Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities opened up by those messy, unclear and indeterminate data in research situations that may be described as being in the shadow and may as such remain in a state of vagueness and indeterminacy. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on the extant literature on shadow organizing and post-qualitative methodologies. It focuses attention on not-yet (or shadow data) in order to ponder over what researchers do to data when they are not (yet) black-boxed as such. At the same time, it investigates what it is that not-yet data do to researchers. Findings Four types of "not-yet" data - illegible, wondrous and disorienting, hesitant and worn out - are presented and discussed. Data are illegible when a researcher is in the position of not knowing how to interpret what is in front of her/him. A second illustration is constructed around wonder, and poses the question of the feelings of surprise and disorientation that arise when facing uncanny realities. In a third situation, not-yet data are narrated as hesitation, when a participant feels conflicting desires and the researchers hesitates in interpreting. The fourth illustration depicts not-yet data as data that have been corrupted, that vanish after time or are worn out. Practical implications Not-yet data belong to researchers practice but can also be found in other professional practices which are concerned with the indeterminacy of shadowy situations. It is argued that situations like these constitute opportunities for learning and for the moral and professional development, so long as indeterminacy is kept open and a process of "slowing down" both action and interpretation is nurtured. Originality/value This paper is of value for taking the metaphor of shadow organizing further. Moreover, it represents a rare attempt to bring the vast debate on post-qualitative research/methodologies into management studies, which with very few exceptions seems to have been ignored by organization studies.

Purpose - This paper aims to offer a perspective to interpret qualitative data drawing on the introduction of the notion of "embodied practice-based research". Design/methodology/approach - Drawing on a comprehensive literature review to support a meta-theoretical approach, we developed a theoretical essay. Findings - The body is not only a field of studies but a mean of study as well. The embodied practice-rased research is an inquiry style to access the tacit texture of social action and cognition. Practical implications - Embodied practice-based research may impact qualitative researchers' education and the way to report methodological proceedings and data report. Originality/value - The core contribution of the paper is the introduction of a new research style able to change how researchers' bodies may be used in qualitative management research.

Each of the chapters in this volume, from the introduction to this end(ing), engaged in a conversation about producing knowledge in, about, with "organization studies" at a time when we (us, the human inhabitants of this Earth) are facing calamitous conditions, probably leading to our/its destruction, and (some more than others) are wondering what is to be done. As members of the management and organization studies (MOS) scholarly community, all the authors in this project are deeply concerned about the "knowledge" our common field is producing as "legitimate", for it seems not only inadequate for addressing those calamitous conditions but also that this kind of knowledge may be implicated in reproducing the harms we all decry. The aim here has not been to critique the field on the basis of what it produces but to acknowledge conditions perpetuating the production of those forms of knowledge more generally, and to offer positive alternatives which may make a difference in what is produced, perhaps contributing to a better world‚ over and over again. The message this chapter and all other chapters hope to convey is the possibility of "thinking, saying and doing otherwise". But can we truly question the very notion of "the human" supporting "legitimate knowledge"? Can we truly focus on producing processual knowledge with indefinite aims? In other words, is the becoming of an organization studies produced with feminist new materialisms possible? Responding to those questions, and following the original proposal for this volume, this chapter is the voice of the collectivity articulating 'the-world-and-beyond' as envisioned in each of the prior chapters. Taking this approach resonates as well with new materialisms: "'a doing with' which cannot be a 'doing alone' -more like a world of on-going assembling".

In this chapter, by metaphorically extending the meaning of the word "manspreading", on one hand we describe how the term "feminist" in "new feminist materialism" has been placed "under erasure". On the other hand, we show how the feminism has been always already all set for disturbing the discursive male order of new materialism. We foreground three main feminist ethico-onto-epistemological assumptions: decentering the subject, (re)materializing all bodies; intra-acting responsibly. Correspondingly, we articulate three alternative forms of politics - a politics of location, a politics of re-materialization, and an ethical politics of response-ability - which, we deem, embody the generative and affirmative posture of new feminist materialism and pave the way for a different knowledge production practice in Management and Organization Studies.

This chapter provides an overview of the book while introducing the main concepts of a posthumanist epistemology of practice theory. In particular, the Introduction articulates the framework of the entire book which is aimed at raising a series of radical epistemological questions about what research practices entail, how such practices—in their variety—generate knowledge, and what are the ethico-onto-epistemological implications of decentering the human beings as the main actors of the research agencement.

Within and beyond organization studies, an epistemology of practice allows us to view the ongoing interaction between doing and knowing, the knowing subject and the known object, social and material, humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans. This book is a collection of reflections by scholars across the social sciences around epistemological practices and the epistemology of posthumanist practice theory.Practice theories and practice-based studies have developed a rich methodology for studying working practices. This book is an epistemological reflection that challenges the distinction between theory and method, questions the knowing practices that give form to the object of knowledge, how they draw boundaries between what comes to matter and what is excluded from mattering. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of organization studies and beyond, allowing social science researchers to rethink their positioning within their own research practices and leaving them open to a broader, looser and more generous understanding of qualitative methodologies.Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

'A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.

At the end of the adventure of this book, we would like to conclude by coming back to the implications of posthumanism for the grand challenges of our time. Climate change, geopolitical crisis (with war), nuclear threats, the crumbing of sense at work, surveillance capitalism, and rising inequalities all of these dangers converge in one way or another to an old will of control. They originate in too-humanistic paths in the world. From there, posthumanism can lead to two different approaches: a processual posthumanism and a critical posthumanism. These two complementary approaches are detailed and implications are drawn for management and organization studies.

This book aims at exploring the reception of critical posthumanist conversations in the context of Management and Organization Studies. It constitutes an invitation to de-center the human subject and thus an invitation to the ongoing deconstruction of humanism. The project is not to deny humans but to position them in relation to other nonhumans, more-than-humans, the non-living world, and all the “missing masses” from organizational inquiry. What is under critique is humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism in the context of the Anthropocene and the contemporary crisis the world experiences. From climate change to the loss of sense at work, to the new geopolitical crisis, to the unknown effects of the diffusion of AI, all these powerful forces have implications for organizations and organizing. A re- imagination of concepts, theories, and methods is needed in organization studies to cope with the challenge of a more-than-human world.

This chapter proposes to look at safety as a collective knowledgeable doing, i.e. a competency embedded in working practices. Therefore, by adopting a practice-based approach to inquire into how work is actually accomplished, we can study how knowing safe and safer working practices is kept and maintained within situated ways of working and talking about safety. The knowledge object ‘safety’ is constructed—materially and discursively—by a plurality of professional communities, according to specific scientific disciplines, controlling specific leverages within an organization, and talking different discourses. In a workplace, there are competing discourses: technological, normative, educational, economic, and managerial. Therefore, learning safer working practices is mediated by comparison among the perspectives of the world embraced by the co-participants in the production of safety as an organizational practice. Training and learning based on situated working practices presumes the collective engagement of researchers and participants in reflexivity, which can help to bring to the surface the experience knowledge embedded in practicing and transform it into actionable knowledge to produce practice changes. In fact, the engagement of practitioners, their experience knowledge and their care for what they do may enhance workplace resilience. 

This article illustrates the gendering of entrepreneurship as an intertwined process of gendering and entrepreneuring that can commence from the analysis of a single situated practice. The practice I explore is deemed 'authoring own-self as entrepreneur', that is, how the 'I' is authored through narrative and discursive processes, mobilized in the presentation of a public identity within a community of entrepreneurs. This is illustrated by four ways of authoring the process of becoming a female entrepreneur in relation to gender and life issues: as a firm-creator, as a coauthor of a project, as a responsible wife, as a member of the second generation. In authoring entrepreneuring, discursive resources are mobilized and edited within a narrative of identity where the process of negotiating one of the major narratives in the field (the work-family life balance) is performed. The discourse on work-family life balance is traditionally constructed in dichotomous terms, and its gender subtext is taken for granted. It portrays a supposed universality of gender conditions based on the implicit assumptions that when women work their family life is under threat, that work and family are two separate and separable spheres of activities, that it is a women's responsibility to keep them in balance, and finally that women in entrepreneurship, as in any other working environment, will be affected by the potential unbalance since their primary loyalty would be to reproduction and the home. On the contrary when female entrepreneuring is conceived as a life form, the discourse on work-family life balance is challenged.

The chapters in this book have focused on what is apparently a single issue, and which is denoted by the expression ‘practice-based learning’. However, consideration of this theme through many different lenses and from diverse points of view has had the effect of constructing an approach whereby the topic has become broader and more nuanced. What has been used is a kind of magnifying glass that places the knowledge object within a broader framework, freeing it from the strictures of falsely circumscribed definitions.

This chapter illustrates the contribution that practice theories have offered to the ongoing conversation on critical posthumanism and how this conversation has shaped in its turn a stream of practice theorization. It offers two points of entry: a conception of practice as agencement and the sociomateriality of situated practices and it argues that the main contribution that a posthumanist practice theory offers to posthumanism is a methodological reflection for re-thinking qualitative empirical research once the human subject (and the humanist predicament associated to the Man of reason) has been decentered. It constitutes an experimentation with posthumanist qualitative inquiry, in which research practices do not “represent” reality, rather they explore various knowledge-producing practices and how different ways of producing reality have different social, economic, and political effects.

Working life studies and practice-based studies have a common interest for work, and how work is accomplished in situated working conditions. The turn to practice may contribute to renew the study of work. The main concern of a practice-based approach to working practices is to understand the logic of the situation and the performance of action as practical knowledge, which connects working with organizing and knowing with practicing. The article will first illustrate the basic assumptions of an approach to working practices based on a post-humanist practice theory and second it will focus on a specific contribution from it. I shall argue that a practice approach to innovation as a continuous process contributes to a better understanding of how working practices change or persist. In fact, the study of work in situation is not only descriptive in its purpose, but it is also intended to yield practical outcomes for empowering practitioners in their attachment to practicing.

This article offers a reflection around the question of 'do we need 'gender' any longer?' In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a 'concept as/instead of method' line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender 'the forces it needs to return to life' or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/artistic production of knowledge, the dis-embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of 'gender' stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de-territorializing it and re-territorializing it otherwise.

Organizational learning is a relatively recent metaphor for the organization that matches two concepts - learning and organization - and enables exploration of the organization as if it were endowed with a stock of knowledge, skills, and expertise. A short history of the concept will illustrate its development in organization studies. During the 2000s, not only did attention to processes and temporality increase, but also an epistemology of becoming appeared where the boundaries between learning and knowing, order and disorder, organization and organizing became conflated. Knowing took the place of knowledge, and instead of considering knowledge as an object or a resource, the concept of knowing makes it possible to see it as a collective knowledgeable doing that is situated in working practices. 

The turn to practice has been prominent in the community of Management Learning and still occupies an important place in the debate that approaches practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing. On considering how the turn to practice contributes to the ongoing conversation on post-epistemologies, one notes a convergence with another turn'. The turn to affect started more or less in the same years as the turn to practice, but the conversation between the two has not yet been fully articulated. I argue that both share a concern for (1) a relational epistemology, (2) the body and (3) sociomateriality. To show how they may interact, three vignettes are presented to illustrate their commonalities and how they try to produce in the reader an affective reaction. This article is also the outcome of an experimentation conducted with a visual writer during the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Milan, and it proposes a reflection on the limits of representationalism.

This paper explores the relationship between knowledge and practice, knowledgeable practices, knowing in practice and knowledge as a situated activity. It traces a tradition of sociological thought in practice theories that derives from studies of scientific knowledge and that challenges the conventional understanding of the ‘social’ as human-centred. The understanding of practice is grounded in an actor-network approach and in feminist Science and Technology Studies. In fact, the precursors of the empirical study of knowing in situ were the so-called laboratory studies, and section 1 presents their contributions to the study of knowledge practices. Later, section 2 proposes a posthumanist practice theory that joins other post-epistemologies in the project of de-centring the human subject as the main source of action and moving from a formulation of practice theory as ‘humans and their practices’ to a vision of practice as the entanglement of humans, materialities, discourses, knowledges and any other relevant element in the situated activities. The aim of the paper is to interpret practice as an empirical phenomenon; therefore, sections 3, 4 and 5 illustrate the core assumptions: i) the sensory and elusive knowledges embedded in knowing in practice; ii) realities as enacted in practices; and iii) interdependent practices as woven in a texture of practices.

The present article retraces the way in which, over the years, I have developed a post-humanistic approach to social practice on the basis of an Actor-Network sensibility and the way in which practice theory appeared in the literature on learning and knowing in organizations. From this background, I propose an epistemology of practice grounded on relationality, multiplicity, and transformation, and I approach practice as an empirical phenomenon from the perspective of knowing as an activity situated in working and organizing. From this point of view the central interest in practice theories becomes practice as a collective and knowledgeable doing.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ten years of the journal through a personal reflection. Design/methodology/approach - A review of the articles published in the last ten years. Findings - I argue that what has distinguished QROM in these ten years are two distinctive features: reflexivity on practices of qualitative research, and openness to the application of qualitative methods to unusual research topics. Originality/value - The main limit of the paper resides in the subjectivity of the person who has read the articles. Other readers may have different opinions and may have chosen different criteria.

The article re-reads what has been published in the years 1998-2007 by Sociologia del lavoro through the "lens" of knowlege and knowing-in-practice. It aims to make visible the "traces" left in the Journal by the debate on knowledge, knowledge workers, and community of practice. In so doing this article will connect the journal to other journals and other articles that gave form to the debate in the same years. In those years knowledge has been conceived and studied both as a resource for the firm and as an activity situated in working practices. The passage from an epistemology of possession, in which knowledge is a "thing" to an epistemology of practice, in which knowledge is a collective knowledgeable activity, changed the way of conceiving technology, work and organization. From being separate entities, technology, work and organization are entangled relationships within a practice. 

This article introduces a new label, 'Affective Ethnography', and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements-texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies-are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data that move. I discuss three pillars for affective ethnographies that relate to researchers' presence in doing fieldwork and their bodily capacity to affect/be affected. The first is embodiment and embodied knowing. Doing fieldwork implies the ability to resonate with, becoming-with, and the capacity for affective attunement. The second aspect relates to place as flow, and process-to placeness. The third relates to affect as the power to act and therefore to the presence in the fieldwork of the capacity to 'make do', either intentionally or unintentionally.

The journal Organization was a precursor of the turn to practice with its 2000 Special Issue, and the burgeoning number of special issues between 2000 and 2011 testifies to the vitality of a field under construction. Nowadays, the consolidation of the field makes it possible to start to understand and spell out differences and, in so doing, to promote lines of practice theorizing with a greater internal consistency. This article contributes to the articulation of differences among various practice theories and within a practice-based theorizing inspired by the sociology of translation. It proposes two conceptsagencement and formativenessthat address two blind spots' in the conversation on the turn to practice. The first blind spot concerns how we can talk of practices as having agency and the second concerns how we can articulate knowing in practice as a doing while inventing the way of doing', that is, the creative entanglement of knowing and doing. I shall address these two blind spots' by saying that one difficulty in addressing them is created by language. Hence, if we want to turn to practice anew, we need to invent/discover/reconfigure a new vocabulary with which to shape new concepts or to circulate existing ones better.

The turn to affect needs to assume a stable discursive position on its importance in relation to the literature on practice, nevertheless the issue is not whether affect is important, but why and how. In fact, all agency unfolds with a certain degree of affect and almost all social practices affect their participants in various degrees. Ordinary affects are the varied capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continuum becoming. Their significance lies in the way they pick up the intensities that they build and in the thoughts and feelings they make possible, rather than in 'meanings' encapsulated in an order of representations. The question that the article addresses is therefore how to preserve and report on ordinary affects while studying working practices? Through two episodes from fieldwork (an unbearable sweet music and cruel optimism) I argue that paying attention to affects is an active process of atmosphere attunement to the various embodiments of the field - the embodied researcher and the embodied practitioners - with their attachments to the object of their practices. The turn to affect may enrich the turn to practice with a sensibility for a form of embodied, affective knowing that put into discussion how research is written.

The turn to affect needs to assume a stable discursive positionon its importance in relation to the literature on practice, nevertheless theissue is not whether affect is important, but why and how. In fact, allagency unfolds with a certain degree of affect and almost all socialpractices affect their participants in various degrees. Ordinary affects arethe varied capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life thequality of a continuum becoming. Their signiÞcance lies in the way theypick up the intensities that they build and in the thoughts and feelings theymake possible, rather than in ÔmeaningsÕ encapsulated in an order ofrepresentations. The question that the article addresses is therefore how topreserve and report on ordinary affects while studying working practices?Through two episodes from Þeldwork (an unbearable sweet music andcruel optimism) I argue that paying attention to affects is an active processof atmosphere attunement to the various embodiments of the Þeld - theembodied researcher and the embodied practitioners - with theirattachments to the object of their practices. The turn to affect may enrichthe turn to practice with a sensibility for a form of embodied, affectiveknowing that put into discussion how research is written.