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A project aiming to study the delineation of responsibilities between hospitals in Paris, with a view to improving administration of patients' admission and transfer led to the restructuring of problems and the discovery of problems not fully realised prior to this, i.e. in addition to mismatches between formal responsibilities and real patient arrivals, and inertia in patient transfer, issues such as which care is to be given priority; precise role of emergency reception services; allocation of beds to specialities, and so on. More and more facets of the problem were uncovered: material resources; organisational issues; individual matters and taboos and culture. When everyone has agreed the problem the study will end.

Actors of territories faced with new managerial innovations have to develop new knowledge and behaviours to seize these innovations and create a vision of the territory. This is part of what we call governance learning: the ability of individuals to create new knowledge and behaviour for collective action within the territory. The purpose of this chapter is to explore this concept.

Drawing from a case study of a periurban territory in France, we analyse how the board members of a Community of Communes can learn to work together, articulating organisational learning theories, actor-network theory and the concept of organisational myths.

We explore the enrolment process necessary to ‘build’ the network and interest them in using the innovation; identify three types of governance learning that turn the network into a collective: sensemaking, instrument-seizing and sensegiving; show how these myths are necessary to turn collective knowledge into organisational knowledge.

With both a behavioural and evolutionary approach to governance, we show that power, relationships and learning processes are tightly intertwined within the governance networks. Our use of organisational learning theory also demonstrates how it can be used in a more systematic way to describe the learning processes witnessed in governance situations.

This research brings new light to the understanding of how territorial governance can be developed and how managerial innovations can provoke learning situations and more specifically how stakeholders learn to define common goals and a shared vision of their territory to enable collective action.

Based on a single and innovative case study (Siggelkow, 2007; Yin, 2014), this research aims to identify the main issues of non-financial reporting. They are related to:

the complexity of the corporate social responsibility (Alcouffe, Berland, Dreveton, & Essid, 2010; Ancori, 2008; Antheaume, 2007; Brichard, 1996; Buritt, 2004; Chan, 2005; Gray & Bebbington, 2001; Herborn, 2005; Savall & Zardet, 2013; Vatn, 2009);

the legislator’s and stakeholders’ expectations (Ancori, 2005; Batifoulier, 2001; Caillaud & Tirole, 2007; Lewis, 1969); and

the company’s expectations (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Chiapello & Gilbert, 2013; David 1998; Grimand, 2012; Moisdon, 1997; Senge, 1992; Wood, 1991).

Symmetrically, it reveals possible pitfalls. Through the study of the way the Rémy Cointreau Group developed its reporting tool, the authors analyze how a company can take the opportunity of a legal obligation to deploy a strategy of non-financial reporting that comes to support and structure a responsible approach. Of course, these results are only replicable under certain conditions related to this singular case.

Whereas many researchers have examined the way in which health institutions have been transformed through funding modalities, and particularly through prospective payment systems (PPS), few have investigated the architecture of these systems, that is, costs and cost variance. Focusing on the study of costs and on the production of hospital rates, this chapter shows that the French PPS, called “rate per activity” made possible what we call a policy of variance. For health policymakers, the aim was to make the different accounting figures between hospitals, and between ways of practising healthcare, visible, in order to reduce these variances. This policy was attended by uncertainty in the processes of quantification, which led to metrological controversies. As a consequence of the issues around the way of calculating costs, some accounts and calculations were redone. In this chapter, we consider the case of metrological controversy over the remuneration of costs for cystic fibrosis patients’ hospital stays, and over the action of a patient organization that criticized the costs calculated officially. It leads to the analysis of the way calculative infrastructures, as cost accounting and rates, are challenged, and how some actors try to stabilize them.

While the formal structures of universities may predominantly reflect ceremonial rather than functional purposes, attempts at changing them are usually a fertile ground for academic conflicts. Taking this apparent contradiction as a starting point, the aim of this article is to explore the intriguing role of formal structures in academic settings. Drawing on a case study of a merger and organizational restructuring process in an academic research centre, it shows how symbolic responses to institutional pressures may have actual consequences on research practices, beyond myth and ceremony.

This paper aims to present a concise history of the main action research (AR) contribution in France. The authors discuss the role of AR in the organizational research field in general and compare it with intervention research (IR) and presented Institute of Socio-Economy of Enterprises and Organizations’s specific contributions and its presence on the international stage through review publications and wider works.

A narrative approach was used to analyze this history.

AR is considered as a research family. The authors define and compare AR with other qualitative methods. They analyze AR and IR principles, which include interaction with practitioners, negotiation with them, focusing in the third part on the case of ISEOR research team.

AR and IR permit to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners, to develop useful research. At the same time, they permit to develop new researchers' competencies and to fund research, in a context of reduced public research funds.

This article permits to understand the reality of what is and how to develop an IR, and the difficulties for researchers to insert them in the academic community, although France seems to be more permissive than others’ contexts. It permits also to better know the French IR and AR research in management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing‐in‐practice and knowledge, in learning processes.

The paper focuses on a distributed, knowledge‐intensive and instrumented activity at the core of any collective action: qualification. The particular case of breeding activities in the livestock sector has been studied, where collective practices of animal qualification for collective breeding have been studied. Qualitative data stemming from in‐depth interviews and observation of daily practices have been analysed, combining practice‐based approaches on knowing processes and science philosophers' theories on the use of instruments during action.

The study of instruments used in daily practices allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between opposite types of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge seen as a stock, and sensible knowledge seen as purely tacit and equated to non‐instrumented practices. Instruments are not merely mediators in learning processes; they also take an active part in shaping and activating knowledge and learning processes.

Further research is needed on the designing of reflexive instrumentation, which takes knowing and knowledge articulation into account better.

Using instruments as a key concept to analyse knowing‐in‐practice processes has both methodological and managerial implications for identifying those instruments that favour learning processes.

This paper complements more classical practice‐based approaches by proposing a new perspective on instruments in learning processes, which is particularly relevant to the study of pluralistic organisations where power is diffuse.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the appropriation of control rooms based on value-based integrated performance management tools implemented in all publicly funded health organizations in Quebec (Canada) as a form of legitimate sociomaterial work.

Multi-site organizational ethnographic case studies in two Integrated health and social services centers, with narrative process analysis of triangulated qualitative data collected through non-participant observation (163 h), individual semi-structured interviews (N = 34), and document review (N = 143).

Three types of legitimate sociomaterial work are accomplished when actors appropriate control rooms: 1) reformulating performance management work; 2) disrupting accountability work and; 3) effecting value-based integrated performance management. Each actor (tools, institutions and people) follows recurrent institutional work-paths: tools consistently engage in disruptive work; institutions consistently engage in maintaining work, and people consistently engage in creation work. The study reveals the potential of performance management tools as “effective integrators” of the technological, managerial, policy and delivery levels of data-driven health system performance and improvement.

This paper draws on theoretically informed empirical insights to develop actionable knowledge around how to better design, implement and adapt tool-driven health system change: 1) Packaging the three agents of data-driven system change in health care: tools, institutions, people; 2) Redefining the search for performance in health care in the context of value creation, and; 3) Strengthening clinical and managerial relevance in health performance management practice.

The authors aim to stimulate new and original scholarship around the under-theorized concept of sociomaterial work, challenging theoretical, ontological and practical conceptions of work in healthcare organizations and beyond.

Scholars and practitioners have both emphasized the importance of collaboration in an innovation context. They have also largely acknowledged that the definition of common purpose is a major driver of successful collaboration, but surprisingly, researchers have put little effort into investigating the process whereby the partners define the common purpose. The purpose of this paper is to explore the generation of common purpose (GCP) in innovation partnerships.

An action‐research approach combined with modeling has been followed. The authors’ research is based on an in‐depth qualitative case study of a cross‐industry exploratory partnership through which four partners, from very different arenas, aim to collectively define innovation projects based on micro‐nanotechnologies. Based on a design reasoning framework, the mechanisms of GCP mechanism are depicted.

Regarding GCP, two main interdependent facets are identified: the determination of existing intersections between the parties’ concept and knowledge spaces (“Matching”); and an introspective learning process that allows the parties to transforms those spaces (“Building”).

The better understanding of the GCP and the specific notion of “C‐K profiles”, which is an original way to characterize each partner involved in a partnership, should improve the capabilities of organizations to efficiently define collaborative innovation projects.

The paper explores one of the cornerstones of successful collaboration in innovation: the process whereby several parties define the common purpose of their partnership.