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In a connected society and organizations working with digitized business models, standards will have more important roles than ever in shaping activity systems content, structure, and governance. While the standardization conformity/innovation duality has received great attention in literature, little research has been done on the role of managers in managing the tensions of knowledge codification required during ISO 9001 standard implementation. By utilizing Danone's Networking Attitude experience as a case study, the authors address this gap by exploring how managerial skills and practices were used to overcome the cognitive and emotional tensions related to internal knowledge codification, transfer, and use. The main contribution is to elucidate the role of managers in resolving these paradoxes and creating innovation capabilities. Further, they demonstrate the mutually beneficial relationship between knowledge codification and innovation if knowledge management is approached more as an evolving pragmatic knowing than a technical means that may create rigidity and resistance.

Throughout the world, including in developed countries, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed and accentuated food insecurity. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations clearly defines food security as a situation of not only availability and accessibility but also social acceptability (i.e., adequacy and sustainability). In developed countries, food security remains non-achieved at all. Notably, the so-called “little deprivation” leads the working poor to rely on food aid. We argue that even doing so, they remain food insecure: food aid is socially unacceptable because, despite their work, they are kept away from classical food access paths. In this article, we present the specificities of food aid in France and state some of its limits, namely those associated with the supply chain of donated foodstuffs. We propose a monographic study relying on a mix of firsthand material (six years of fieldwork from students with associations) and secondhand material (analysis of specialized, legal, and activity reports). We describe inspiring initiatives from three French associations and mobilize the recently published analysis of dignity construction in food aid in the United States of America to argue that dignity in food aid logistics is also a knowledge management and digital matter. Indeed, the initiatives of the three considered associations show concretely how knowledge management and digital systems can enhance dignity in food aid logistics.