Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze friction and controversies with interaction processes and their effects on forming new resource interfaces, through the lens of boundary objects. Design/methodology/approach The empirical setting consists of two organizations that are trying to enhance their competitive advantage through digitalization. During the process of data collection four different boundary objects were identified. The study illustrates how these boundary objects were characterized in terms of their modularity, standardization, abstractness and tangibility. This paper provides an analysis of how respondents perceived that the development of these boundary objects affected the creation of novel resource interfaces, and the resulting friction and controversy between new and old structures. Findings The study concludes that within a producer–user setting a focal boundary object will take on tangible and standardized properties, and the interaction process will expose friction in terms of both power struggles and resource incompatibilities. On the other hand, a boundary object’s modularity gives the actors central to the interaction room to maneuver and avoid resource incompatibilities and the development setting will hence be characterized by controversies. Originality/value The analysis indicates that the way individuals perceive boundary objects is central to interaction processes, answering calls for studies that investigate the role of objects within subject-to-object interaction.

Probabilistic aggregation is a self-organised behaviour studied in swarm robotics. It aims at gathering a population of robots in the same place, in order to favour the execution of other more complex collective behaviours or tasks. However, probabilistic aggregation is extremely sensitive to experimental conditions, and thus requires specific parameter tuning for different conditions such as population size or density. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a novel embodied evolution approach for swarm robotics based on social dynamics. This idea hinges on the cultural evolution metaphor, which postulates that good ideas spread widely in a population. Thus, we propose that good parameter settings can spread following a social dynamics process. Testing this idea on probabilistic aggregation and using the minimal naming game to emulate social dynamics, we observe a significant improvement in the scalability of the aggregation process.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the benefits and drawbacks that strategically imposed liminality inflicts upon inter-organizational digitalization efforts within the different phases of its utilization. Design/methodology/approach This study empirically examines digitalization in a large multinational manufacturing company, Sandvik Machining Solutions, using data that were collected through interviews and a qualitative research design. Findings This study shows that a liminal space separated from the structures in which one is supposed to inflict changes increases the risk of developing an incompatible system that will be rejected in the incorporation phase. An inter-organizational perspective on liminality thus contributes to our understanding of the benefits and drawbacks that liminal space can pose for the organizations involved. Practical implications The study suggests that, in the separation phase, driving change processes by creating liminal spaces could be a way to loosen up rigid resource structures and circumvent network over-embeddedness. Finding the right amount of freedom, ambiguity and community within the liminal space is, however, essential for the transition of information as well as the incorporation of the imposed changes. Originality/value Introducing an inter-organizational perspective on liminality contributes to our understanding of the stress that liminal space can place on individuals as well as the individual organization.

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While direct local communication is very important for the organization of robot swarms, so far it has mostly been used for relatively simple tasks such as signaling robots preferences or states. Inspired by the emergence of meaning found in natural languages, more complex communication skills could allow robot swarms to tackle novel situations in ways that may not be a priori obvious to the experimenter. This would pave the way for the design of robot swarms with higher autonomy and adaptivity. The state of the art regarding the emergence of communication for robot swarms has mostly focused on offline evolutionary approaches, which showed that signaling and communication can emerge spontaneously even when not explicitly promoted. However, these approaches do not lead to complex, language-like communication skills, and signals are tightly linked to environmental and/or sensory-motor states that are specific to the task for which communication was evolved. To move beyond current practice, we advocate an approach to emergent communication in robot swarms based on language games. Thanks to language games, previous studies showed that cultural self-organization-rather than biological evolution-can be responsible for the complexity and expressive power of language. We suggest that swarm robotics can be an ideal test-bed to advance research on the emergence of language-like communication. The latter can be key to provide robot swarms with additional skills to support self-organization and adaptivity, enabling the design of more complex collective behaviors.