Sari Laari-Salmela

Mundane or Magical? Discourses on Technology Adoption in Finnish Schools

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have truly entered our everyday life, both work and leisure. This applies especially to the lives of our children: the children of today have been surrounded by ICT from their birth – personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and social media have been an integral part of their everyday life from the early childhood. School should be able to adapt to this change, but this seems to be challenging to achieve: schools are lagging behind the recent developments in ICT. We inquire the reasons for these challenges as regards ICT adoption in the Finnish schools from the perspective of the school principals, i.e. the ones expected to lead their schools to utilize ICT in its full potential. This is a nexus analytic inquiry that first examines these principals’ discourses on ICT and change, revealing several different discourses on them both, constructing the objects of talk in various ways. Afterwards, the study identifies influential participants helping or hindering in the process of change as well as broader societal themes or values that act as drivers of or barriers to change, as pictured in the principals’ talk. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

‘Worksome but Rewarding’ –Stakeholder Perceptions on Value in Collaborative Design Work

In this paper, we examine collaborative design projects in school contexts with many different stakeholders. We look at the value created for and by different stakeholders, focusing on value as a benefit, which is experienced – perceived and determined – by the beneficiaries themselves in the value co-creation process. As our focus is in “value-in-use”, i.e., value which emerges through activities taking place in a specific space, time, and context, we define value through subjective experience of people involved. We apply in our study the concept of value co-creation, where value is understood emerging from collaborative activity between actors participating in the activity. We see that the value co-creation lens provides a useful means for the CSCW community to scrutinize and make sense of collaborative design projects. We categorized the perceived value for each stakeholder and discuss how these categories can help in gaining a deeper understanding of the value gained in collaborative design work as well as how value co-creation lens in more general can be used as a tool in collaborative design projects.

Strategic practices of subsidiary positioning in business networks

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine subsidiary positioning within the dynamic business networks in the context of multinational companies (MNCs). The research question of the study is: How does the positioning of a subsidiary emerge through strategic practices in the dynamic business networks of an MNC? Design/methodology/approach The study relies on the IMP view on strategy with a focus on market positioning activity and the strategy-as-practice approach. Positioning is seen as a question of strategic practices in the interactive spheres of the subsidiaries. In the empirical part of the study, the authors examine the practices of a forest machine industry multinational through longitudinal interview and archival data on three of its sales subsidiaries in Sweden, Russia and the USA. Findings The study defines core tensions in subsidiary interactive spheres and the related strategic practices that shape the positioning of the subsidiaries. The study models the practice-based network positioning of MNC subsidiaries as a dynamic play of relationship tensions. Originality/value Prior research has focused either on the internal organizing of the MNCs or embeddedness of subsidiaries in their local environment. Less attention has been paid to the practices of positioning through which the subsidiaries deal with the inevitable tensions at the intersection of the internal and external networks.

Dematerializing the Material: Ambiguity Enabling Innovation in Strategic Change

While strategic change implies something to change giving rise to something new, it is not evident what the source for the emergence of novelty is. Our longitudinal case study documents a public sc...