Silvia Gherardi

To Transfer is to Transform: The Circulation of Safety Knowledge

Organizational knowing is fundamentally a collective endeavour through which heterogeneous materials and entities, such as ideas, concepts, artifacts, texts, persons, norms, and traditions are mobilized, modified, translated, distorted, exposed, used, ignored or hidden in view of some practical accomplishment, such as safety in a construction site. Safety as a form of organizational expertise is therefore situated in the system of ongoing practices, has both explicit and tacit dimensions, is relational and mediated by artifacts, that is, it is material as well as mental and representational. Using examples derived from the observation data we will discuss how safety-related knowledge is constituted, institutionalized, and continually redefined and renegotiated within the organizing process through the interplay between action and reflexivity.

Entrepreneur‐mentality, gender and the study of women entrepreneurs

Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucaults govermentality – to highlight how an entrepreneurial discourse is mobilized as a system of thinking about women entrepreneurs which is able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable, namely: who can be an entrepreneur, what entrepreneurship is, what or who is managed by that form of governance of economic relations? Discourses on women entrepreneurs are linguistic practices that create truth effects. Argues that social studies of women entrepreneurs tend to reproduce an androcentric entrepreneur mentality that makes hegemonic masculinity invisible. They portray womens organizations as “the other”, and sustain social expectations of their difference, thereby implicitly reproducing male experience as a preferred normative value. Taking a deconstructive gaze on how an entrepreneur‐mentality discourse is gendered, reveals the gender sub‐text underpinning the practices of the scientific community that study women entrepreneurs and, in so doing, open a space to question them.

The Gender We Think, The Gender We Do in Our Everyday Organizational Lives

We “do gender” while we are at work, while we produce an organizational culture and its rules governing what is fair in the relationship between the sexes. The inner ambiguity of gender construction is expressed in the dilemma: how can we do gender without second-sexing the female? The management of cross-gendered situations (dual presence) is based on a two-stage ritual involving the ceremonial work of paying homage to the symbolic order of gender (a deep trans-psychic structure) and the remedial work of repairing the inequality inherent in gender difference. Studying the ambiguity of gender symbols enables us to use indirect speech and discoursively to change gender relationships in organizations.

The Organizational Learning of Safety in Communities of Practice

n the past 10 years or so, the issues of safetyand reliability in organizations have beenmoving to the center of scientific and manage-rial interest, not only because of their public impor-tance, but also because of the increasing emphasisplaced on making firms responsible for protecting thehealth of workers and the environment. On one hand,the scientific debate stresses that ours is a risk society(Beck, 1992); on the other, that human and organiza-tional factors are at the origin of industrial disasters(Gephart & Pitter, 1993; Perrow, 1984; Sagan, 1993;Turner & Pidgeon, 1997). In organization studies, thishas given rise to a new area of inquiry that, followingsuch major industrial disasters as Seveso, Three MilesIsland,Challenger,andExxonValdez,investigatesthefactors and conditions that determine the reliabilityand safety of organizations both internally and vis-a-vis their socioenvironmental context. “From risk tosafety” might be the distinctive slogan of the culturalmovement now underway: from the study of risk asan objective factor inherent in risk conditions, to thesocial production of safety conditions sustained by acultureofsafety(Gherardi,Nicolini,&Odella,1997a).Traditional approaches to safety, as regards to bothindustrial disasters and workplace accidents, con-sider it to be a property of technical systems that is ob-jectified in “safe” technologies and artifacts. We maycall this the “technical route to safety.” This is sup-ported by the normative route that views safety as theoutcome of the application of rules and regulationsthat prescribe “safe” individual and collective behav-iors. Although one should certainly not underesti-matetheimportanceofsafety-embodyingtechnologi-cal artifacts, or of the social and organizationalproduction of norms that impose safe working condi-tions, technological and bureaucratic safety cultures

Learning the Trade: A Culture of Safety in Practice

This paper presents an ethnographic study of how safety is mastered by novices on a building site, in order to highlight the social and cultural character of learning. Adopting a situational focus, the paper explores how knowledge is acquired and transmitted, and how a culture of practice sediments and is perpetuated in the process. The paper takes the community of practices as the privileged locus of learning and transmitting practical knowledge. This study is therefore an attempt to understand in what forms and by means of what mechanisms building-site novices are socialized in the community of practices and how, within this process, the competence relative to safety and danger is learned.

Through the practice lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading?

In the last 20 years we have witnessed a return of the practice concept in studies of organizing, learning and knowing. Practice has been used as a lens for the reinterpretation of many organizational phenomena, and it seems that a bandwagon of practice-based studies has been set in motion by the coining of labels, which comprise the term ‘practice’. A bandwagon can serve to institutionalize a field of studies by progressive labelling and a collective appropriation of the general label.We wonder if this has been the case for practice-based studies? The article presents seven labels and discusses their similarities and differences in order to demonstrate that, while the institutionalization of practice-based studies may be considered an achieved goal, the collective appropriation of the label has not been achieved, and therefore, the bandwagon is heading for a partition.

Storytelling and Change: An Unfolding Story

Change spawns stories and stories can trigger change. Stories can also block change and can define what constitutes change. In this Introduction to the special issue, the special issue editors explore some of the current debates on stories and organizational change, introduce the articles that are included in the issue, identify some prominent themes (power, identity construction and defence, plurivocality, knowledge transfer, boundary unfreezing, sense-making and sense-destroying) and some possible blind spots (authenticity, narrative structure). In this way, they offer a conspectus on the current state of play in this field, signalling some challenges and directions for the future.

Practice? It’s a Matter of Taste!

This article aims to enhance our understanding of how practice is socially sustained, learnt and constantly refined by arguing that practice is much more than a set of activities—it involves, beside instrumental and ethical judgements, taste and appraisal. Taste is a sense of what is aesthetically fitting within a community of practitioners—a preference for ‘the way we do things together’. Taste is based on subjective attachment to the object of practice and is learnt and taught as part of becoming a practitioner; it is performed as a collective, situated activity within a practice. The elaboration of taste and the refining of practice within a community involves taste-making, which is based on ‘sensible knowledge’ and the continual negotiation of aesthetic categories. The article examines how in a variety of practices, taste-making occurs through three processes: sharing a vocabulary for appraisal; crafting identities within epistemic communities; and refining performances.

Knowing and learning in practice‐based studies: an introduction

Purpose – The aim of this introduction to the special issue is to furnish a panorama on how practice‐based studies (PBS) concerned with organizational learning have developed in recent years, and to describe the topics that such studies have debated.Design/methodology/approach – The articles in this special issue were first presented at the standing working group on “Practice‐based Studies of Knowledge and Innovation in Workplaces” of the European Group for Organizational Studies, and will therefore provide the background to PBS and an idea of its methodology.Findings – The practice‐ based approach may be useful for: a renewed conception of organization as a texture of interrelated practices which extend to form an action‐net sustained by a knowing‐in‐action which renews itself and transforms itself into being practiced; a renewed conception of knowledge as a situated, negotiated, emergent and embedded activity; a renewed conception of materiality as a form of distributed agency and an intimate relationsh...

What Do You Mean By Safety? Conflicting Perspectives on Accident Causation and Safety Management in a Construction Firm

This paper is based on the assumption that people in organizations do not learn ‘safety’; rather, they learn safe working practices. Therefore, there are as many safety cultures as there are communities of practice inside an organization contributing to the social construction of safety. Ambiguity plays a central role in this process since consensus and dissensus on what is safety and danger are issue-specific and constantly fluctuating. The analysis of the explanations of the cause of accidents held by two communities of practice ‐ engineers and site managers ‐ sheds light on sense-making processes relevant to the understanding of safety and to the design of a safer organization.