seen as a chore drawn up at the request of external funders rather than a tool adopted for the benefit of project members. Similarly, the information gathered into DMPs is rarely utilised by other stakeholders such as institutional research services, nor linked to external parties such as data repositories. Machine-actionable DMPs aim to change this landscape by offering better guidance and support for researchers preparing their plans, and facilitating a research data management system that allows data and information to be shared across institutions and repositories. In fact, one of the recommendations of the EOSC Nordic project, which studied FAIR incentives and expected impact in the Nordics, Baltics and EOSC, was the implementation of machine-actionable DMPs for seamless information workflow and supporting FAIR adoption in everyday research work. Tools such as Data Stewardship Wizard and Argos do this by taking researchers through a set of simple structural questions on research data management from which answers are exported into funder templates resulting in downloadable DMP documents. These machine-actionable online tools transform tick-the-box answers that are easy to fill in into full-text DMPs that comply with funder requirements. This poster introduces a pilot project testing the Data Stewardship Wizard and localising its Knowledge Template to the needs of Aalto University. It presents the project’s findings and stages, including the process of creating a template for the Research Council of Finland DMPs and testing the tool with researchers. In doing so, it examines machine-actionable DMPs from a practice-based perspective and comments on the process of institutional implementation.

Expanding engineering practices: immigrant accounts of innovation from a practice-based perspective

ABSTRACT Research shows a positive association between skilled migration and innovation. Related literature however is largely limited to the use of proxies such as patents, and publications. There is also a lack of attention to how innovation is accomplished in practices. This paper addresses these gaps with an examination of the innovative contributions made by immigrant engineers in Canada. Conceptually, informed by practice-based theories, it conceives innovation as a sociocultural and sociomaterial process that leads to the transformation of the object/motives of activities, i.e. the problem space to which actions are directed. Empirically, drawing on a thematic and situational analysis of the career accounts of 32 immigrant engineers, it shows that immigrants expand engineering practices by introducing, inter alias, new technologies, products, processes, policies and standards. It further traces the rise of the problem spaces, and the ways in which engineering objects and other practitioners are knotted into practices of innovation. It argues that while immigrants manage to introduce epistemic objects through continuous learning and knowledge translation, it is through the enrolment of other practitioners, and technologies and tools that relations of differences and power are (re)negotiated, and new ways of doing become amplified as innovation at work.

The orchestration of green supply chain management practices to enable performance measurement and evaluation

This study aims at investigating the relationship between the implementation of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and the implementation of environmental performance measurement and evaluation (EPME) practices. The theoretical model was empirically validated using structural equation modelling in a survey of 199 Brazilian managers working in sustainability areas. We introduce a novel framework that bridges systems theory with the practice-based perspective of firms. The framework advances the current understanding of factors influencing EPME adoption, structuring GSCM practices as system components: inputs, processes, outputs, and feedback loops. More specifically, we identify the direct effects of different GSCM practices in the implementation of EPME but also indirect effects cascading through input, process, output, and feedback loop practices. Our research addresses industry needs for guidance on how to implement GSCM practices and facilitate EPME. Managers need to orchestrate the adoption of GSCM practices in each of these system components by monitoring of inter-organisational and intra-organisational activities of their supply chains. Both EPME and feedback loop practices (e.g. customer collaboration) are key to achieving benefits concerning the environmental impact of supply chain operations.

Marginal Identities and Bodies in North African Trance Dance: A Celebration of Madness

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between marginal identities, bodies, and the performance of madness in the North African trance dance. It casts light on festive rituals where the illnesses of the soul are manifested through corporeal expressions that variably combine the religious, the spiritual, the socio-cultural, and the psychological aspects. Rather than being stigmatized or pathologized, madness is celebrated to grant a legitimate space and voice to the disadvantaged and marginalized individuals. It is hence posited to produce a counter-discourse that symbolically speaks out against the dictates of formal discourses that control the lives of men and women and shape their identities. By applying a qualitative research method, this study involves observing subjects' corporeal performances in trance from a practice-based perspective. The descriptive analysis of the night of trance (the Lila) takes insights from social semiotics and the concept of the 'meta-sign' to account for the minimal details of madness and the corporeal signs into play. There are stages to follow and intricate bodily moments that would drive the observer of madness to where the order of society comes to a standstill. However, the focus of interest is to assess the readiness of women and men to play other than their normative sociocultural roles in society. The varying dramatic scenes with musical melodies, colors, spirits, litanies, and personifications are overwhelmingly loaded with the passion to celebrate and the desire to transcend time and space. The participants are voluntarily involved in trance as an outlet for their collective endeavor to exteriorize their own mental anxieties and whims. Their sole intention is to defy the prevailing ideologies and the pressures their bodies suffer from. Dancing for them embodies the psychiatric that helps the patients to be dispossessed and hopefully be cured. These observed rites of trance are found to be intentionally performed to relieve individuals from different types of alienation suffered in a 21st century modern world that marginalizes, downgrades, and chains them to the rigidity of disciplinary powers.

Valuing Nature in Global Production Networks: Hunting Tourism and the Weight of History in Zambezi, Namibia

Southern African ecosystems are threatened by biodiversity loss, but it remains highly controversial whether nature conservation can be successfully achieved by commodifying ecosystems through tourism or by withdrawing habitats from their integration into globalized production. This article contributes to the debate by applying the global production network (GPN) approach to analyze institutional dynamics and actors involved in the commodification of nature. While highlighting historical drivers of GPN articulation, we advance the GPN framework by integrating a practice-based perspective on value making. Based on archival research, qualitative interviews and quantitative data, this contribution examines the historical and current commodification of wildlife in the Zambezi region in northeastern Namibia. Under the umbrella of the community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) policy, the postapartheid government allows the regulated harvesting of individual animals for hunting tourism. This policy mobilizes wildlife as an endogenous natural asset that is embedded in the region. As a consequence, local institutions emerge that enable strategic coupling processes with the global hunting industry to initiate development trajectories in the remote region. The historical perspective, however, reveals that former elites are able to take advantage of these newly emerging opportunities and maintain a powerful position in the GPN until today. The analysis shows three mechanisms that drive the valuation of nature: local institution building, quota making, and revenue sharing. We conclude that the valuation of nature is a way of mobilizing regional assets through strategic coupling and gains realized from this commodification are used to build local institutions that ensure ongoing valuation.

Technologies of Power in Digital Inclusion

This study moves beyond the conventional focus on technology access, adoption, and participation in communities, and instead presents a perspective on digital inclusion as a complex process of both empowerment and subjugation. Drawing on Foucault’s theorization on subjectivity and power, our case study of community health workers in rural India reveals that the adoption of an mHealth application simultaneously subordinated and strengthened the subjectivity of the community health workers. The study explicates the process through which the health workers oscillated between the enhancement of their individual efficacy, and their submission to institutionalized power as facilitated by the mHealth application during their everyday work practices. Thus, by shifting the focus from “who” is digitally included to “how” they become digitally included, our research provides a fresh perspective that enriches and deepens the discourse of digital inclusion. It generates both theoretical and practical implications for anyone interested in understanding digital inclusion from a more granulated and practice-based perspective.

Dentistry medicalization at SUS: a qualitative practice-based perspective

Resumo Este artigo explora sentidos e significados do trabalho odontológico no SUS, no contexto da relação profissional-paciente. Pesquisa qualitativa com 20 cirurgiões-dentistas que atuavam em um município paulista de médio porte, abordada por meio de três grupos focais, com a pergunta disparadora “Qual é o sentido ou significado do seu trabalho, aqui na prefeitura, para você?”. O material foi áudio-gravado, transcrito na íntegra e analisado pelo método de análise de conteúdo temática. Procedemos a realização de leitura flutuante, categorização e discussão dos achados junto aos pares de pesquisadores para validação final. Como resultados, aponta-se a construção das categorias 1) Estranheza às necessidades percebidas pelos pacientes e a consequente medicalização da vida, e 2) Poder e consumo como significados da prática. O trabalho do cirurgião dentista, nesse contexto, evidenciou as diferenças entre as necessidades percebidas pelo paciente e aquelas que o dentista considera. Além disso, revelou o poder que emana da assimetria entre paciente e profissional como dificultador da produção de autonomia do paciente. Tais significações parecem trazer sofrimento para esses profissionais no seu trabalho. Concluiu-se que há necessidade de reflexão sobre o trabalho em saúde como forma de se evitar sofrimento, e que a prática desses dentistas é carregada de sentidos e significados.

More than a handshake – knowledge transfer in structured corporate–startup collaboration programs

PurposeThis paper aims to review the existing literature on structured corporate–startup collaboration programs (SCSCPs) concerning their objectives and organizational design components. The design components of the program execution are analyzed on how they impact knowledge transfer and how the extant literature on SCSCP considers the knowledge management topic. A new perspective to examine its ramifications will be discussed.Design/methodology/approachThrough an integrative literature review, 103 papers on the topic of SCSCP are analyzed about references of objectives and design components of the programs.FindingsThe literature shows a strong focus on strategic objectives corporations pursue in implementing an SCSCP. The design components can be divided into governance mode, structural decisions, selection of ventures, program execution and follow up.Research limitations/implicationsThe literature review shows a lack of insights into the knowledge transfer process between the corporation and the ventures. Therefore, this study suggests a practice-based, longitudinal perspective on the interaction processes that occur during the program execution of an SCSCP.Originality/valueCompared to existing literature reviews, the study takes the corporation’s perspective on incubation and acceleration and reveals design components specific to the corporate forms. Furthermore, SCSCPs center around strategic value generation and the design of the programs can vary highly. It is proposed that knowledge transfer is the central aspect of corporate programs and that a practice-based perspective would enrich the research on knowledge transfer in highly complex setups like this.

CURRENT TRENDS IN TESTAMENTARY SUCCESSION

In this article some current trends in testamentary succession are considered in order to establish a practice-based perspective re the rules of testamentary succession. The research was undertaken by means of the distribution of questionnaires to practitioners specialising in wills, trusts and deceased estates. The data received are hereby described and analysed.

Entrepreneurial Creativity form a Practice-based Perspective

Novel ideas in the business world are often linked to entrepreneurship via entrepreneurial opportunities, no matter whether conceptualized from the discovery or the creation point of view. Notwithstanding the close link between creativity and entreprenuerial processes, only a few studies scrutinize this nexus, and particularly the role of context in shaping and changing these processes. Adopting the practice-based perspective, we focus on the journey of novel and potentially useful ideas in the business context and elucidate how different components of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as context affect generating, elaborating, championing and implementing of these ideas. Following a longitudinal multiple-case study in the Berlin entrepreneurial ecosystem, we studied 6 startups in this ecosystem for 18 months. The result unveils the micro¬-foundations that connect entrepreneurs and different components of the ecosystem and sheds light on how the entrepreneurial ecosystem contributes to entrepreneurial actions in general and different phase of creating and implementing novel ideas in particular.

Constructing a New Organizational Form:One is not Born an Institutional Entrepreneur, but Becomes One

The consequences of the crisis are particularly felt at the local level, and the Covid 19 pandemic has accentuated this trend. Accordingly, we observe the emergence of new collective organizational forms in response to local crisis and to ‘create a better world’. We conducted a longitudinal case study of the Archer Group located in Romans-sur-Isère (France) based on a life story of the CEO and various additional data gathered during 10 years . We scrutinized how the founder and leader of the group gradually transformed a work integration social enterprise (WISE) into a ‘territory enterprise’ whose ambition is to mobilize the entire community to serve sustainable local development. Our findings revealed how an organizational form mutates under the activity of an institutional entrepreneur. Using a practice-based perspective, we explain how an actor becomes progressively equipped for institutional action. We identified the different constellations of practices that an institutional entrepreneur develops over time to bring about this new organizational form. Our practice-driven lens makes it possible to propose a new approach of institutional entrepreneurship. Contrary to the view of a ‘hypermuscular institutional entrepreneur’ we show that his skills are not given at the outset, but are built over time.

Strategic Governance of Mobility Ecosystems – A Practice-Based Perspective

Set up in the right way, ecosystems are promising to partners, consumers, and society at large. In practice, however, establishing an ecosystem is oftentimes complicated, particularly when contributing partners offer competing services. Building on a set of qualitative interviews conducted with practitioners involved in existing or new ecosystems in the mobility sector, our research provides a practice-based assessment of strategically relevant managerial issues related to platform ecosystems. We identify six areas of governance that are particularly relevant for an ecosystem to function effectively, namely strategic direction, revenue sharing, ownership rights, investment and finance, additional value provided to the customer, and the competitive relationship between partners. Suggesting that ecosystems are more complex to manage than previously believed, the study provides a framework for strategizing ecosystem governance, outlining constitutional elements that have to be clarified when setting up a mobility ecosystem.

Advancing Temporal Organizing: The Case for a Practising School in Project-Based Organizing

Navigating complexity remains one of the key pragmatic challenges that call for temporal organizing as a response. Whilst project-based organizing is established as an approach integral to deploying temporal organizing we still know little about the lived experiences of project managers as they enact it. It, therefore, merits academic study and attention to analyze further how project-based organizing is practised and why it is practiced in unique ways that offer insights into the practical judgements that underpin project managers’ action choices. We present findings from a study investigating the lived experience of 43 project managers from key sectors in countries around the globe. We use the empirical findings of this qualitative study to show how project managers embody and not only enact the dynamics of temporary organizing in the ways they navigate project complexities and form their judgements on an ongoing basis. This process of practising is marked by leaps of faith that can mark new measures of project success beyond the traditional parameters of project completion on time and budget. This paper makes a compelling case for a new school of thought in advancing temporal organizing that we will call the ‘Practising School’, which informs our understanding of the dynamics of project-based organizing and offers insights into how practitioners navigate the ongoing project complexities inherent in project-based organizing. We pave the way for advancing a practice-based perspective for studying projectification and extend current conceptualizations of temporal organizing.