Silvia Gherardi
Biographic Data
| ID | 113157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Silvia Gherardi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Silvia |
| FAMILY NAME | Gherardi |
| SIGNATURE | GHERARDI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Trento |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7026-2418 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 547 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 49 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Writing the fascination for extreme contexts
Fascination, as an affective, material and non-rational force, creates a particular bond between human beings, nature, and the materialization of space in an extreme context. This article, in relation to the ‘Darwin Expedition’ in Patagonia, explores affect as a poetic reverie under the dreamscape influence of Gaston Bachelard. This poetic reverie, quilts together multiple voices, multiple writings and photographs, bringing to mind and to text, t…
Theorizing the processes and practices of entrepreneuring at work
As the boundaries of ‘work’ extend to include work that adapts to or brings about new organization, social value and alternative futures, it intersects with entrepreneurship studies in intriguing yet under-developed ways. This special issue focuses on developing this intersection by advancing process and practice theory research on entrepreneuring. Entrepreneuring is a concept that captures the processuality and relationality of entrepreneurship,…
The fluid affective space of organizational practices
Purpose The article contributes to affective ethnography focussing on the fluidity of organizational spacing. Through the concept of affective space, it highlights those elements that are ephemeral and elusive – like affect, aesthetics, atmosphere, intensity, moods – and proposes to explore affect as spatialized and space as affective. Design/methodology/approach Fluidity is proposed as a conceptual lens that sits at the conjunction of space and …
Feminism in organization studies? It is a long story
This paper is an edited version of a conversation between Silvia Gherardi and Lynne Baxter at the Inaugural Distinguished Speaker Event of the Gender, Materialities, and Activism Network. We learn about the development of Professor Gherardi's interest in feminism, how it evolves and informs her wider work on organization studies and methodology, and how she supports community development while advancing her own work. Moreover, there is a percepti…
Readingwriting
In this paper, we share with the reader our individual and collective experience of a reading circle organised during the pandemic, at a time of social distancing. The collective reading allowed ‘us’ to become-with other humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans with the materiality of different bodies. The reading circle allowed individual vulnerability to be shared in a process of becoming-together a multiple ‘Author’ who authored a ‘Composition…
Responsible Management-as-Practice
The emerging field of responsible management (RM) studies the integration of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics in managerial practices. Therefore, turning to practice theories for the study of RM appears to hold great promise of conceptual and methodological contribution. We propose a posthumanist practice approach for studying RM-as-practice. Managerial practices are conceived as the agencement of heterogeneous elements (humans, nonhuma…
Shadow organising as dwelling in the space of the ‘not-yet’
This paper dwells on the metaphor of shadow organising for exploring what happens in the space of the ‘not-yet data’. It wonders what we do to ‘data’ and what ‘data’ do to us, to our subjectivities as professionals. It deals with elusive knowledges and how professionals construct what counts as ‘data’ and what is discarded as ‘no-data’. Taking a post-qualitative approach, the paper illustrates three instances of not-yet data. The first exemplifie…
Covid‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By di…
Working within the shadow
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities opened up by those messy, unclear and indeterminate data in research situations that may be described as being in the shadow and may as such remain in a state of vagueness and indeterminacy. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on the extant literature on shadow organizing and post-qualitative methodologies. It focuses attention on not-yet (or shadow data) in order to ponder…
If we practice posthumanist research, do we need ‘gender’ any longer
This article offers a reflection around the question of ‘do we need ‘gender’ any longer?’ In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a ‘concept as/instead of method’ line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender ‘the forces it needs to return to life’ or the forces to abandon it. I propose four diff…
Tracking the sociomaterial traces of affect at the crossroads of affect and practice theories
Purpose Affect is relevant for organization studies mainly for its potential to reveal the intensities and forces of everyday organizational experiences that may pass unnoticed or pass in silence because they have been discarded from the orthodoxy of doing research “as usual.” The paper is constructed around two questions: what does affect “do” in a situated practice, and what does the study of affect contribute to practice-based studies. This pa…
Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies
This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data tha…
Shadow organizing
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional organizing. The term intra-activity refers to relationships between multiple elements (human and more-than-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries. The paper aims at reframing organizing, as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements, b…
Se ha agotado la crítica de la teoría de la práctica
En este artículo se plantea la cuestión de si, durante la última década, los estudios empíricos de las prácticas cognitivas han perdido tanto su impulso como la energía necesaria para continuar el trabajo de redefinición del estatuto del conocimiento en las sociedades contemporáneas y en estudios organizacionales. Ilustra cómo el movimiento intelectual, que se ha comprometido con los estudios empíricos del conocimiento como práctica situada, tamb…
Has practice theory run out of steam
The article poses the question of whether in the past ten years the empirical study of knowledge practices has lost momentum and the energy to continue in redefining the status of knowledge in contemporary society and in organization studies. It illustrates how the intellectual movement that has been made possible by the empirical study of knowing as a situated practice has been a movement towards the de-centering of the human subject. A posthuma…
La théorie de la pratique serait-elle à court de carburant
Cet article pose la question de savoir si, au cours des dix dernières années, les études empiriques des pratiques cognitives auraient perdu tant leur élan que l'énergie nécessaire pour poursuivre le travail de redéfinition du statut des connaissances dans les sociétés contemporaines et dans les études organisationnelles. Il illustre comment le mouvement intellectuel, qui a été engagé avec les études empiriques de la connaissance comme pratique si…
To start practice theorizing anew
The journal Organization was a precursor of the turn to practice with its 2000 Special Issue, and the burgeoning number of special issues between 2000 and 2011 testifies to the vitality of a field under construction. Nowadays, the consolidation of the field makes it possible to start to understand and spell out differences and, in so doing, to promote lines of practice theorizing with a greater internal consistency. This article contributes to th…
Daughters taking over the family business
Purpose – This paper aims to explore gender and legitimacy in family business succession. Design/methodology/approach – Within the theoretical framework of French pragmatic sociology, the authors conceptualise the family business as the locus where two regimes of engagement are present, generating the co-presence of two orders of worth, namely the domestic and the industrial. Taking a processual approach to entrepreneuring, and using case studies…
Learning
Reading the past to imagine the future
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ten years of the journal through a personal reflection. Design/methodology/approach – A review of the articles published in the last ten years. Findings – I argue that what has distinguished QROM in these ten years are two distinctive features: reflexivity on practices of qualitative research, and openness to the application of qualitative methods to unusual research topics. Originality/…
“I Sign, Therefore I am” (Un)stable Traces of Professional Practices
Signatures will be read as (un)stable traces of professional knowledges, practices, and identities. The paper intends to propose a theoretical framework to explore the sociomateriality of signature in occupational and professional practices. This exploration will be conducted by assuming a practice-based approach to “signing in practice” and therefore by paying attention to knowing as a situated practice within organizations. The aim of the paper…
Between the hand and the head
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add a new term to the vocabulary of practice-based studies: “formativeness”, which denotes the kind of knowledge that is generated in the process of realizing the object of the practice and that is discovered while the form of the object is being shaped. This term focuses the analysis on how the elements of a practice are held together, rather than on what elements are involved in a practice. Design/metho…
What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories tol…
Staging precariousness
The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates…
How to Conduct a Practice-based Study
Contents: Introduction 1. How Ordinary Work is Practically Accomplished 2. Working in Coordination Centres 3. Sensible Knowledge and Knowledgeable Bodies 4. Sociomaterial Practices and Technological Environments 5. Learning to Talk in Practice and About Practice 6. On Rules, on Knowing the Rules and on Ordinary Prescription 7. Representing the Textures of Practices 8. Ethnography for the Practice-based Design of Information Systems 9. Towards a P…
Doing Gender, Doing Entrepreneurship
Traditional literature and research on entrepreneurship relies on a model of economic rationality alleged to be universal and agendered. This article presents a description of the processes that position people as 'men' and 'women' within entrepreneurial practices and as 'entrepreneurs' within gender practices, relying on an ethnographic study carried out in small enterprises in Italy. Our analysis shows how gender and entrepreneurship are enacte…
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 gend…
From Organizational Learning to Practice-Based Knowing
L'A. se penche sur les biais qui jalonnent la recherche en apprentissage organisationnel. Il souligne alors l'importance de la pratique pour obtenir un savoir situe spatialement et factuellement
Theorizing affective ethnography for organization studies
This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data tha…
Learning the Trade
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…
Telemedicine
Telecardiological consultancy, enabling distant consultation between cardiologist and the general practitioner in the presence of the patient and relying on a technological infrastructure, is a new medical working practice. This article proposes a practice-based approach in order to study it as an object emerging from a local ecology of human and non-human. An analytical framework proposes three interpretative lines: a reading of practice ‘from o…
Readingwriting
In this paper, we share with the reader our individual and collective experience of a reading circle organised during the pandemic, at a time of social distancing. The collective reading allowed ‘us’ to become-with other humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans with the materiality of different bodies. The reading circle allowed individual vulnerability to be shared in a process of becoming-together a multiple ‘Author’ who authored a ‘Composition…
The Passion for Knowing
Covid‐19 as a breakdown in the texture of social practices
A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitation - sent by one of the authors to the others - led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By di…
If we practice posthumanist research, do we need ‘gender’ any longer
This article offers a reflection around the question of ‘do we need ‘gender’ any longer?’ In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a ‘concept as/instead of method’ line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender ‘the forces it needs to return to life’ or the forces to abandon it. I propose four diff…
Gendered Organizational Cultures
The paper will present various self‐identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual prac…
Has practice theory run out of steam
The article poses the question of whether in the past ten years the empirical study of knowledge practices has lost momentum and the energy to continue in redefining the status of knowledge in contemporary society and in organization studies. It illustrates how the intellectual movement that has been made possible by the empirical study of knowing as a situated practice has been a movement towards the de-centering of the human subject. A posthuma…
Daughters taking over the family business
Purpose – This paper aims to explore gender and legitimacy in family business succession. Design/methodology/approach – Within the theoretical framework of French pragmatic sociology, the authors conceptualise the family business as the locus where two regimes of engagement are present, generating the co-presence of two orders of worth, namely the domestic and the industrial. Taking a processual approach to entrepreneuring, and using case studies…
What makes a “good manager”? Positioning gender and management in students’ narratives
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the relationships between gender and management in the narratives of students. More specifically, the authors discuss how the discourse on management is mobilized as a discursive practice able to make some form of that activity thinkable and practicable: who can be a CEO? What kind of managerial competencies are attributed to men/women CEOs? What kind of moral order is expressed in the stories tol…
Staging precariousness
The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates…
Aujourd'hui les plaques sont molles
Cet article propose une méthode d'analyse ethnographique des savoirs pratiques appelée ' interview avec un sosie '. Cette approche suggère d'interpréter le processus socio-cognitif de prise de décision comme une activité située ; elle vise à proposer une description fine du ' freinage ouvrier ' en l'interprétant fondamentalement comme un processus de gestion de l'ambiguïté. Un prédicat linguistique provenant du cas étudié (une phrase liée au prod…
La théorie de la pratique serait-elle à court de carburant
Cet article pose la question de savoir si, au cours des dix dernières années, les études empiriques des pratiques cognitives auraient perdu tant leur élan que l'énergie nécessaire pour poursuivre le travail de redéfinition du statut des connaissances dans les sociétés contemporaines et dans les études organisationnelles. Il illustre comment le mouvement intellectuel, qui a été engagé avec les études empiriques de la connaissance comme pratique si…
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 gend…
Speaking Personally
When will he say
The article proposes a method for ethnographic studies based on “interview with the double”. This approach suggests interpreting the cognitive process of collective decision-making as a situated activity, and provides an interpretive description of “quota restriction” as management of ambiguity. The linguistic constract “today the plates are soft” emphasises the social function of this symbolic phrase, internally to Signor Rossi's occupational co…
Gendered Organizational Cultures
The paper will present various self‐identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual prac…
Gendered Organizational Cultures
The paper will present various self‐identity narratives of women pioneers in male occupations who ‘take their place’ in a male gendered organizational culture. These narratives belong to a single discourse of what may be called ‘travellers in a male world’. This discourse presumes the existence of a territory marked out as male which is trespassed upon by females who are formally members of the same occupational community, but who, in actual prac…
Toward a Social Understanding of How People Learn in Organizations
In this article we submit the view that learning in the workplace is to be understood both as a cognitive and a social activity. We support our claim by introducing and discussing the concept of `situated curriculum', a specific form of social order that instructs the socialization of novices within the context of ongoing work activities. We describe both the nature and features of the situated curriculum, discussing the factors that make it char…
Man-Made Disasters 20 years later
(1999). Man-Made Disasters 20 years later: Critical commentary. Health, Risk & Society: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 233-239
Practice-Based Theorizing on Learning and Knowing in Organizations
To Transfer is to Transform
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 practic…
Creating and recreating gender order in organizations
From Organizational Learning to Practice-Based Knowing
L'A. se penche sur les biais qui jalonnent la recherche en apprentissage organisationnel. Il souligne alors l'importance de la pratique pour obtenir un savoir situe spatialement et factuellement
Learning the Trade
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…
Entrepreneur‐mentality, gender and the study of women entrepreneurs
Uses the neologism “entrepreneur mentality” – paying implicit homage to Foucault's 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 entreprene…
Doing Gender, Doing Entrepreneurship
Traditional literature and research on entrepreneurship relies on a model of economic rationality alleged to be universal and agendered. This article presents a description of the processes that position people as 'men' and 'women' within entrepreneurial practices and as 'entrepreneurs' within gender practices, relying on an ethnographic study carried out in small enterprises in Italy. Our analysis shows how gender and entrepreneurship are enacte…
Knowing in a System of Fragmented Knowledge
Knowing is a situated activity. Adopting a practice-based approach, this article describes a workplace characterized by technologically dense practices as a setting in which human actors and technological objects work “together.” The case of remote cardiological consultation is paradigmatic of how information and communication technologies (ICT) enter workplaces and reshape them as “systems of fragmented knowledge:” that is, learning settings in …
The Passion for Knowing
Aujourd'hui les plaques sont molles
Cet article propose une méthode d'analyse ethnographique des savoirs pratiques appelée ' interview avec un sosie '. Cette approche suggère d'interpréter le processus socio-cognitif de prise de décision comme une activité située ; elle vise à proposer une description fine du ' freinage ouvrier ' en l'interprétant fondamentalement comme un processus de gestion de l'ambiguïté. Un prédicat linguistique provenant du cas étudié (une phrase liée au prod…
Introduction
Storytelling and Change
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…
Through the practice lens
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 colle…
Time & Society Review of Books http
Telemedicine
Telecardiological consultancy, enabling distant consultation between cardiologist and the general practitioner in the presence of the patient and relying on a technological infrastructure, is a new medical working practice. This article proposes a practice-based approach in order to study it as an object emerging from a local ecology of human and non-human. An analytical framework proposes three interpretative lines: a reading of practice ‘from o…
Egg dates sperm
The aim of this article is to enlarge practice-based studies to the consideration of institutional environment and institutional work, opening a dialogue with neo-institutionalism and, in so doing, advance the growing field of sociology of practice. This study attempts to do this by answering the question: how does a change in a practice become stabilized and what does the new practice do, once stabilized? Within practice-based studies, most stud…
L’entreprise créatrice, Le rôle des récits, des objets et de l’acteur dans l’invention, H. Mialet
Comment une nouvelle idée scientifique naît-elle ? Pourquoi est-elle conçue par un individu plutôt que par un autre ? Que se passe-t-il entre le moment où l’idée novatrice est conçue et sa reconnaissance publique ? Comment le créateur peut-il se faire aussi l’entrepreneur de ses propres idées ? Voilà autant de questions auxquelles la recherche empirique menée par Hélène Mialet entend fournir des réponses. Ces questions, inscrites de longue date a…
How to Conduct a Practice-based Study
Contents: Introduction 1. How Ordinary Work is Practically Accomplished 2. Working in Coordination Centres 3. Sensible Knowledge and Knowledgeable Bodies 4. Sociomaterial Practices and Technological Environments 5. Learning to Talk in Practice and About Practice 6. On Rules, on Knowing the Rules and on Ordinary Prescription 7. Representing the Textures of Practices 8. Ethnography for the Practice-based Design of Information Systems 9. Towards a P…
Sociology (38 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (24 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Social science (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works)