Practice' is a familiar term in everyday language but it also has a long history of scholarship. What then does it mean to 'turn' towards practice, and how would we know when a practice turn has occurred? To answer these questions, this article develops a theoretical view of practice as a transactional social process involving experience and action as mutually informing aspects of human conduct. This perspective is elaborated in detail by drawing on the ideas of the pragmatist philosophers, especially George Herbert Mead. In particular, it is asserted that 'transactionality' and 'temporality', when taken together, offer a theoretical perspective on practice that is dynamic, emergent and socially agentic. The utility of this pragmatist approach is illustrated using a published study of a strategizing episode. The article concludes that a practice turn is indeed underway in organization studies, but there is still some distance to travel before the full potential of this turn is realized.

Although role theory appears to have been largely dismissed from the contemporary critical literature, role is nevertheless a persistent theme in the discourses of organizational actors. This paper argues that it is timely, therefore, to re-view role, particularly as it articulates with the processes of constructing identity. Drawing on three interview segments that evoke a variety of roles, we develop the notion of role as a boundary object (a concept that we have appropriated from the sociology of science and technology literature). We show that this provides a much richer and more complex understanding that recognizes role as an inherently incomplete and emergent intermediary in identity construction processes. Further, we suggest that this view of role resonates with, and informs, wider theoretical conversations about identity construction.

In this article we offer a dynamic relational perspective in which frames and framing work together in the practice of leadership development. Mead's (1932) notion of sociality is introduced as a way of engaging with movements within and between frames, where it is these framing movements that we argue hold the potentiality of emergent practice. The article responds to a growing interest in the delineation, conceptualization and practice of leadership as opposed to leader development, where we understand leadership development in terms of the creation of social capital, relational capacity and collaboration. However, there is little, if any, research into how these dimensions may be developed intentionally in practice. Using online forum data from an 18-monthlong leadership development programme, we demonstrate three different sociality movements, which we have labelled kindling, stretching and spanning. Our analysis positions sociality at the core of leadership development interventions, and practice more generally.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide some context for the special issue and to introduce the collection of invited commentaries and research papers that follow. It also sets out to clarify the contribution that shadowing methods can make to the study of organizations. Design/methodology/approach – This is done by briefly outlining the ways in which shadowing methods have developed in parallel within a number of disciplines. In order to tackle the question of why this has happened, a grounded approach is taken which centres on data excerpts generated by a shadowing method and three of its closest methodological neighbours: interviews, observation and participant observation. The paper further develops this analysis through the presentation of a set of illustrative analogies which use the idea of the researcher's gaze as a beam of light. Findings – Similarities and differences between shadowing, interviews, observation and participant observation are identified, which support the articulation of shadowing as a family of following methods. Research limitations/implications – Taken together, the contributions from the invited commentaries and research papers, suggest a number of ways in which the debate surrounding shadowing research in organizations needs to be developed going forward. Originality/value – The reflexive, comparative methodological approach taken here provides for the first time a systematic comparison of shadowing in relation to other common qualitative data elicitation methods. Further, the development of a critique of the extant literature on shadowing provides a basis on which to progress the field, both in terms of shadowing practices themselves and writing about them within disciplines and across the research methods literature.

No abstract