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In this article, we report on our experiences of collaborating for seven years in an international virtual team of nine researchers, where a mix of digital technologies, were used for team collaboration. We explore the experiences of the team members as different digital technologies became entangled in the 'texture of practice' of our work community and tease out the implications for what this meant for us as team members. We offer two interconnected contributions. First, we show how adopting a relational perspective through the concept of texture of practices helps unpack the sociomaterial context in which virtual teamwork takes place, unveiling a complexity of different situated, individual and affective practices. Our research uncovers the micro-level practices that make team members visible to each other, thereby showing how different types of 'visibility' emerge relationally in practices rather than solely as an affordance of technology. Second, we show how this texture of practices renders team members visible to each other differently in time and in (the virtual) space, challenging the line-of-sight of the work-place community. Together, these contributions offer novel insight into the difficulties for the members of a work community to stay within the line-of-sight of each other when collaborating virtually.MAD-statementThis article aims to Make A Difference (MAD) by exploring how a virtual work community unfolds with digital technologies. A study of the mobilization of multiple digital tools for collaboration and interaction amongst the members of a virtual team highlights how the humans and technologies of the team became connected in a complex 'texture of practices'. When considering new technologies for collaboration in a work community, this needs to be considered to not disturb the work community's 'line-of-sight'.

This chapter examines how contemporary imaginaries of artificial intelligence shape visions of the future and the assumptions about humanness they rely on. By analysing representations of AI in popular science, it explores how these narratives construct expectations, frame societal debates, and influence the cultural understanding of both AI and humanness. By tracing how these accounts mobilise hopes, fears, and normative assumptions, the chapter shows how popular science functions as a key discursive arena in which AI’s meaning is negotiated, and wider socio-political trajectories are legitimised. The chapter displays the narrative arcs that frame AI as inevitable, transformative, or existential, producing partial imaginaries that reduce humanness to narrow models of intelligence, agency, and sociality while obscuring the institutional and political conditions from which AI emerges. Arguing that narratives themselves are performative and future-shaping, we call for greater scepticism toward these prognoses and advocate alternative voices to develop more plural, situated languages of AI and humanness.

Blue-collar steel industry workers have traditionally been engaged in hard, physical, manual labour, but with the transformation of Industry 4.0, the need for manual human labour is reduced. In this article we explore the consequences of this transformation for the constructions of discursive positioning of the blue-collar worker. Analysing the material from 89 interviews from five steel companies in Sweden we analyse the the linguistic constructions of concept: what the blue-collar worker is and might become in Industry 4.0, and the consequences this concept has for the blue-collar worker as object: who the blue-collar worker is, and who (s)he is not. This shows that blue-collar workers are constructed as skilled and equal to white-collar workers, but also as deskilled and standardized.

Furthermore, inclusion into this equal and standardized workforce is constructed as being based on abilities and experiences that are only shared by a fragment of the population; the young, well-versed, socially skilled, and fast learners, with permanent contracts. The study contributes with an understanding of how social polarization is taking place in contemporary industry and points to the need for management, labour unions and to take the constructions of social inclusion and exclusion in daily interactions in the workplace seriously, in order for the development towards an innovative, human-centric Industry 5.0 to become just and fair.

In this paper, we propose that drawing on our "feeling of being out of place" when seeking research access can be a valuable source for methodological reflexivity. Drawing on the concept of affective spacing, we examine why and how "feelings of being out of place" emerge as we approach research settings, what emerges as matters of concern in this process and what insights attending to these feelings can provide. We conclude by discussing the revelatory and consequential implications that affective spacing can have for our research. This, we argue, can also help better prepare qualitative scholars to acknowledge and navigate their own involvement in their research.

 This study responds to the need in social entrepreneurship research for more empirical studies to clarify the meaning of social value. Specially, it aims to explore the meaning of social value communicated on social media (SoMe) within the local context of a social enterprise (SE).Design/methodology/approachA multimodal social semiotic approach was applied to several hundred Facebook posts of a Finnish SE providing elderly care solutions, complemented by secondary data from high-quality press sources.FindingsBuilding on Young's (2006) dimensions of social value and Hidalgo et al.'s (2021) theorisation of social capital in social entrepreneurship, the authors find that an SE draws on multiple levels of social capital on SoMe to express the meaning of the social value it creates.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough limited to one case, this study provides a deep contextual understanding of how SEs can give meaning to social value and leverage social capital on SoMe to do so.Practical implicationsThe authors offer a contextually embedded framework for SEs to communicate social value through media. This approach enables SEs to engage stakeholders more effectively and improve the quality of support for local initiatives.Social implicationsImprovements in SEs' ability to communicate social value will increase their legitimacy, thus enhancing their prospects to survive and create sustained social value.Originality/valueThe authors strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of social value by being among the first to empirically describe its connection to social capital in an SE, thereby deepening previous studies on subjective social value. Methodologically, this study is the first, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to apply social semiotics to research on SEs.

This study scrutinizes how the effect of artificial intelligence on workerwelfare is discussed in banking-related news media. We reviewed 162articles from 2021 to 2023 and found only 47 articles that mentionedworkers. Among these articles, where business leaders and other industryexperts were interviewed, a prevailing trend was the lack of attention toworker welfare concerns. However, Fintech innovations pose potentialthreats to working conditions if left unchecked. Despite academicevidence of work intensification and surveillance from AI, the publicdiscourse, including that of union executives, lacks acknowledgment ofthese issues. Urgent action is needed to address these overlookedconcerns and ensure the well-being of bank employees amidsttechnological advancements, now and in the future.