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As for the previous one, aim of the present chapter is to offer a comprehensive theoretical framework of cognitive dissonance. After the definition offered by Festinger, the founder of cognitive dissonance theory, at first the context of cognitive dissonance is examined, which mainly refer to the involvement toward the product and the lack of control on the purchasing process, and gives rise to a state of discomfort. Strategies which companies can put in place to help consumers reduce the adverse state of cognitive dissonance are proposed in the final part of the chapter.

Online sales for companies have become indispensable to reach the global market's consumers. To facilitate the purchasing process, however, it's essential to design websites taking attention to all those aspects that contribute to determining their quality and ability to meet the needs of both the e-commerce and the end-user. In particular, when we refer to kids’ products sale, personalized e-commerce services are necessary, bearing in mind the role of emotions on customers’ behaviour and the particular attention that parents pay to products quality. The paper aims to understand behaviours and buying habits’ changes of parents and adults in general, with a particular focus on the processes of choice, purchase and post-sale concerning online sales platforms for children's products. The research reports an analysis of 16 major online retail platforms currently existing globally, divided between child-specific and generic, evaluating aspects related to on-line Customer Journey and User Experience (UX).

In today's world, social media is already a full-fledged part of the marketing mix. Their growth has been huge in recent years. Our paper seeks to analyze the metrics that make up social media engagement and their relationship with consumer’s purchase intentions. The variables examined in our study were the number of likes, comments, shares, followers, and respondents' purchase intentions. Data for this study were collected via the CAWI - computer assisted web interviewing method. The dataset consisted of 372 respondents. In the study, we analyzed the degree of correlation for the four established hypotheses. The results indicate the statistical significance of the examined relationships for all selected social media exposure metrics. These findings were presented in the context of existing research with an aim to expand current knowledge in this area. The results support the perceived importance of these variables in the purchasing process while proving important for e-commerce and s-commerce.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has become an important tool in manufacturing companies that seek to improve their competitiveness by adapting their manufacturing processes to their customer requirements. In this study, the authors seek to deepen the knowledge about the disruptive potential impact of additive manufacturing (AM) implementation in aerospace sector purchasing processes. During the study it has been analyzed the changes on the purchasing processes, activities, and cost-related issues, when aerospace companies decide to change from their traditional manufacturing models to one new manufacturing model based on AM adoption. Result analysis allow authors to infer quite several relevant changes in terms of purchasing function definitions, investments, and costs involved which could be relevant to consider before AM implementation is decided by aerospace companies.

Having good suppliers not only means having quality supplies, it also means having low costs. Suppliers play a fundamental role in the production process from the acquisition of raw materials and even in the design and innovation of products. After an analysis of the literature related to the objective of the research, this article proposes a methodology for the analysis and selection of suppliers in order to improve the performance of the supply chain and also to be able to face the diversity and complexity of the situations that may arise in the purchasing process. The article provides professionals with flexibility and effectiveness in the selection of suppliers and their selection process, and with a better understanding of their future purchasing strategies. The fundamental findings of this research focus specifically on the determination and analysis of the main methods quantitative used in the selection of the supplier. The proposed methodology is applied in a company in the automotive sector and there is a good expectation of the methodology since in the preliminary investigations satisfactory results have been obtained.

Inclusion of ‘circular principles’ in the activities of the purchasing process from the initial stages to the end of product life can help all actors in the value chain to deliver sustainability goals through an active, cost-effective and accountable approach. Yet, research on this linkage has been virtually nonexistent. This study extends perspectives and theories on purchasing and circular economy business models (CEBMs) for engineer-to-order (ETO) production. Based on a case study, a framework that identifies critical purchasing activities relevant for enhancing the implementation of CEBMs is developed. The framework advocates that engaging in the proposed activities can compel the purchasing function to increase its strategic focus by being proactive and relentless in embracing circularity in its agenda. In addition to accentuating the relevance of purchasing function in ETO production, the framework shows how harnessing it can benefit circular strategies.

A new framework that examines consumers’ interaction with fashion products in-depth is introduced. It is based on the idea of transmedia storytelling, a new academic field that has been growing in the last fifteen years. The framework consists of nodes that describe the forces that shape a consumer’s purchasing process. It is a complex, non-linear, synchronous, and asynchronous description of all the external factors that contribute to the sense of self. Its complexity is counterbalanced by the practicality it presents to managers of fashion brands as they often need to assess the forces that influence consumer behavior in a particular market. The brand manager who drafts strategic plans is better equipped to ascertain the future state of affairs with a framework that tests the interconnectivity of the inputs that breed desire for luxury fashion.

Tracking financial data is a task that usually involves intermediaries and this issue has not been totally covered by information systems. Blockchain has been presented as a potential solution though. The aim of this paper is to perform a proof of concept of purchasing management that makes use of blockchain technology in order to track financial data. The adopted methodology was simulation to compare two different scenarios: a traditional purchasing process (As-Is) and another using blockchain (To-Be). The output of the simulations was used to compare the transactional costs of each model measured through two variables: the execution time of placing orders and the number of service stations required. It could be verified that the blockchain network alternative had a superior performance according to the type of architecture employed. In the present study, the private blockchain with proof of work adjusted to seek hashes that begins with two consecutive zeros had the best achievement.

Advances in new computing technologies to gather and process large quantities of information, increased further in the second part of the 2000s. Nowadays, car clients make great use of digital media. Given that potential clients find a huge amount of content online, they make many decisions concerning the purchasing process before visiting a dealership. The marketing content they can find online has a significant impact on these decisions. The development of digital technologies marked the need to extend the “4Ps” of marketing to 7, to include people, process and physical evidence. The impact on the traditional marketing was profound. New technologies made it possible to change the core product and extend it. From the early 2000s, car companies moved towards “selling personal transportation solutions” rather than “just selling cars.” Customers participated in creating products through the web. In the pricing field, transparency increased, downward pressure on prices grew, and dynamic pricing challenged vendor-fixed pricing, especially for the low-cost segments. Regarding place, the relationship between customers and dealers is difficult to replace. Almost everywhere, franchisees have obtained state legislation to protect their positions. However, given that many car buyers make their purchasing decisions before they even consider visiting a dealership, manufacturers often turn to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to present their products. In terms of promotions, the digital age opened up new channels of communication: some people speak of “the end of an era.” In the digital age, customers have access to a large amount of information about products, and power shifts towards them.

The purpose of this article was to identify factors influencing intention to use mobile device during purchasing process. To achieve this goal Technology Acceptance Model extended with additional variables (social influence and perceived enjoyment) was chosen as the research model. There were 500 respondents from 5 Polish cities – Warsaw, Poznan, Gdansk, Wroclaw and Bialystok. Data was collected with paper questionnaire and analyzed with partial least square path modeling (PLS-SEM) method in Smart PLS 3 software. Model explained over 50% of variance of endogenous variable. According to results perceived usefulness has the strongest influence on intention (0.389; p 0.05). Outcomes of the study suggest that sellers should focus on the utilitarian aspects of the mobile sales in the first place (such as providing free delivery of products, offering multitude of payment options and increasing overall performance of their websites), and then also on the facets related to simplifying of the mobile shopping (production of video tutorials, clear and plain explanations regarding purchasing process on the website) and pleasure of the mobile buying process (creation of additional features in the sellers’ applications e.g. quizzes, games or downloadable materials).

Even in the age of online shopping and digital touch points a customer journey has many detours. These complexities in the purchasing process result that customers are ill-supported in their decision process. This can lead to an exclusion of retailers, the purchase of substitute products or churn. On top of this, consumers prefer to purchase products which can be customized or adapted to their individual needs exclusively. This creates even more complexities to the customer journey. In order to accomplish a compelling customer experience, interaction of both consumers and manufactures needs to be taken to a next level. The Internet of Things (IoT) opens for consumers many options to “leapfrog” the customer journey in order to meet before mentioned requirements. It enables to constantly learn from the customer. Thereby it offers potential to improve interaction, innovation, selling, supporting or simplification along a customer’s journey. Powered by artificial intelligence customer experience is able to adapt to the individual customer and its actual behavior or situation. This development could potentially lead Customer Experience Management on a new journey to its next paramount. Also a Telco can benefit by adopting IoT enabling an improved customer experience. But further steps have to be taken to seize these new opportunities for a Telco’s advantage.

The purpose of this research is developing of model of market segmentation for food consumers, as well as determination the extent of influence of various factors influencing the behavior of the Latvian consumers while making the decision on purchase of these goods. In the course of the research approaches to market segmentation of food products consumers were used, as well as statistical data for Latvian food product market, described in literature, also the results of empirical researches. As a result the model of market segmentation for food consumers was developed, the extent of influence of various factors influencing the behavior of the Latvian consumers was determined based on the correlation analysis. The results of the research let the authors to make conclusion and develop recommendations for producers and sellers of food products for possible effective marketing impact on the Latvian food product consumers. The results of the research have as well as theoretical as practical meaning not only for Latvian market subjects, but also for food product market subjects in other countries.

The new marketing practices and developments have had incredible impact on consumers’ purchasing process and information-acquisition process, and most notably, social media is changing marketing. The research setting for this paper refers to consumer behavior on social media services, particularly Facebook and consumers’ interactions with brands on this social platform. Through this research, we examine which consumer behavior concept has a higher impact in generating loyalty for the brands consumers interact with on Facebook. Using Automatic Linear Modeling, we forecast and model a target variable (namely, consumer loyalty) based on linear relationships between the target variable and its established predictors (Involvement, Satisfaction, Customer-to-Customer Interactions or electronic-Word-of-Mouth/eWOM, and Consumer Participation). Results show that the variable with the most significant impact on consumers’ loyalty for a particular brand on Facebook is consumer involvement. Based on the findings, we establish various managerial recommendations for online marketing strategies and tactics on social media and we propose future directions for research, aimed at expanding the current study.

With the rise of mobile technologies and social networks, a new, growing segment of smarter, digitally-connected, price-minded consumers has emerged. These new consumers use multiple shopping channels to obtain the product or service they want, at the right time and at the desired price. This impact of digital transformation on retailing customers is particularly acute in the case of fast-fashion brands, and is forcing them to move from a multi-channel paradigm into an omni-channel one. In this new omni-channel context, the different channels fashion brands use tend to interact with each other, as they are simultaneously and indistinctly used by customers in any phase of the purchasing process, from browsing to point of sale and beyond. Furthermore, omni-shopping customers expect consistency and timeliness across both online and offline channels in terms of a seamless customer experience. They want to engage in a personal conversation with fashion brands through a flux of inadvertent and intentional interactions, that combine instrumental and expressive, individual and community dimensions, across a diversity of channels and touch points. This paper identifies the main challenges that fast-fashion retailers face when trying to turn the combination of multiple channels into truly integrated omni-channel strategies, and proposes a simple operational tool to assess the extent to which fast fashion companies are behaving under an omni-channel paradigm from the point of view of the consumer doing a purchase.

(a) Situation faced: During the review of an information system for medical material purchasing at a Brazilian insurance company, it became clear that part of the process supported by this system was done informally and there was no consensus among the employees about some of the related fundamental concepts and procedures. (b) Action taken: A consulting firm hired by the insurance company to find a solution to these challenges proposed to use the Design Thinking approach to process redesign, by aligning the Design Thinking stages with the phases of the Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle. A series of workshops that applied various Design Thinking tools was conducted with representatives from all of the company’s departments that deal with the purchasing process, as well as a team of information technology (IT) professionals. (c) Results achieved: The Design Thinking approach facilitated the following outcomes: (1) formalization of the employees’ perceptions regarding the existing purchasing process, (2) design of a to-be process for material purchasing, which was approved by all stakeholders, and (3) formalization of requirements for the new information system for managing the material-purchasing process. (d) Lessons learned: The case demonstrated the value of applying the Design Thinking approach to process redesign and improvement, adding useful instruments for BPM analysis. The BPM lifecycle phases correspond well with the Design Thinking stages, and Design Thinking techniques match BPM’s social-construction viewpoint well.

This chapter illustrates different approaches that can be used to organise the Purchasing function in practice. In addition to several versions of organisation structures, an overview of process design and optimisation is given. Readers shall thus be placed in a position to transfer these methods to their own fields of work and implement them.

Blogs are considered as modern communication medium. They are currently used as a tool of communication content strategy and present their activities in the Internet environment. Blogs allow companies to reach the target audience by distribution of complex information. The aim of this paper was to determine the current status of using the blogs in the buying process in Slovakia and Poland. Results of the questionnaire survey confirmed that the terms of the frequency of visits of the blog between Slovak and Polish customers are not statistically significant. It was further confirmed that the Slovak and Polish customers use blogs by selected activities associated with the purchasing process as well. The last finding was that the frequency of visits of the blog and by whether the customer buys based on the blog, there is a statistically significant dependence.

Furniture directly affects users’ emotion, since it forms the overall atmosphere of the space where it is placed. While previous research projects and furniture design practitioners rarely consider the spatial context of furniture, we sought to understand users’ emotional aspect and spatial context of furniture. In this study, we focused on users’ affective responses to visual aesthetic attributes of furniture design. We conducted observations and expert interview sessions in order to find what factors would influence the spatial context. From the initial study, we assumed that the level of “public openness” might influence users’ affective responses and preferences to furniture design. To explore our research question, we conducted in-depth interviews with ten participants who recently engaged in the purchasing process of furniture items. Through the analysis, we found that there is a correlation between the level of public openness of the space and users’ affective responses to furniture design. We explain how such openness affect users’ affective responses to the furniture design.

With over two billion users worldwide (Bennett 2014), social media is a ubiquitous entity that has fundamentally changed how individuals and businesses communicate. Although initially slow to adopt, business-to-business (B2B) organizations are allocating more time and money to the development of social media initiatives, especially within the information technology (IT) sector. IT is leading social media adoption, owning 54 % of the overall B2B global share of voice, and three of the top five social B2B companies in the USA are IT companies (Brandwatch.com 2015). However, while IT companies are producing more content than any other B2B industry, they are struggling to reach and engage existing and potential customers via social media (Brandwatch.com 2015). This suggests that the IT industry is not effectively capitalizing on social media’s full potential. In order to get the most from social media, businesses must first understand why and how their customers are using the technology in relation to their brand.

In-store physical shopping experiences are often complemented with searches for product related information on mobile devices. However, there is a distinct gap between the physical reality at the shop and the digital content on mobile devices. At the same time, in the not-too-distant future, we envision a world where mixed-reality technologies become ubiquitous, in much the same way as mobile devices have become today. In this context, we proposed MR-Shoppingu, a novel interactive retail shopping experience by using a combination of continuous context awareness, natural user actions, and augmented physical products with online content. Users can interact with products physically and naturally, and are provided with relevant content and recommendations virtually in mixed-reality. This may help consumers in the purchasing process by increasing efficiency and certainty of purchase, and enabling a more personalized and entertaining shopping experience.

The present paper aims to contribute to the development of the theory concerning the models of sustainable supply chain management. Argues that the development of a model of sustainable supply chain management, combined with a set of appropriate support tools at different levels of management (strategic and operational) will help organizations to develop integrated sustainability programs in the management of organizations. The development of a Case Study allowed sharing a set of support sustainability practices implemented in the Purchasing Process. This Case Study, combined with the Literature Review, allowed the construction of a framework for the Sustainable Supply Chain Management. The key feature differentiating of this framework its operational nature, by integrating a set of supporting sustainability practices.

To understand the usefulness of neuromarketing in business terms, one needs to understand how consumers behave during the purchasing process. Thanks to brain imaging, one can better understand what determines this behaviour, and the opinions and preferences of consumers (Lindstrom in Buyology: verdades y mentiras de por que compramos. Gestion, Barcelona, 2010). However, according to Zaltman (Como piensan los consumidores: lo que nuestros clientes no pueden decirnos y nuestros competidores no saben. Empresa Activa, Madrid, 2003), the ethical and moral implications underlying this activity require a judicious and socially responsible use of the information obtained. The method used is based on semi-structured interviews with seven Spanish neuromarketing firms. Thus, in order to respond to the current situation and to predict the future scenario in the short term, they were asked about the knowledge of both the population and Spanish firms, about the situation of the discipline versus traditional market research, and about the lack of specific regulations, among other things. The results demonstrate the incipient state of the discipline, although extensive growth is expected in the coming years. With greater current application in multinationals than in SMEs, the discipline is complemented with traditional methods, which in no case should be replaced.

The literature recognition carried out in the second chapter has allowed the identification of the major dimensions underlying the developed model. As highlighted, the objective of this study is the empirical verification of customer behavior in a business-to-business (B2B) market. B2B has particular structural connotations: first of all, with regard to the demographic features of customers (professionals in the industry compared with end users), their buying capacity (in bulk rather than at the retail level), their bargaining power (directly linked to a better ability to trade on the types of purchases made in relation to variables such as “time continuity” and “volume of purchases”), and the determinants of their loyalty (B2B operators compared with B2B customers tend to be more rational when purchasing. The balance is often given by variables such as price, speed of the purchasing process, product availability, and the elements of customer service. Therefore, as B2B operators are more informed and rational when purchasing, they are potentially more disloyal.) Thus, the literature shows that in a digital economy, and in particular in the B2B sector, the need to induce the creation of a client shopping script is vital for companies that aspire to maximize the spontaneous resistance to change of their customers. The presence of a shopping script provides the individual with a sense of order, organization, and structuring of stimuli from the environment, simplifying the management of cognitive activity (Benjafield, 1992). These benefits inherent in the script would justify a substantial reluctance by individuals to change the buying patterns in use. Moreover, the tendency of consumers in B2B markets to maintain their purchasing patterns, thus speeding up the buying process (which is a critical factor for a company or, more generally, a professional) and not reviewing the assumptions of the established pattern, is precisely the cognitive manifestation of spontaneous resistance to change the acquired patterns (Johnson, 1994).

Ensuring that the design of E-Commerce environments is in-line with the task at hand, providing satisfactory guidance and user experience to customers is critical for a company’s success. Despite the popularity of online shopping, especially due to the increasing use of mobile channels and platforms, research reveals that astonishingly between 60 % and 70 % of online users terminate their purchasing process, abandoning their shopping carts. The most important reasons appear to be that users do not have a clear understanding or direction through the purchasing process, or they have difficulties on locating and collecting the respective information for their targeted items or services. Current personalization approaches try to solve at some extent these problems, but still most of them fail to provide solutions aligned to the unique capabilities and characteristics of the end-users. Hence, taking into consideration that human-computer interactions within E-Commerce settings are in principal cognitive tasks, it is vital to follow human-centred adaptation and personalization design guidelines to model and develop such user interactions. This way, we will be able to more inclusively tackle the customers’ needs, requirements and perceptions, while at the same time companies will benefit from more sustainable buying behaviors. Among the numerous dimensions of individual differences in cognitive processing found in the literature, this chapter proposes design guidelines driven by high-level cognitive factors and elementary cognitive processes of the human mind, discussing how researchers and professionals could integrate them in the user interface design of E-Commerce environments.

The industrial sales force has evolved from being a relationship oriented profession to a technically oriented one. Praise for that! While a good Sales Engineer must still be able to manage human relations as a basic trait, there are other more important competences that customers want from them: technical expertise, time commitment and agreement fulfilment.This chapter discusses a complete industrial purchasing process from the customer point of view, as well as the sales process from the supplier's perspective. A proactive tender bid approach and two types of after-sales concepts and practises are also explained.Moreover, Capex/Opex consultative selling activities are discussed in detail, and novel tools such as the project map and its impact upon other company's departments are introduced for the first time. The reader will also obtain knowledge about the essential characteristics of modern industrial selling.

The online purchasing process usually follows the same pattern: Search the web; read recommendations and reviews; decide. Thus, reviews and recommendations are central to the online purchasing process, since they contain information about the functionality of the brand and the experiences other consumers made. Consequently, some researchers postulate a development from manager-ruled to customer-ruled brands and an empowerment of consumers.

It is well acknowledged that children influence purchasing decisions within a family, and this influence is widely observable in societies of various types. However, there are some ‘grey zones’ that require additional exploration. Just a modest number of researchers have been interested in the analysis of the child’s influence or participation in various phases of the purchase decision-making process. The existing studies suppose that its strength depends on the phase of the decision-making process, product type, several contextual factors and (perhaps) on the family structure. At the same time, the combination of a specific external context and family parameters offer possibilities of additional insights.

Customer experience management (CEM) denotes a set of practices, processes, and tools, that aim at personalizing customer’s interactions with a company according to customer’s needs and desires (Weijters et al., J Serv Res 10(1):3–21, 2007 [29]). E-business specialists have long realized the potential of ubiquitous computing to develop context-aware CEM applications (CA-CEM), and have been imagining CA-CEM scenarios that exploit a rich combination of sensor data, customer profile data, and historical data about the customer’s interactions with his environment. However, to realize this potential, e-commerce tool vendors need to figure out which software functionalities to incorporate into their products that their customers (e.g. retailers) could use/configure to build CA-CEM solutions. We propose to provide such functionalities in the form of an application framework within which CA-CEM functionalities can be specified, designed, and implemented. Our framework relies on, (1) a cognitive modeling of the purchasing process, identifying potential touchpoints between sellers and buyers, and relevant influence factors, (2) an ontology to represent relevant information about consumer categories, property types, products, and promotional material, (3) computational intelligence techniques to compute consumer- or category-specific property values, and (4) approximate reasoning algorithms to implement some of the CEM functionalities. In this paper, we present the principles underlying our framework, and outline steps for using the framework for particular purchase scenarios. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.

E-commerce customers demand quick and easy access to suitable products in large purchase spaces. To support and facilitate this purchasing process to users, recommender systems (RSs) help them to find out the information that best fits their preferences and needs in an overloaded search space. These systems require the elicitation of customers’ preferences. However, this elicitation process is not always precise either correct because of external factors such as human errors, uncertainty, human beings inherent inconsistency and so on. Such a problem in RSs is known as natural noise (NN) and can negatively bias recommendations, which leads to poor user’s experience. Different proposals have been presented to deal with natural noise in RSs. Several of them require additional interaction with customers. Others just remove noisy information. Recently, new NN approaches dealing with the ratings stored in the user/item rating matrix have raised to deal with NN in a better and simpler way. This contribution is devoted to provide a brief review of the latter approaches revising crisp and fuzzy approaches for dealing with NN in RSs. Eventually it points out as a future research the management of NN in other recommendation scenarios as group RSs.

The following paper conceptually relates birth order to the consumer purchasing process and the marketing mix.

Revenues from E-commerce for businesses in the B2B sector are rising as part of multichannel marketing, the use of different information, communication, and revenue channels. This trend can also be observed in the market for power tools for professional use. The consumer goods sector has already been subject to far-reaching studies regarding the reasons for the choice between online and offline channels, including research in different phases of the purchasing process. In industrial goods marketing, by contrast, the reasons for this choice are less well known. Power tools belong to those product groups in the industrial goods sector that show clear parallels to B2C business.

Driver assistance systems require fundamental information from sensors. In order to meet the high standard of safety and availability of these systems, the product quality is essential. Therefore, the selection process plays an important role during the purchasing process in the automotive industry. The surrounding and specific application defines the sensor design and manufacturing process of the sensor. For advanced system functions, the requirements of sensor data content and precision are increasing continuously; however, there are still some values which have not changed since the first ABS was introduced into the market. Even though the function remains relatively unchanged, the technology itself is changing. This opens up the possibility for the introduction of new features. This chapter provides a general overview of the key figures related to sensors for safety systems with details to the design and with special considerations to the fitment in the vehicle.

The purchasing function is assuming an increasingly relevant role within companies in the last decades, taking over the main responsibility for the costs of goods purchased as well as for supplier management. Its relevancy is due to the fact that purchasing can contribute to develop competitive advantages by aligning its strategy to the business strategy. Purchasing strategy is usually deployed per (purchasing) category and operationally executed in the so called tactical purchasing process. One key step is the negotiation/bidding where there is a lack of empirical research regarding the application of game theory. This paper contributes by discussing how game theory can be systematically utilised for designing negotiations (i.e. games) and getting more efficient results –by presenting an empirical study on automotive sector company, specifically on a bidding process for constructing a new production facility in Mexico.

Mort African American households that can afford to purchase a home do not do so. In part, this results from their lack of knowledge of the home buying process. This papers outlines the steps in the home purchasing process and provides suggestions designed to increase an African American’s chances of uwning a home.

This chapter suggests that learning is an intrinsic aspect of every conscious, purposeful activity. That activity is viewed here as dialogical (i.e., activity is addressed through and acquires its meaning from the interacting situation) and mediated by different types of semiotic mediations, e.g., language, tooling, information systems, and procedures. All mediations are ultimately referenced to one final mediation: socially recognizable and meaning-making habits. When unpredicted situations disrupt habits, multiple and partly invisible inquiries lead to their transformation for supporting allow activity continuation. Activity, habits, and inquiries are all dialogical and weave the threads of a collective sensemaking narrative. Learning is, thus, defined here as the continuous transformation of habits and of their combination into sensemaking cross-functional narratives through dialogical inquiries. Inquiries can be felicitous, meaning that they succeed in reweaving the threads of collective activity, or infelicitous. One key issue thus is identifying the conditions of felicity. This conception is illustrated using the case of an electricity company. The implementation of an integrated management information system (ERP) disrupted existing professional habits without providing the conditions for felicitous inquiries, leading to an organizational crisis. From this case, it appears that it is a key condition of organizational learning to view collective activity, not only in its “directly performing” dyadic dimension (A transforms B) but also in its mediated triadic dimension (A means C by transforming B). This grants due consideration not only to “what people actually do” but also to “what people actually mean by doing what they do” with three mediating dimensions: firstly, the links of day-to-day ordinary operations with “professional genres”; secondly, the links of day-to-day ordinary operations with inquiries which continuously and often invisibly transform habits and keep collective activity feasible; and thirdly, the links of day-to-day ordinary operations with the procedural and narrative thread that gives activity its global social sense. This approach requires establishing the adequate communities of practice, to transform professional habits and identities, and communities of process, to redesign cross-functional inquiries and the cross-functional narrative coherence of processes.