The awareness of having a good information quality (IQ) in organizations has been increasing in the past decades. Despite that the well-accepted definition of information quality emphasizes the fitness of information to its consumers, IQ itself is known as context sensitive (Wang and Strong, 1996). It may be perceived differently depending on different contexts. This thesis presents a study of investigating IQ under the lens of practice theory. Practice theory intends to reveal the very idea of how the nexuses of human activities are organized (Schatzki, 2001). In this thesis, IQ was interpreted under the lens of Swidler’s perspective on practice theory specifically (2001), who stresses culture as the core that lies behind every aspect of social causation. The purpose of this study is to gain an in-depth knowledge on information quality. The empirical setting in this study is the sibling support system in Sweden, which has a rather unique organizational context as they do not have a classic top-down organizational structure and standard working procedure. The inquiry of this study focuses on three aspects; how IQ is perceived under this particular organizational context and the reasons behind it, also whether IQ is context sensitive in this type of organization. A mixed methods research was performed as the research methodology. A questionnaire was firstly sent out to the participants, and then interviews were followed up in order to obtain more detailed information. The contribution includes an account on a new perception on IQ under this specific organizational setting, and why it is perceived in such a way. Also the answer to whether IQ is context sensitive in this kind of organization is argued. Further secondary findings on the issues raised from the applied questionnaire are presented, as they are unexpectedly uncovered but worth attention for future IQ studies. This study presents a new angle of perceiving IQ, which offers certain reference value to future relevant studies.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the process of creativity in advertising from a practice-based perspective and illustrate the dynamics and relations between practices that can constitute this phenomenon. A nine month long ethnographic study was conducted in the context of an international advertising agency in Iran, where the organisational aim of doing being creative is in contradiction with the broader social system of the country which largely promotes conservative thinking. Such tension makes practitioners aware of their intertwinement with the practices involved in the creativity process and thus it is easier for them to reflect on what they are doing (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2011). This setting thus provides a good platform to capture the logic of practices. By drawing on Schatzki’s (1996) theories of practice, the everyday practices of creatives, their interaction with other members of their advertising agency, their clients and audiences as well as with existing advertising and ideas within the social and situational milieux from the start of a campaign until receiving approval are examined. The findings indicate various stakeholders participate in the process of creativity in advertising, such as creatives, other ad agency members, the client, the campaign’s audience, and the governmental officers, all of whom can have different requirements and preferences. While prior literature makes valuable contributions to our understanding of creativity in advertising agencies, in particular related to the important features of the creative outcome, the environmental factors that hinder or foster creativity and the people involved, particularly those individuals that are responsible for delivering creativity, their traits and personalities, we lack an understanding of its process and the recursive roles of environmental and structural factors that can shape and be shaped by the process of creativity in advertising. The present study contributes to this literature by adopting a practice lens revealing the process of creativity in advertising to be entwined in relational/socio-material practice, be the alignment of different preferences of various stakeholders, and be a cumulative process. In addition, techniques for pursuing different end tasks are explored and practices are found to be carriers of culture, and the internal and external rewards in practices are found to be the perceived competences of a practice and the embracing of the identity of a practice respectively. Finally, some managerial implications based on the outcomes of this research are proposed. These cover the establishment of practice-based guidelines with a corresponding reward system for evaluating creativity in advertising, introducing an appropriate physical layout and structures for ad agencies that can enable the alignment of various objectives and avoid potential tensions, providing a comprehensive induction and training for staff, ensuring an organisational flat structure as well as deploying collaboration as the most appropriate type of leadership for controlling creatives.

The French Counts of St. Hubert is a group of aristocrats who left France for homesteads in the Canadian North-West during the late nineteenth century. They settled near and within the town of Whitewood, Saskatchewan, most notably along the Pipestone Valley. The aristocrats attempted to carve out a living in the Prairie West while at the same time maintaining their connections with Europe. Their attempted numerous business ventures all ended in failure, including forays into sheep-herding, horse-raising, cheese production, coffee manufacturing, and sugar beet refining. The Counts also brought with them a large number of French immigrants to act as labourers and establish a Francophone settlement. St. Hubert would become a vibrant community throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The participation of the aristocrats, however, was short-lived. All returned to France by the early 1900s.<p> One of the homesteads associated with the French aristocrats is called Bellevue (Borden No. EbMo-5), a home erected by Comte de Rouffignac in 1888 and eventually transported to another location in 1926. The location of the original homestead was the subject of excavations by the author in the summer of 2006. Over 3000 artifacts were recovered from 17 square metres of excavation. While most of these artifacts are fragmentary in nature, a number of them have implications for understanding the social identity of the French aristocrats.<p> This thesis discusses the social identity of the French aristocrats as framed through the theoretical perspective of practice theory. This social identity is formulated through the expectations they carried into an unfamiliar social space that required experience and compromise to negotiate a position within the social field accepted by all parties. Ethnicity, class, ideology, and gender all played roles in the formulation of this identity. Artifacts from the Bellevue excavation are used to highlight the materiality of the French aristocratic social identity in the Prairie West.

The French Counts of St. Hubert is a group of aristocrats who left France for homesteads in the Canadian North-West during the late nineteenth century. They settled near and within the town of Whitewood, Saskatchewan, most notably along the Pipestone Valley. The aristocrats attempted to carve out a living in the Prairie West while at the same time maintaining their connections with Europe. Their attempted numerous business ventures all ended in failure, including forays into sheep-herding, horse-raising, cheese production, coffee manufacturing, and sugar beet refining. The Counts also brought with them a large number of French immigrants to act as labourers and establish a Francophone settlement. St. Hubert would become a vibrant community throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The participation of the aristocrats, however, was short-lived. All returned to France by the early 1900s.<p> One of the homesteads associated with the French aristocrats is called Bellevue (Borden No. EbMo-5), a home erected by Comte de Rouffignac in 1888 and eventually transported to another location in 1926. The location of the original homestead was the subject of excavations by the author in the summer of 2006. Over 3000 artifacts were recovered from 17 square metres of excavation. While most of these artifacts are fragmentary in nature, a number of them have implications for understanding the social identity of the French aristocrats.<p> This thesis discusses the social identity of the French aristocrats as framed through the theoretical perspective of practice theory. This social identity is formulated through the expectations they carried into an unfamiliar social space that required experience and compromise to negotiate a position within the social field accepted by all parties. Ethnicity, class, ideology, and gender all played roles in the formulation of this identity. Artifacts from the Bellevue excavation are used to highlight the materiality of the French aristocratic social identity in the Prairie West.

How do security communities develop in and through practice? For more than forty years, security relations between Russia and NATO member states were structured by the spectre of mutual assured destruction as symbolized by thousands of nuclear missiles targeted at each other. Less than a generation after the end of the Cold War, the possibility of military confrontation between these former enemies has considerably receded. Taking inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, this dissertation develops a theory of practice of security communities that argues that on the ground of international politics, the social fact of peace emerges when security practitioners come to debate with diplomacy—the non-violent settlement of disputes—instead of about diplomacy. It is doxa, a relationship of immediate adherence to the order of things, that makes such a peaceful practical sense possible. In the empirical analysis, the dissertation reveals an intriguing paradox in the post-Cold War Russian-Atlantic relationship. On the one hand, over the last fifteen years Russia and NATO member states have solved each and every one of their disputes, including fierce ones over the double enlargement, by nonviolent means. Such a track record of peaceful change is testimony to security-communitybuilding processes. But on the other hand, diplomatic success was often bought at the price of a growing mistrust on the Russian side. As the Russian Great Power habitus resurfaced, hysteresis—a disconnect between players’ dispositions and their positions in the game—steadily increased to the point of inconclusive symbolic power struggles over the rules of the international security game and the roles that each player should play. A decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, Russian-Atlantic relations have left the terrain of military confrontation but have yet to settle on that of mature peace. Building on several dozen interviews with Russian and NATO security practitioners, the dissertation discovers that diplomacy has become a normal though not a self-evident practice in Russian-Atlantic dealings.

How do security communities develop in and through practice? For more than forty years, security relations between Russia and NATO member states were structured by the spectre of mutual assured destruction as symbolized by thousands of nuclear missiles targeted at each other. Less than a generation after the end of the Cold War, the possibility of military confrontation between these former enemies has considerably receded. Taking inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, this dissertation develops a theory of practice of security communities that argues that on the ground of international politics, the social fact of peace emerges when security practitioners come to debate with diplomacy—the non-violent settlement of disputes—instead of about diplomacy. It is doxa, a relationship of immediate adherence to the order of things, that makes such a peaceful practical sense possible. In the empirical analysis, the dissertation reveals an intriguing paradox in the post-Cold War Russian-Atlantic relationship. On the one hand, over the last fifteen years Russia and NATO member states have solved each and every one of their disputes, including fierce ones over the double enlargement, by nonviolent means. Such a track record of peaceful change is testimony to security-communitybuilding processes. But on the other hand, diplomatic success was often bought at the price of a growing mistrust on the Russian side. As the Russian Great Power habitus resurfaced, hysteresis—a disconnect between players’ dispositions and their positions in the game—steadily increased to the point of inconclusive symbolic power struggles over the rules of the international security game and the roles that each player should play. A decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, Russian-Atlantic relations have left the terrain of military confrontation but have yet to settle on that of mature peace. Building on several dozen interviews with Russian and NATO security practitioners, the dissertation discovers that diplomacy has become a normal though not a self-evident practice in Russian-Atlantic dealings.

Academic perspectives on the meanings of luxury often link luxury to status or conspicuous consumption, assuming that luxury derives its meaning primarily from a traditional viewpoint, in which it is narrowly associated with generic economic and social displays of superiority, as attained through the rhetoric of wealth (Vickers and Renand, 2003; Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). However, this traditional view of luxury fails to appreciate the cultural and emotional complexity of luxury consumption: this rather limited interpretation therefore risks rendering consumers as passive and primarily homogeneous entities. This thesis argues that the term ‘luxury’ has little meaning unless it is integrated within the current ‘practices’ of consumer culture. Thus, the study conceptualises luxury from a consumer perspective, wherein meanings are understood as resulting from luxury consumption practices adopted by diverse sets of consumers across cultures. Sixteen UK and Sixteen Thai undergraduate and postgraduate students were selected to participate in two stages of data collection, involving collage construction, in-depth interviews and further fieldwork. The findings extends the existing research on luxury by developing four practices of luxury consumption: caretaker, escapist, self-transformation, and status-based. Accordingly, the study proposes an alternation view of luxury as ‘everyday luxury’, a view in which consumers can transfer and incorporate self-defined luxuries into everyday contexts. The notion of everyday luxury fundamentally allows us to move beyond a purely materialistic understanding of luxury in order to reach a metaphysical account of luxury as a subjective, moral, ephemeral and immaterial concept present in our everyday living. Moreover, this idea considerably fulfils our understanding of contemporary luxury so that traditional luxury (Veblen, 1902) and everyday luxury can co-exist within the concept of luxury. Overall, the subjective truth of the meaning of luxury in a cross-cultural context is regarded as combining the construct and outcome of a reciprocal interaction between both traditional and everyday luxury, the understanding of the self and morality within different cultures and societies, and different reflections on individuals’ lived experiences.

Traditional analyses of operational effectiveness often lack consideration of civil-military relations. However, in operations with complex and ambitious political aims, such as democratization, stabilization and reconstruction, economic development, and respect for human rights, taking a comprehensive approach (the co-ordination of military, diplomatic, and development efforts) is essential. The creation of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan aimed to essentially operationalize the comprehensive approach but was largely viewed as ineffective. The aim of this thesis is to increase the understanding of why the comprehensive approach in PRTs failed to live up to its potential and increase operational effectiveness through a comparative case study of US and Canada PRTs. As often is the case with complex peace operations, the mandates given to both military and civilian leaders are usually broad with little detail and thus are open for interpretation. As such, leadership has significant leeway as to how to conduct the operation, and many leaders have different ways of doing everyday things based on their own dispositions. The current theorizing of civil-military relations largely relies on rationalist and positivist assumptions which cannot readily capture the everyday experiences and dispositions of interveners and are less than insightful when it comes to describing and explaining the nuances of civil-military relations. By using a practice theory lens (specifically Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, capital, and hysteresis), allows one to move away from models of actions based on realist assumptions and analyze civil-military relations as the result of different processes, practices, and systems of knowledge. The principal argument of this thesis is that because the habitus of the US and Canada were so misaligned with the field, actual operationalization (or embodiment) of the comprehensive approach was very sporadic and was largely dependent on leadership personality, which negatively effected effectiveness. Without understanding the systems of knowledge and sense-making (the habitus) that underlie decision-making processes one cannot assume that leadership will change its everyday practices to better embody the comprehensive approach. Without this understanding, it is necessary to put in place standard practices, such as training and clearer mandates, to help mitigate hysteresis (or the lag between generating practices that are in line with the new conditions).

The aim of this thesis is to examine the professional role of school social workers in Sweden from the perspective of profession theory, with particular focus on legitimacy, jurisdiction and discretion. The aim has been divided into four research questions, which are examined in four separate studies: How has the school social work profession emerged and developed? How do school social workers experience boundaries to their professional discretion? How are theories of social work practice applied in school social work? How do school social workers and teachers perceive their cooperation with regard to the wellbeing of pupils? The general area of interest concerns professionals operating in organizations where they are the sole representatives of their profession. In addition, these professionals typically have a peripheral position in relation to the core professions in the organization. The four different studies build on empirical material from qualitative interviews with school social workers and teachers, and also from policy and regulatory documents. The theoretical framework guiding the analysis draws on theories from the sociology of professions (Abbott, 1988) and about human service organizations (Hasenfeld, 1983, 2010). A key finding is that school social worker has a specific technology based on well-established practice theories in social work, where a systems approach appears as the most prominent. Although, it was possible to discern such practice theories from the interviews, the school social workers did not explicitly give reference to them and generally struggled to describe their practice in a professional language. A second key finding result is the lack of clarity with regards to the school social worker’s role. This is evidenced in regulatory documents, as well as among social workers themselves and teachers. In theory, this provides school social workers with a high degree of discretion. However, due to legitimacy problems they feel limited in performing their work unless they can rely on support from other sources such strong support from headmasters. A third key finding is that the cooperation with teachers is all-important to school social workers. They spend a considerable proportion of their time working with teachers rather than pupils, not the least by providing informal consultations to teachers.  On a rhetoric level, teachers agree with social workers about the value and need of school social work. However, they tend to disagree about the role of school social work when they talk about concrete practice. As an overall conclusion the school social worker appears as a critical guest, drawing on a professional foundation in social work theory that contributes uniquely to pupil health care. This distinguishes the school social workers’ role from other professionals in the school setting. The findings in this thesis indicate the need for both education and research in the discipline of social work to start paying attention to social work in schools and other settings where social workers represents a minority occupation peripheral to the host organisation.

Identities are forged through interaction, as people simultaneously seek to distinguish themselves from--and are influenced by--other populations. This dynamic is especially pronounced along frontiers, where multiple societies engage in sustained contact. Centuries of interaction between Spanish colonial and indigenous populations in New Mexico blurred the traditional social categories of caste and race, prompting the colonists to conceptualize themselves in new ways. In the late eighteenth century, Hispanic New Mexicans began to self-identify as Vecinos (literally, "neighbors"). This term described a civic rather than ethnic identity, characterizing individuals as residents and members of a Hispanic corporate community. This social category was particularly relevant in the multiethnic settlements along the eastern frontier, where Vecinos regularly interacted with Plains Indian nomads, Pueblo villagers, semi-nomadic Apache bands, and American traders and immigrants. One such settlement was San Miguel del Vado, established around 1794 as part of a community land grant in the Upper Pecos River Valley. Situated just east of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains beside a ford ("vado") in the river, this settlement served as a gateway between New Mexico and the Great Plains, hosting Plains Indian and American traders during the Spanish colonial and Mexican periods and American immigrants after the United States conquered the territory in 1846. These interactions shaped Vecino identity within San Miguel del Vado, motivating residents to distinguish themselves from outsiders while introducing foreign goods and concepts. Vecino identity was expressed and reinforced through the structure and routine of daily life within Hispanic villages; therefore, it can be interpreted archaeologically through an examination of spatial organization and the material remains of daily practices. Similarly, distinctive regional or temporal patterns within these data can provide insight into the different forces shaping Vecino identity across space and over time. In this way, this dissertation utilizes archaeological data to explore the expression and evolution of Vecino identity at San Miguel del Vado, and to place this site within a regional and historical framework. These archaeological data are supplemented with historical sources and interpreted using a framework derived from archaeological theories of culture contact, identity, and practice.