Practice-based approaches to learning and knowing can be credited with their contribution to, among other things, establishing the social basis for human cognition, action and interaction. However, although they emphasise the (ontological) significance of practice, inter/action and activity as the basis of learning and knowing, little attention has been paid to the body — that which makes all doing and performs all action. The aim of the present study is to suggest a corporeal ground for a practice-based learning theory. The body is regarded as our link to the practical (social and material) world, and is thus the medium of learning and knowing. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962; 1964; 1968) advanced phenomenology learning is viewed as a process of incorporating and absorbing new competencies and understandings into our body schema, which in turn transforms our ways of perceiving and acting. Learning is corporeal, pre-discursive and pre-social, stemming from the body’s perpetual need to cope with tensions arising in the body-environment connections. The study closes with some theoretical and practical implications for practice-based approaches to learning and knowing.

The expression "customer involvement" is finding increasing popularity with popular as well as academic marketing texts. Within the evolving research, customer involvement is cast in an information-processing mould that tends to reduce it to the mere transfer of information from where it exists (customers) to where it is dearly needed (the firm). Customers' active participation is accounted for in economic psychological (contract) terms. Drawing on case study material gleaned from an organisation that adopted a customer involvement strategy, the present paper suggests a conversational approach that regards customers' active participation and involvement in terms of conversational exchanges between customers during which new ideas are jointly co-created and commitment to action is established. Conversation is not only the fostering ground for new ideas and knowledge, but also the source of social agency. Some theoretical and practical implications of the conversation-based customer-firm interface for involving customers are discussed.

The Heideggerian strand of organization studies has highlighted important aspects of organizational practices. Because of the emphasis of the practice-oriented approach on routine practice, researchers have taken a special interest in how innovative, improvised action arises. One of the dominant views is that innovative action is the outcome of different variations in everyday practices. Insightful though these studies are, they do not recognize the role of the body in their conceptualization. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phenomenology, suggesting that the body, as a carrier of practices, is the locus of innovative action. The article proposes that innovative action emerges in our bodily expressive-responsive skilful coping mode. In illustrating this argument, we make use of case study material focusing on practices involving elderly care service provision. We show how the care workers under consideration cope with the demands of their unpredictable work by adapting their bodily expressive-responsive abilities innovatively to emerging situational calls. Practice innovation emerges as the outcome of a tension between what it makes sense for the care workers to do based on the practical intelligibility underlying their own practices, on the one hand, and bureaucratic rules and requirements inscribed in terms of economic rationality and cost-efficiency, on the other. Because bureaucratic rules are perceived as alienating and unethical, innovation would inevitably be a form of resistance. The article specifies this form of practical resistance, concluding with some implications of this approach for organization studies.

Although the literature on customer experience within retail environments spontaneously invokes the sensuous, affective and emotional aspects of experience, the body-which is the locus of these-is conspicuous by its absence. In these terms, researchers have relied on a theory of mind. This article seeks to suggest an embodied, spatial approach to customer experience, arguing that it is thanks to the body that we sense the environment, and that likewise, it is thanks to the environment that we can sense and experience our body. The reciprocity between body and world implies an inter-corporeality that extends or retracts the spatiality of the body as a result of its motility. This article emphasizes the bodily, spatial character of customer experience, concluding with implications and suggestions for future studies.

What does the Internet imply for the business of banking and how will it affect it? Are branch offices``doomed'' and obsolete? Explores the major Swedish banks' adoption of the Internet with a view to highlighting the ensuing changes in the way banks conduct their business and deliver their services. Although the number of branches is shrinking in rhythm with increased Internet use, their role is increasingly changing as banks move from a view of the Internet as a means for improving efficiency, to one of seeing it as a strategic device for transforming the business. Since more and more of the transaction processing load is taken over by technology, banks are concentrating on strengthening their marketing approach and re-inventing their business model. In this context, traditional bank branches, with an infrastructure supporting transaction processing, are being transformed into an open-space interface within which bank experts engage intimately with their customers, delivering specialised, advisory services.