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Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.

Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.

The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.

Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.

Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

Digitalization is becoming the subject of considerable interest in the literature. This is in view of its relevance in addressing social problems and contributing to the development of communities and societies. In the agri-food-industry, digitalization is also expected to contribute significantly to solve several challenges the sector is facing at this moment, such as the increasing food demand and resource use. However, the effects of advanced technologies are less a function of the technologies themselves than of how they are used by people. The study analyses the dominant challenges faced by firms in the agri-food industry in the usage and adoption of digital technology. Also, they show how these challenges impact on the sustainable development of digital technology for firms in the industry and provide avenues for future research.

The authors propose a structured literature review aiming to investigate the following research question: what are the main challenges faced by firms within the agri-food industry in the adoption of smart technologies?

Results illustrate the dominant challenges faced by firms in the agri-food industry in the usage and adoption of digital technology. Also, they show how these challenges impact on the sustainable development of digital technology for firms in the industry and provide avenues for future research.

So far, in the context of digitalization in the agri-food industry, various researchers have analysed different kinds of challenges to the adoption of smart technologies. This work reviews these contributions to create a clear reference framework of the challenges faced by agri-food firms while providing future avenues of research and implications at a policymaking, economic-managerial and socio-environmental level.