Organizational attention, the capacity of organizations to combine effective oversight and foresight, is increasingly becoming a critical core competence and a source of competitive advantage. Failure to put in place appropriate mechanisms to orient, sustain and re-orient attention can, in fact, lead to loss of opportunities, wrong strategic decisions, and adverse events. These, in turn, can have seriously negative effects on the performance and reputation of private, public, and non-profit organizations alike.

Despite the increasing centrality of attention in what has been described as the click economy, we still know very little about how organizations pay attention. This is partly because the limited past research understood attention narrowly as a mental process and focused exclusively on the attention processes of top managers. A Practice-theoretical Account of Organizational Attention aims at complementing this view by showing how attention is produced in everyday practice at the heart of organizations and how these practices are mediated by the organization's materiality.