No abstract

During the past few decades, scholars have undertaken numerous studies to map various determinants of flexibility at various levels: organizational, group, and individual. However, limited attention has been paid to the role of context and spatiality in realizing individual flexibility. This article aims to fill this gap and seeks to inquire into links between flexibility and spatiality. More specifically, this article will explore how organizational spatial layouts affect individual flexibility as everyday work activities are undertaken in the production of services in two settings, namely, health care and financial services. The findings show that spatial layout is important to better understand and conceptualize individual and organizational flexibility. The findings also show how spatial layout affords various and unexpected outcomes and that layouts that unilaterally foster flexibility are difficult to achieve due to the polymorphous nature of flexibility.

The research process and production of scientific knowledge has traditionally been understood to be based on abstract analysis and intellectual capacity rather than physical and emotional resources, promoting an understanding of academic practice as a detached, non-emotional and objective activity. Lately, several researchers have bemoaned this lack of recognition of the bodiliness of our work. In this study, we attempt to address this gap by exploring and conceptualizing some of the ways in which the embodied dimensions of academic research practices are intertwined with the articulation of ideas in the writing of scientific texts. In order to pursue our aim, we draw on experiences explicated through an autoethnographic approach, including the generation of personal narratives and in-depth conversations with 18 researchers from different universities in Europe and the US. The article contributes to the sociology of science and academic literacy literature, by conceptualizing the interconnectedness between sensuous and discursive understandings in this context. With the advancement of this theoretical approach, we illuminate how scientific practice is bound up with emotional, embodied, material, social, political and institutional forces. We also challenge the dichotomy between 'knowledge work' or theoretical tasks on the one hand, and 'body work' or physical labor on the other.

Purpose Many scholars have urged firms to empower consumers to become co-producers, arguing that this empowerment leads to a win-win situation that benefits consumers and providers alike. However, critical voices have emphasised that co-production is a way to exploit rather than empower consumers and hence represents a win–lose idea that benefits providers only. Regrettably, these polarised positions remain disconnected and lack empirical investigation. The aim of the present study is to move the debate beyond this stalemate by integrating these perspectives using an empirical study to explore enabling and constraining implications of the attempts to “empower” consumers. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on a qualitative empirical study of an internationally unique example of a long-term co-production process in rheumatology care. Data were collected using both focused interviews and observations. Findings The study indicates that both the optimistic and the critical perspectives of co-production are valid and the implications of “empowering” consumers are two-edged. Research Limitations/implications The study highlights the need to zoom in and analyse how empowering and disempowering mechanisms relate to specific aspects of particular co-production processes rather than to co-production as a general phenomenon. Practical Implications The empirical data illustrate the feasibility of employing patients in everyday healthcare production through simple means while raising numerous issues related to, for example, traditional healthcare roles and process design. Originality/value The present study of a unique, long-term co-production illustrates how both perspectives of co-production are valid.

We explore how new practices are transferred across locations in a global organization. The company we studied strove to infuse more user-centered innovation and quicker, more agile delivery of software into their development teams. The practices for doing so were crafted in the United States and then transferred to China and India. Over a period of 20 months, we observed how three practices were transferred to and enacted at each location. Our findings suggest a constellation of logics, which varied by site and by practice, molded the particular recontextualizations at each site. We contribute to a deeper understanding of how employees experience and respond to the transfer of practices from abroad by proposing that a constellation of logics guides recontextualization of meaning as well as action. Our empirical work and analysis also raises numerous questions about the effects of the recontextualizations on performance, what makes a particular logic or constellation of logics salient for a particular practice at a particular time, the stability and malleability of these logics, and what happens in global collaborations when different logics are invoked at different locations.