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This manuscript explores the evolving roles of HR professionals amidst global megatrends and organizational transitions, focusing on the Italian context, which has experienced disruptive adoption of new forms of work such as remote and hybrid work. In this challenging scenario, our research aims to uncover if and how HR professionals are transforming their roles or maintaining the status quo in navigating organizational changes, dealing with the upcoming working scenario, and challenging conventional perceptions of HR practitioners.

The study employs the social-symbolic work lens, that contributes to a deeper understanding of how HR professionals work to construct organizational life, the identities of employees, and the societal norms and assumptions that provide the context for organizational action. This perspective highlights HR professionals’ personal efforts, consisting of the emotional labor entailed in steering organizational transformations and, eventually, maintenance in a context where remote work has become prevalent. Data was collected through 16 online focus groups involving 76 HR professionals from Italian organizations.

Our research offers two interrelated contributions to HR literature. First, we provide pieces of evidence on how HR practitioners act as agents of change in two emerging roles: the “Wannabe Hero” and the “Ordinary Hero”. This challenges the prevailing rhetorical discourse about the so-called HR business partner. Secondly, we delve into the persistent obstacles that hinder HR professionals from making a substantial impact in addressing radical changes. These findings will provide useful insights into effectively engaging HR practitioners as agents of change in organizational transformation, shedding light on praxis, structures, and their emotional work.

The paper analyzes HR professionals’ social-symbolic work, which offers an original contribution to the comprehension of the activities they carry on in practice and the emotions they have been experiencing. These influence both the way HR professionals play their role and the organizational and institutional environment.

This paper aims to attempt to provide an overview of the valuable scientific contribution on learning organization in social science from the perspectives of Professor Silvia Gherardi and discusses the evolution of Silvia’s work over her long career.

With the collaboration of this leading scholar, Professor Silvia Gherardi, this paper investigates several topics pertaining to the debate on Learning Organization and provides a unique perspective on the development of these theories.

Starting from the Italian perspective, in which knowledge and learning are mainly social and cultural phenomena, the paper focuses on Professor Silvia Gherardi’s contribution to the emerging area of practice-based theorizing of knowing and learning in organizations.

In the light of different epistemological approaches and views, the discussion with Professor Silvia Gherardi reveals her practice-based perspective. She proposes a historical analysis of the evolution of the Learning Organization debate, thus providing fertile ground for both researchers and practitioners.

Purpose – Several systems for the management of digital libraries have evolved in the recent past from simple document repository to sophisticated applications that provide the possibility of classifying and, in some cases, even rating the documents collected in the library itself. In a few of those systems members of the community of practice that uses and produces the library itself can also be active in assigning a reputation score to each other. This study aimed to explore the idea of using a collectively negotiated term taxonomy in order to develop a better model for the automated evaluation of users’ competence on different discussion topics. Design/methodology/approach – The study provides a formalization of the approach we propose, and the proposal of an architecture for implementing a system deploying the approach. Findings – The study analyses the issues related to the implementation of a digital library, and develops an architecture that aims to evaluate users’ competence about different discussion topics in an automated way. Research limitations/implications – The paper only describes an abstract architecture of a self‐balancing digital library. Further research should investigate the different possible choices for the implementation details that have been left out from this first explorative analysis. Originality/value – The novelty of the approach resides in the fact that we make use of a collectively negotiated taxonomy in order to automatically assign relevance scores to reviewers’ evaluations.

The purpose of this special issue s to cover a substantial range of approach to knowledge management penetrating inquiry that goes beyond intra-organizational learning processes to include inter-organizational perspectives.

As pointed out by the literature on various aspects of the knowledge processes within and between organizations, the work has been organized coherently with two “strains” of topics: the first one focused on managerial practices and operative directions of knowledge management, the other one pointed out on applications of knowledge management to inter-firm networks. Qualitative as well quantitative papers have been welcomed.

Opening up the idea of pluralism as a driving force in the knowledge economy pushes the organizations in a permanent cumulative process of adaptation and re-creation through innovative means of social interaction in global environments.

The dynamic nature of the field is reflected in the fact that this project expanded to encompass emerging works on knowledge models and concepts that grew from conversations within the network.

This special issue aims to extend the current understanding on how diversity of approaches enhances the process of discovery: the authors convey the sense of where the stimulating challenges lie.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the special issue on the Semantic Web. Intensive research has been undertaken worldwide in research centres and several achievements have been accomplished towards the ultimate objective: the expression and the exploitation of humanity's collective knowledge.

A multi‐fold strategy for the preparation of this special issue was deployed. Given the special characteristics, a balanced mix of introductory papers to the topic, and also advanced research papers at the leading edge of Semantic Web evolution, were selected.

The paper summarizes the articles of the issue and also provides help in understanding the Semantic Web Roadmap of Digital Libraries.

Introduces the papers in the special issue.