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Papers by silvia gherardi

… the Take up of Advanced Energy …, Jan 1, 1999

Actor-Network Theory and Organizing, Stockholm: …, Jan 1, 2005

Journal of Contingencies …, Jan 1, 1999

Journal of Management Studies, Jan 1, 2002

Organization, Jan 1, 2002

Knowing in organizations: A practice-based …, Jan 1, 2003

Journal of Management Inquiry, Jan 1, 2000

Management learning, Jan 1, 1998

Rosenberg & Sellier eBooks, 2021

Gender and Entrepreneurship: An ethnographic approach, 2005

As well as being an economic phenomenon, entrepreneurship can also be read as a cultural one. Ent... more As well as being an economic phenomenon, entrepreneurship can also be read as a cultural one. Entrepreneurial action can be related to gender for a cross-reading of how gender and entrepreneurship are culturally produced and reproduced in social practices.
This groundbreaking new study considers both gender and entrepreneurship as symbolic forms, looking at their diverse patterns and social representation. Presenting an ethnographic study of the gender structuring of entrepreneurship, the work employs three strategies:
• a critical survey of gender studies which argues that entrepreneurship is a cultural model of masculinity that obstructs the expression of other models
• ‘reflexive’ ethnographic observations conducted in five small firms describe how business cultures are ‘gendered’ and how gender is the product of situated practices
• an analysis of how discursive and narrative practices in business cultures constitute gender and entrepreneurship.

Organization, Apr 6, 2018

The Work of Communication is an ambitious and expansive treatment of the ways social and material... more The Work of Communication is an ambitious and expansive treatment of the ways social and material conditions interact in the contexts of organizations and the processes of organizing. It revolves around the central question of how to capture the range of ways that symbolic and material dimensions of human relations are interrelated and what that range of understandings means for research and practice. In a manner parallel to innovative treatments of the agency-structure tension in sociology, this volume explores multiple avenues for recasting the role of communication, with the material world in full view and with an array of interrelationships confronted. Along the way, the authors interweave diverse theoretical threads to represent well the dynamism and performativity of many situations and senses of work. As a work of communication theory and practice, this book is profoundly conscious of vocabulary, interaction, and narrative (including the authors' own theoretical story). The authors explain in chapter 1, Encountering Working and Organizing, how they aim to interrogate standing stories of meaning of work in capitalist contexts, as well as to question familiar ways of portraying symbolic-material relationships. To do this, they highlight practice and emphasize a concept of "relationality" as something of a perspective on perspectives. With this term, the authors direct our gaze toward what happens in situations as a whole and away from positing what is prior to or shapes something else-as in either material conditions giving rise to certain symbolic lenses or characterizations, or those symbolic constructions influencing anticipated future material conditions. Relationality then becomes a term for crystallizing the dynamic interplay of symbolism and materiality. Relationality becomes a means of conceptually and spatially repositioning key ontological and epistemological questions such as the "location" of objects and actions. Chapter 2 is structured around five integrative theoretical premises and four broad areas of application and does its work entirely under the rubric of "relationality." This chapter covers a great deal of territory in the social sciences and humanities; at the same time, the chapter celebrates novelty in terms of upending some familiar interpretations, rotating others, and combining or recombining still others. The underlying assumptions include not only the idea that there's much more to communication "at work" than was previously thought, but also that scholars and practitioners remain unduly tied down to what might be called fixity of identities, structures, and meanings. "Substance" is repositioned; reality is made plural; the social and material are not exactly fused but are placed in a never-ending dance with one another. Agency, by this account, is dispersed and hybrid; causality becomes more of a point of multiple references, to allow for its often 800453O SS0010.1177/0170840618800453Organization StudiesBook Review book-review2018

Routledge eBooks, Aug 24, 2022

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2019

… the Take up of Advanced Energy …, Jan 1, 1999

Actor-Network Theory and Organizing, Stockholm: …, Jan 1, 2005

Journal of Contingencies …, Jan 1, 1999

Journal of Management Studies, Jan 1, 2002

Organization, Jan 1, 2002

Knowing in organizations: A practice-based …, Jan 1, 2003

Journal of Management Inquiry, Jan 1, 2000

Management learning, Jan 1, 1998

Rosenberg & Sellier eBooks, 2021

Gender and Entrepreneurship: An ethnographic approach, 2005

Organization, Apr 6, 2018

Routledge eBooks, Aug 24, 2022

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2019

Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, 2023

Purpose-The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizatio... more Purpose-The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizational spacing. Through the concept of affective space, it highlights those elements that are ephemeral and elusivelike affect, aesthetics, atmosphere, intensity, moodsand proposes to explore affect as spatialized and space as affective. Design/methodology/approach-Fluidity is proposed as a conceptual lens that sits at the conjunction of space and affect, highlighting both the movement in time and space, and the mutable relationships that the capacity of affecting and being affected weaves. It experiments with "writing differently" in affective ethnography, thus performing the space of representation of affective space. Findings-The article enriches the alternative to a conceptualization of organizations as stable entities, considering organizing in its spatial fluidity and in being a fragmented, affective and dispersed phenomenon. Originality/value-The article's writing is an example of intertextuality constructed through five praxiographic stories that illustrate the multiple fluidity of affective spacing in terms of temporal fluidity, fluidity of boundaries, of participation, of the object of practice, and atmospheric fluidity.

Management learning, Jan 1, 1998

Mind, Culture, and Activity, Jan 1, 2007

Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a work... more Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work "together." The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as "systems of fragmented knowledge:" that is, learning settings in which people, symbols, and technologies work jointly to construct and reconstruct understanding of social and organizational action. Working at a distance, therefore, requires the acquisition of skills relative to the mobilization of fragmented knowledge, and the latter's alignment into a fully-fledged work practice. Knowing-in-practice is accomplished by discursive practices: "Framing and postscripting", as practices that generate a "space" of signification for the subsequent action; "footing", as the dialectic that enables people to align themselves within a predetermined frame and disrupt its coordinates; and "delegation to the nonhuman", as the ability of humans to delegate the performance of clinical practice to nonhuman systems, which come to be regarded as active subjects within the remote consultation.

Society and Business Review, 2010

The data presented are part of a AIM research project, entitled Practising learning in context: ... more The data presented are part of a AIM research project, entitled Practising learning in context: Dynamic capability development across and between sectors, coordinated by Elena Antonacopoulou and grouping together scholars from seven countries. The authors are ...

Organization, 2011

The aim of this article is to enlarge practice-based studies to the consideration of institutiona... more The aim of this article is to enlarge practice-based studies to the consideration of institutional environment and institutional work, opening a dialogue with neo-institutionalism and, in so doing, advance the growing field of sociology of practice. This study attempts to do this by answering the question: how does a change in a practice become stabilized and what does the new practice do, once stabilized? Within practice-based studies, most studies have considered mainly endogenous changes, emergent from the community of practitioners under study. By contrast, this study discusses an exogenous change (a recent Italian law limits medically assisted reproduction practices) and the emergent relations that stabilize a provisional new practice through negotiation within the institutional context. Stabilization of a new practice is achieved by limitation, by rhetorical closure and by anchoring in technology. The aim of the article is to show the unintended power effects that a new practice generates once stabilized.

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 2014

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based studi... more Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based studies: "formativeness", which denotes the kind of knowledge that is generated in the process of realizing the object of the practice and that is discovered while the form of the object is being shaped. This term focuses the analysis on how the elements of a practice are held together, rather than on what elements are involved in a practice. Design/methodology/approach -Inspired by grounded theory, an empirical research study on craftswomen and their practical creativity (between the hand and the head) was designed. Storytelling was used in order to elicit the verbalization of the craftswomen's ways of knowing/doing, and the episodic interview was the technique employed to access and present the data. Findings -Formativeness can be described and interpreted as the effect of the following dimensions: the emergence of the object, the golden rule of realization, forming by hybridization, experimentation, playfulness, attachment to matter, and proper realization. Originality/value -The study's contribution may be evaluated in relation to how a vocabulary for describing and interpreting knowing-in-practice is constructed. Formativeness makes it possible to name the process by which ways of doing are discovered while activities are being performed. It contributes to a critique of representational knowledge, while offering an alternative line of inquiry.

Organization, Jan 1, 2000

Journal of Management Studies, 2002

The present article is based on research into organizational learning as part of a project for th... more The present article is based on research into organizational learning as part of a project for the Kolleg 'Organizational Learning in Various Environmental Conditions', financed by the Daimler-Benz Foundation. It is the outcome of joint and indivisible work by the authors. learning of safety in a constellation of communities of practice is mediated by comparison among the perspectives of the world embraced by the co-participants in the production of this practice. The aim of the paper is to investigate the accounts of the causes of accidents provided by the members of three different communities of practice (engineers, site managers and prime contractors), internal to a medium sized cooperative building firm. Comparison among perspectives is made possible by a discursive practice targeted on the alignment of elements mental and material, within mutually accountable discursive positions. These alignments are provisional and unstable, they produce tensions, discontinuities and incoherences (dissonance) just as much as they produce order and negotiated meanings (canon).

Journal of Organizational Change Management, 2004

Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucault's govermenta... more Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucault's govermentality – to highlight how an entrepreneurial discourse is mobilized as a system of thinking about women entrepreneurs which is able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable, namely: who can be an entrepreneur, what entrepreneurship is, what or who is managed by that form of governance of economic relations? Discourses on women entrepreneurs are linguistic practices that create truth effects. Argues that social studies of women entrepreneurs tend to reproduce an androcentric entrepreneur mentality that makes hegemonic masculinity invisible. They portray women's organizations as “the other”, and sustain social expectations of their difference, thereby implicitly reproducing male experience as a preferred normative value. Taking a deconstructive gaze on how an entrepreneur‐mentality discourse is gendered, reveals the gender sub‐text underpinning the practices of the sc...

Journal of World Business, 2001

This article examines the organizational dynamics responsible for maintaining the gender asymmetr... more This article examines the organizational dynamics responsible for maintaining the gender asymmetry in organizations, by considering the narratives of women and men working in male dominated jobs and positions. Using a symbolic-interpretative approach we analyze the rules and the rituals by which gender is created and recreated in organizations and we show the ambiguity that characterizes social expectations towards women entering traditionally male territories. We present gender as a set of social practices which define the relations between men and women and which, in the organizations that we studied, are based on a dichotomous and hierarchical symbolic order. Viewing gender as something organizations 'do' and not as a natural attribute of people, can help organizational actors, and in particular the management, to be aware of the hegemonic masculinity underlying the dominant social practices and, therefore, to change the strategies for change.

Mind, Culture, and Activity, 2007

Flessibilità e conciliazione sono due termini negli ultimi anni entrati di prepotenza non solo ne... more Flessibilità e conciliazione sono due termini negli ultimi anni entrati di prepotenza non solo nel lessico degli studi di genere sulle organizzazioni, ma anche nel dibattito sulle politiche del lavoro e soprattutto nelle pratiche organizzative. Tratto comune di questi due concetti è la convinzione della necessità di rendere più fluida l'organizzazione del lavoro per rispondere, nel caso della flessibilità, ai rapidi

Papers. Revista de Sociologia, 2009

Feminist practice and theory have always conferred value on narrative knowledge produced through ... more Feminist practice and theory have always conferred value on narrative knowledge produced through storytelling, mainly because of its ability to stimulate reflexive thought. In our contribution we intend to present and discuss a training methodology founded on memory work and designed to stimulate an individual and group reworking of the leadership dimension, and of the gender and leadership relationship. We will describe a narrative workshop conducted with groups of women working in managerial positions and based on the perspective of workplace learning through experiential reflexivity. The narrative methodology proved to be a particularly effective tool: it gave the participants a chance to conduct retrospective analysis of their past work experiences (individual and organizational), and it generated-due to the interaction with other stories (those furnished in the training activity and those provided by other trainees)-different interpretative perspectives and new meaning configurations in order to face working life and organizational dynamics.

International Handbook of Research in Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2014

ABSTRACT A practice-based interpretative framework for reading the process of becoming a professi... more ABSTRACT A practice-based interpretative framework for reading the process of becoming a professional as a social practice is developed to examine the ecology of the human and non-human actors involved in induction to the organization and seduction by the profession. We argue that professionals undergo induction into the organization while they undergo seduction by the profession. The chapter illustrates the situatedness of this process in relation to different types of organizations (private, public, network) in order to analyse the relation between the induction process and the actors that influence it. Three different models of induction are described: (a) in a professional bureaucracy, socialization precedes selection, and the key actor is the profession; (b) in a small private organization, induction is almost exclusively managed by the community of practice in the form of seduction by the profession; (c) in a large network of organizations, induction is explicitly managed by the organization and becomes a means to transmit the organizational culture. Because the process of becoming a professional is a continuous process throughout working life, the tensions and contradictions that characterize its accomplishment are discussed in relation to the issues of behaviour control versus professional control, managerialism versus professionalism and identity work.

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 2014

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based stud... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based studies: “formativeness”, which denotes the kind of knowledge that is generated in the process of realizing the object of the practice and that is discovered while the form of the object is being shaped. This term focuses the analysis on how the elements of a practice are held together, rather than on what elements are involved in a practice. Design/methodology/approach – Inspired by grounded theory, an empirical research study on craftswomen and their practical creativity (between the hand and the head) was designed. Storytelling was used in order to elicit the verbalization of the craftswomen's ways of knowing/doing, and the episodic interview was the technique employed to access and present the data. Findings – Formativeness can be described and interpreted as the effect of the following dimensions: the emergence of the object, the golden rule of realization, forming by hybridization,...

Human Relations, 1995

The field of organizational learning (OL) has been characterized by a wide diversity of opinions,... more The field of organizational learning (OL) has been characterized by a wide diversity of opinions, definitions, and conceptualizations. After discussing difficulties associated with previous conceptualizations of organizational learning, this paper suggests a broader conceptualization which is consistent with and integrates diverse perspectives in the field of OL. To the extent that organizations continuously act and enact their environments, cognitive processes associated with learning continually take place whether the organization recognizes it or not. OL cannot be understood without taking into account the continuous ongoing change of organizational cognitive structures. However, learning is only recognized when an observer identifies and contextualizes those changes. Thus, organizational learning can be interpreted as a social construction which transforms acquired cognition into accountable abstract knowledge. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this conceptua...

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 1998

This paper is based on the assumption that people in organizations do not learn `safety&#... more This paper is based on the assumption that people in organizations do not learn `safety&#x27;; rather, they learn safe working practices. Therefore, there are as many safety cultures as there are communities of practice inside an organization contributing to the social construction ...

Journal of Management Studies, 1990

The texture of organizing is an elusive concept, one that embraces the intangible quality of the ... more The texture of organizing is an elusive concept, one that embraces the intangible quality of the activities of an organization's members. In this article we use examples taken from an empirical study of a department of mathematics in an Italian university to illustrate the social processes that underlie the construction of texture. We define 'texture' as that imaginative domain of organizational actors where processes such as the creation of a sense of togetherness and of ownership, mutual understanding and misunderstanding of organizational life, shifting memberships and audiences link and interweave. Some methodological issues concerning the concept of texture are also examined.

Organization Studies, 1988

Organization studies and theories are based on time-free statements. This paper introduces the co... more Organization studies and theories are based on time-free statements. This paper introduces the concept of 'organizational time' in order to explore the internal and particular time of the individual organization (or event) and the time involved in intra-organizational dynamics in relation to other times. Two research studies prompted the authors' reflections on organizational time as an important variable in the shaping of the scenario of decision-making processes. It is argued that the heuristic validity of the variable 'organizational time' lies in the interpretation of the choices and culture of organizational actors and in their defining of the boundaries of the organization.

Organization, 2000

Organizational knowing is fundamentally a collective endeavour through which heterogeneous materi... more Organizational knowing is fundamentally a collective endeavour through which heterogeneous materials and entities, such as ideas, concepts, artifacts, texts, persons, norms, and traditions are mobilized, modified, translated, distorted, exposed, used, ignored or hidden in view of some practical accomplishment, such as safety in a construction site. Safety as a form of organizational expertise is therefore situated in the system of ongoing practices, has both explicit and tacit dimensions, is relational and mediated by artifacts, that is, it is material as well as mental and representational. Using examples derived from the observation data we will discuss how safety-related knowledge is constituted, institutionalized, and continually redefined and renegotiated within the organizing process through the interplay between action and reflexivity.

Gender, Work and Organization, 2004

Traditional literature and research on entrepreneurship relies on a model of economic rationality... more Traditional literature and research on entrepreneurship relies on a model of economic rationality alleged to be universal and agendered. This article presents a description of the processes that position people as 'men' and 'women' within entrepreneurial practices and as ...

Eco-Efficiency in Industry and Science, 2001

IThis case study was part of the SORGET project funded in part by the European commission in the ... more IThis case study was part of the SORGET project funded in part by the European commission in the framework of JOULEIII programme. The project run between 1996 and 1998 and aimed at exploring the social. economic and technological forces and circumstances that encourage or discourage the take-up of advanced energy-efficient technologies within manufacturing processes in European enterprises. Further information and a full report on the results of the project can be obtained by contacting the first author. The authors wish to express their gratitude to ...

Introduction Organizational Symbolism, Culture and Gender The Metaphor of the Sexual Contract Jer... more Introduction Organizational Symbolism, Culture and Gender The Metaphor of the Sexual Contract Jerosgamos The Metaphor of the Alchemic Wedding The Symbolic Order of Gender in Organizations Doing Gender in the Workplace Gender Citizenship in Organizations Conclusions The Symbolics of Gender Citizenship

© 2006 by Silvia Gherardi BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 G... more © 2006 by Silvia Gherardi BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton,Victoria 3053,Australia The right of Silvia Gherardi to be identiﬁed as the Author of ...

Advances in Organization Studies Series Editors: Stewart Clegg Professor, University of Technolog... more Advances in Organization Studies Series Editors: Stewart Clegg Professor, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia Ralph E. Stablein Professor, Massey University, New Zealand Advances in Organization Studies is a channel for cutting edge theo-retical and empirical ...

Gender, Work & Organization, 2008

The paper will present various self-identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who... more The paper will present various self-identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual practice, must stake out their positions in the field. Social structures coerce discourse positions and set up a series of expectations and social obligations, although several subject positions can be taken up for oneself, and for the ‘other’. This process has been labelled ‘positioning gender relations within an organizational culture’ and has been described as liminal work, performed discursively and in transitional spaces. Gender relations can therefore be viewed as cultural performances learned and enacted on appropriate occasions both by men and women.

La ricerca, mirata a un’indagine sulla relazione sussistente tra forme contrattuali di tipo tempo... more La ricerca, mirata a un’indagine sulla relazione sussistente tra forme contrattuali di tipo temporaneo e sicurezza sul lavoro, e stata condotta attraverso interviste a lavoratori e a testimoni privilegiati in due settori di attivita – Cura alla persona in Strutture pubbliche e Alberghi/Ristorazione – che rappresentano una fetta importante nell’ambito dell’economia provinciale trentina e hanno permesso di rilevare valori crescenti negli eventi infortunistici denunciati. L’indagine, durata circa due anni e condotta con approccio intersezionale, non si e limitata al riscontro “quantitativo” del binomio precarieta/infortuni, ma e entrata in profondita nel fenomeno, seguendo un percorso di analisi che ha individuato nel complesso delle interazioni di carattere individuale, contrattuale e lavorativo gli elementi concorrenti alla determinazione di condizioni di rischio e di insicurezza e della loro diversa percezione.

Una donna entra in un gruppo di lavoro a netta prevalenza maschile. Cosa succede? Quali sono le r... more Una donna entra in un gruppo di lavoro a netta prevalenza maschile. Cosa succede? Quali sono le reazioni dei colleghi? Le due autrici raccolgono le testimonianze di donne e uomini che hanno affrontato sul campo questa situazione ed evidenziano come, malgrado l'esperienza vissuta sia la stessa, i racconti delle une e degli altri divergano in modo significativo: le testimonianze delle donne appaiono spesso romanzi, quelle degli uomini resoconti di cronaca. Perché? Quali sono le regole di genere esplicite e implicite trasmesse dalle narrazioni?

SOCIOLOGIA DEL LAVORO, 2018

The practice-based approach to the study of work and organizing has been widely adopted in recent... more The practice-based approach to the study of work and
organizing has been widely adopted in recent years, yet its
theoretical and methodological systematization has only just
begun. Silvia Gherardi expertly provides an overview on the
topics and issues addressed by practice-based studies. By means of a series of examples
drawn from the best-known analyses using this approach, the book provides methodological
guidance on how to conduct empirical research on practices, and how to interpret them from
three perspectives: practices ‘from outside’, practices ‘from inside’, and the social effects
produced by practices.
The distinctive trait of the present book is the presentation of the classic studies that gave
rise to practice-based studies and through their analysis the illustration of their problems and
methods is presented. Masters students, doctoral students and scholars will find plenty of
invaluable information in this methodological book. In relation to a lively and wide-ranging
debate conducted at the international level, but not yet systematized in its methodological
assumptions, the book will also be of interest to those practitioners curious about a view of
work as a practical activity which develops within an ecology of social, economic and material
relationships.
Contents: Introduction 1. How Ordinary Work is Practically Accomplished 2. Working in Coordination Centres 3. Sensible Knowledge
and Knowledgeable Bodies 4. Sociomaterial Practices and Technological Environments 5. Learning to Talk in Practice and About
Practice 6. On Rules, on Knowing the Rules and on Ordinary Prescription 7. Representing the Textures of Practices 8. Ethnography
for the Practice-based Design of Information Systems 9. Towards a Practice Theory of Organizing Bibliography Index

This book brings together stories told by men and women. With a play on words sometimes used by f... more This book brings together stories told by men and women. With a play on words sometimes used by feminists in the past, it could have been entitled "His/story and Her/story," in order to convey from the outset a banal, but sometimes overlooked, fact: the contents of stories depend on the voice telling them, and the experience recounted in first person differs according to the gender of the narrator.

Marta Calás and Linda Smircich, A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 33-54., 2023

In this chapter, by metaphorically extending the meaning of the word “manspreading”, on one hand ... more In this chapter, by metaphorically extending the meaning of the word “manspreading”, on one hand we describe how the term “feminist” in “new feminist materialism” has been placed “under erasure”. On the other hand, we show how the feminism has been always already all set for disturbing the discursive male order of new materialism. We foreground three main feminist ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions: decentering the subject, (re)materializing all bodies; intra-acting responsibly. Correspondingly, we articulate three alternative forms of politics – a politics of location, a politics of re-materialization, and an ethical politics of response-ability – which, we deem, embody the generative and affirmative posture of new feminist materialism and pave the way for a different knowledge production practice in Management and Organization Studies.
Keywords: agencement; dualisms; differing; ethico-onto-epistemology; knowledge production; transversality

Organization as Time: Technology, power and politics, 2023

The chapter assumes a feminist new materialist approach to explore the entanglement of temporalit... more The chapter assumes a feminist new materialist approach to explore the entanglement of temporality, materiality and power within a practice agencement. Feminist new materialism in empirical research is a methodology that emphasizes the vitality of matter and the performative and affective flow of agency. The chapter deals both with the materiality of human bodies (and normative embodiment in organizations) and with the materiality of digital technologies and their normative power over teens’ sexuality. Temporality is explored by means of two concepts – refrain and feminist snap - that create orientations for thinking about how the entangled elements that form a practice assume in time different configurations according to the elements’ capacity to affect and be affected. While refrain illuminates the lines of flight within differentiating practices, feminist snap highlights the breaking moment of discontinuity when digital networking subverts the control on women’s bodies.
Keywords: agency as flow, digital activism, feminist new materialism, practice as agencement, refrain.

Handbook of Research on Small Business and Entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT The traditional approaches to entrepreneurship thus tend to reproduce a specific normati... more ABSTRACT The traditional approaches to entrepreneurship thus tend to reproduce a specific normative economic model (that of market capitalism) which takes it for granted that development of this model will be beneficial the system as a whole. In their attempt to identify an allegedly universal form of market-based entrepreneurship, the dominant theoretical perspectives pay scant attention to the contextual dynamics in which entrepreneurial activity acquires meaning for specific people, in specific places, and for contextual reasons which may differ from those normatively presumed by the mainstream literature. A crucial consequence of the supremacy of approaches of this kind is the exclusion – empirical, practical and political – of numerous actors (for example, women, immigrants, or people in the emerging economies) from the category of entrepreneur identified in the stereotype of the male, white, and Western innovator. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the entrepreneurial literature on qualitative and non-positivist research methods from a feminist empiricist perspective. In the chapter, we shall introduce what can be considered a ‘qualitative approach’ by examining what different studies have produced in terms of contributions to the field, and by identifying their research implications. For the sake of brevity, we shall concentrate on three areas of research particularly rich with examples of the potential of these approaches: gender, gender and ethnicity, and social entrepreneurship. Our aim is to stress how qualitative methodology in entrepreneurship studies has taken a reflexive and critical stance that acknowledges the active role of the researchers in framing and reframing the field through their epistemic practices.

Journal of Management Inquiry, 2000

In the past 10 years or so, the issues of safety and reliability in organizations have been movin... more In the past 10 years or so, the issues of safety and reliability in organizations have been moving to the center of scientific and managerial interest, not only because of their public importance, but also because of the increasing emphasis placed on making firms responsible for protecting the health of workers and the environment. On one hand, the scientific debate stresses that ours is a risk society (Beck, 1992); on the other, that human and organizational factors are at the origin of industrial disasters (Gephart &amp;amp; Pitter, 1993; ...

Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge, …, 2001

Human Relations, 2000

Organizational learning is a root metaphor which sets organizational processes in relation to kno... more Organizational learning is a root metaphor which sets organizational processes in relation to knowledge and knowing. An action-learning intervention in a municipality provides the stage for observing several metaphors at work in advancing learning within the planning group. The aim of the paper is to explore the role of language in producing and expressing situated knowledge and to further the interpretation of metaphors as organizational artifacts instead of linguistic or mental materials. The understanding of metaphors is always a creative endeavour, and metaphors can be both facilitators of learning and the tangible manifestation of something learnt. Understanding metaphors as the dreamwork of language collapses the traditional distinction among metaphors either as heuristic or generative.

Journal of Workplace Learning, 2003

Why do people and their organizations seek out knowledge? Most of the recurrent explanations emph... more Why do people and their organizations seek out knowledge? Most of the recurrent explanations emphasise the instrumental use of knowledge: in order to solve problems, to gain competitive advantages, to exploit innovation commercially, or to contribute to the wellbeing of future generations. But besides the rationality and purposiveness of knowledge‐gathering, there is another aspect that may be undervalued in organization studies: that of a search for knowledge driven by a love of knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge as an end in itself motivates people and organizations. In order to explore how desire for knowledge may operate in organizing, the paper refers to the literary figure of the “knowledge journey” and to one of the greatest of all travellers: Ulysses.

Management Learning, 1998

This article provides an overview of current debates in the field of organizational learning thro... more This article provides an overview of current debates in the field of organizational learning through the device of examining key `divergencies' within the literature. Clear divergencies are noted in two areas: first, between the practitioner literature which is primarily engaged in creating learning organizations and the academic literature which is engaged in the study of learning processes in organizations; and, second, in the views of both academics and practitioners about the nature and essence of organizational learning. In addition, but with somewhat less significance, divergencies are noted in the preferred ways of investigating and researching into organizational learning, and ways of improving the ability of organizations to learn. The article then identifies power as an issue that has received limited attention in the literature, but which appears to underlie many of the above divergencies.

The Learning Organization, 2009

PurposeThe aim of this introduction to the special issue is to furnish a panorama on how practice... more PurposeThe aim of this introduction to the special issue is to furnish a panorama on how practice‐based studies (PBS) concerned with organizational learning have developed in recent years, and to describe the topics that such studies have debated.Design/methodology/approachThe articles in this special issue were first presented at the standing working group on “Practice‐based Studies of Knowledge and Innovation in Workplaces” of the European Group for Organizational Studies, and will therefore provide the background to PBS and an idea of its methodology.FindingsThe practice‐ based approach may be useful for: a renewed conception of organization as a texture of interrelated practices which extend to form an action‐net sustained by a knowing‐in‐action which renews itself and transforms itself into being practiced; a renewed conception of knowledge as a situated, negotiated, emergent and embedded activity; a renewed conception of materiality as a form of distributed agency and an intim...

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013

Gender is one of the most powerful of symbols; indeed, the very word 'gender' enc... more Gender is one of the most powerful of symbols; indeed, the very word 'gender' encapsulates all the symbols that a culture elaborates to account for biological difference. Therefore a symbolist approach is particularly able to grasp the ambiguity of gender relations, since the function of a symbol is to express a polysemy, to contain and to convey ambiguity. The contribution of organizational symbolism to the analysis of gender as a social practice highlights both how gender is 'done' at work, and how organizations 'do' gender. Both play an active role in gender performativity trough the interplay of ceremonial and remedial work underpinning the symbolic ordering of an organizational culture. Gender symbolism is maintained, reproduced and culturally transmitted through the ceremonial work that takes places within organizations, while remedial work restores the symbolic order of gender following instances when it has been challenged.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015

Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2012

Whilst mainstream innovation literature assumes knowledge as an object, a new resource for innova... more Whilst mainstream innovation literature assumes knowledge as an object, a new resource for innovation, a practice-based approach to innovation, conceptualizes it in processual, incremental and continuous terms. Innovative processes will consequently be analyzed as situated in the everyday activities of a community of practitioners, such that innovation is conceptualized as neither separate nor separable from learning, working and organizing.

Business and Management Research, 2014

The aim of the paper is to illustrate how doing gender and doing entrepreneurship form a single i... more The aim of the paper is to illustrate how doing gender and doing entrepreneurship form a single intertwined social practice. It is based on an empirical analysis of women's narratives about their becoming entrepreneurs. Five plots are identified: the women who positioned themselves as the creators of their businesses; those who define themselves as artists, those who assumed a position of co-author; those who described themselves as a 'responsible wife'; those who defined themselves as belonging to the second generation. In fact becoming a woman entrepreneur implies a process of learning and enacting behaviors, discourses and competent participation in a local community. The narratives of becoming a woman entrepreneur are analyzed in relation to two dimensions: temporality and accountability.

Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2015

Practice-based learning and higher education It has become almost orthodox now that programs in h... more Practice-based learning and higher education It has become almost orthodox now that programs in higher education focussing on occupational specific outcomes need to include practice-based experiences as part of their curriculum. Whilst these kinds of arrangements have been long standing in medicine, nursing, and teaching the requirements are that workplaces or practice-based experiences are now required in all programs that have specific occupational focuses. Moreover, there is even a move for programs which do not have such specifically aligned outcomes to also include experiences in which students can come to engage in experiences outside the university setting. Such a move appears to have been prompted by requests from national governments (Department of Innovation Universities and Skills, 2008), global agencies such as Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) (2010), professional bodies and industry representatives and university groups (Universities Australia 2008) to address concerns about the employability of university graduates. The shift is also often welcomed by students who have selected their courses to secure preferred occupations. They, like those listed before them are keen to secure a smooth transition to paid employment upon graduation. Hence, these kinds of experiences offer the promise of students coming to experience, and subsequently understand more about the particular occupation, how it is enacted and what is required for effective employment. In this way, the provision of practicebased experiences is seen as a means of assisting that occupational preparation, and also having other benefits associated with readiness for the world of work, including introductions to prospective employers. There are also some important educational contributions and rationales for including practice-based experiences within higher education programs which have particular occupations as their focus (Billett 2009). These include the provision of experiences that are authentic in terms of the kinds of activities and interactions that comprise those occupational practices and, wherever possible, the positioning of the students to engage in the kinds of thinking and acting that practitioners engage within those occupations. Certainly, in the past two decades it has been realised that the physical and social circumstances in which individuals engage in activities and interactions make important contributions to people's learning. Whether referring to the situated cognition movement (Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989), sociocultural constructivism (Scribner 1985), anthropology (Lave 1990, Ingold 2000) or the grounded cognition ideas arising from neuroscience (Barsalou 2008), there is now a strong consensus that the actual circumstances in which people engage in thinking and acting have consequences for their learning. The idea that the physical and social settings that comprise universities represent neutral learning environments from which knowledge can be learnt and then competently adapted elsewhere is being increasingly questioned and discarded. So, a shift is occurring in accepted cultural precepts

Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2015

The chapters in this book have focused on what is apparently a single issue, and which is denoted... more The chapters in this book have focused on what is apparently a single issue, and which is denoted by the expression ‘practice-based learning’. However, consideration of this theme through many different lenses and from diverse points of view has had the effect of constructing an approach whereby the topic has become broader and more nuanced. What has been used is a kind of magnifying glass that places the knowledge object within a broader framework, freeing it from the strictures of falsely circumscribed definitions.