This article explores how heterogeneous and distributed forms of social-symbolic work combine over time to yield synergistic relationships that precipitate institutional change. We study a collective effort by patient activists to change the technological and regulatory standards of Type 1 diabetes care. We offer contributions to radical flank theory by conceptualizing radical and moderate flanks as dynamic and overlapping pathways of action rather than fixed actor positions, and we show how a medial 'bonding' pathway can provide important social glue to connect the radical and moderate flanks. While in our case the material and discursive 'hacking' work in the breaching pathway disrupted institutions, triggered technology innovation, and created momentum for change, material and relational 'bridging' embedded these efforts into existing institutional structures and longer-term innovation trajectories. Values and amplification work in the bonding pathway served to keep the two other pathways aligned over time. By addressing how a complex social problem - patient-centric innovation - may be affected through heterogeneous social-symbolic work that leads to institutional accommodation, our study holds considerable policy and societal relevance.

Mobile applications for digital contact tracing have been developed and introduced around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed as a tool to support ‘traditional’ forms of contact-tracing carried out to monitor contagion, these apps have triggered an intense debate with respect to their legal and ethical permissibility, social desirability and general feasibility. Based on a large-scale study including qualitative data from 349 interviews conducted in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland, the United Kingdom), this paper shows that the binary framing often found in surveys and polls, which contrasts privacy concerns with the usefulness of these interventions for public health, does not capture the depth, breadth, and nuances of people’s positions towards COVID-19 contact-tracing apps. The paper provides a detailed account of how people arrive at certain normative positions by analysing the argumentative patterns, tropes and (moral) repertoires underpinning people’s perspectives on digital contact-tracing. Specifically, we identified a spectrum comprising five normative positions towards the use of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: opposition, scepticism of feasibility, pondered deliberation, resignation, and support. We describe these stances and analyse the diversity of assumptions and values that underlie the normative orientations of our interviewees. We conclude by arguing that policy attempts to develop and implement these and other digital responses to the pandemic should move beyond the reiteration of binary framings, and instead cater to the variety of values, concerns and expectations that citizens voice in discussions about these types of public health interventions.

In this paper we draw attention to the relevance of informal training in entrepreneurship for advancing sustainable and inclusive rural development. Adopting a perspective inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we explore how the informal training facilitated by CARE International’s village savings and loan associations (VSLAs) impacts the lives and livelihoods of members of these associations in a rural region of Rwanda. Based on our findings from a qualitative interview study of multiple stakeholders, we show how this informal training is facilitated through CARE’s train-the-trainer methodology and through regular dialogue, peer feedback and reflection at weekly group meetings. Our analysis highlights how such training emancipates and empowers participants, enabling them to act more reflectively and make more informed decisions in their efforts to improve their socioeconomic circumstances through entrepreneurial activities. Whereas prior research has tended to measure the impacts of membership in VSLAs on financial outcomes quantitatively, our qualitative study explores how VSLAs also contribute to the creation not only of economic but socio-cultural value in rural settings.

The issue of control in multinational corporations (MNCs) is central to international business scholarship. However, prior literature tends to provide a static perspective offering few theoretical insights on control changes, especially the practices that enable control adjustments. Adopting a practice theory perspective, we consider control as “in the making” whereby adjustments emerge through a social accomplishment, constituted and reconstituted as headquarters and subsidiaries engage in a co-creating process. Using a longitudinal case study approach, we had the rare opportunity to track and compare an unsuccessful and a successful attempt to adjust control in an MNC over time. Our main theoretical contribution is a model of adjusting control in MNCs that details the practices that enable control changes. This model offers theoretical implications for organizational control theory in MNCs, especially in relation to theorizing the subsidiary contribution in the design of control, the reconciliation of raised tensions in headquarters–subsidiary relationships, and the nature of unintended consequences in the adjustment process. Our study also contributes to theories on MNC change, as it details the construction of an ongoing strategy–structure alignment for strategic flexibility.

In the context of international business, control refers to the mechanisms the headquarters use to control their subsidiaries to ensure corporate goals and plans. The issue of control has a long tradition within international business and is still a widely discussed topic among international business scholars This literature, supported by organization theorists, identifies different control mechanisms that can be grouped into five classes of control: centralization, formalization, outcome, process/behavior, and social control.

Lateral collaboration across subsidiaries is beneficial for innovation in multinational corporations (MNCs), such as the creation of new organizational practices, because it helps working towards shared, rather than subsidiary-centric, objectives and creates new knowledge. To instill lateral collaboration, prior research has mainly focused on coordination mechanisms that rely on interpersonal exchanges among dispersed individuals across subsidiaries. However, due to rising concerns over coordination cost and sustainability of international travel, MNCs are increasingly challenged to search for other approaches that require less direct interpersonal interaction across subsidiaries. We, therefore, ask: How can MNCs elicit lateral collaboration during practice creation in a less space-time sensitive way? Drawing on a longitudinal case study, we develop a model of practice creation in MNCs. Our model offers two main insights. First, it details a novel approach for unleashing the benefits of lateral collaboration in globally-linked innovation processes in MNCs. In contrast to emphasizing coordination mechanisms that focus on interpersonal interactions across subsidiaries, our study contributes by detailing the emergence of lateral knowledge through a shared technological artefact as key enabler. Second, our model illuminates how MNCs can innovate new organizational practices that reflect both MNC and local subsidiary needs by adopting an improvisational approach.

We explore the role of affect in fuelling and sustaining political organizing in the case of an online type-1 diabetes community. Analysing this community's interactions, we show that the drive towards political transformation is triggered by affective dissonance, but that this dissonance needs to be recurrently enacted through the balanced circulation of objects of pain and hope. We propose the notion of affective resonance to illuminate the dynamic interplay that collectively moderates and fosters this circulation and that keeps bodies invested and reverberating together around shared political goals. Affective resonance points researchers toward the fragile and complex accomplishment that affective politics represents. Focusing particularly on the community's interactions on Twitter, we also reflect on the role of (digital) resonance spaces in how affects circulate. By adopting and transposing concepts from affect theories into the context of patient communities, we further add important insights into the unique embodied challenges that patients with chronic illness face. Highlighting the hope induced by techno-bodily emancipation that intertwine into a particular form of political organizing in such healthcare movements, we give emphasis to patient communities' deeply embodied affects as important engines for political, social and economic change.