Social Practice Theory and Organization

This book presents an at-home ethnography of innovation and innovation workers within a cross-functional engineering team in the medical device industry. Written from the position of a natural insider, it combines theoretical engagement with detailed accounts from the often-forgotten members in organizational research fieldwork, namely through an examination of the workers themselves. Focusing on often-overlooked organizational actors, the study follows engineers through their daily work and life at work during a period of heightened program tension as deadlines intensify. Attending closely to the team's social practices and their innate roots, the book examines how work is organized, negotiated, and enacted across R&D and clinical sites, where engineers encounter the needs of clinicians and potential users, at times in surprising ways. Alongside ethnographic description, the analysis engages practice-oriented theory to explore moral, identity, power, and tactical dimensions of organizational life, and their relationship to broader ontological structures of work. The book develops a conceptual model and analytical framework for interrogating the conditions, meanings, and lived realities of work and work life, revealing the depth and humanity embedded in everyday organizational practice as life at work.

Kristina Leppälä is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Eastern Finland Business School. Her current research primarily concentrates on the navigation and enactments of sustainability and the circular economy. Her research interests include practice theoretical approaches to multi-actor collaboration, materials, technology, and industrial transitions toward sustainability. Leppälä joined academia after a long career in the high-tech industrial sector. Leppälä is affiliated with the Research Center for Sustainable Circular Economy, based in Finland. She has been a visiting researcher at Exeter University (UK) and twice to Stanford University's Institute for Research on the Social Sciences (IRiSS) (USA), the latter as a Fulbright Finland scholar (2025). She serves on many boards and is frequently a visiting speaker at academic and public events. Leppälä has made her home in Finland for decades, and maintains close ties to the US where she was born and raised.

1. The nuanced examination of workers in organizations 2. Ontological assumptions and examinations of the workplace 3. Practice orientations 4. Navigation of the enactments in the field: Ethnographic vignettes form the field of medical device development 5. Model and frameworks for social practice trades 6. Looking back, going forward