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Most fairy tale narratives have a hero, a damsel in distress and the ever-present opposing villain. The villains, or antagonists, share several commonalities across the various narratives as well as one over-arching trait of evil. However, as television viewers have become more intuitive, and demand for more sophisticated narratives have increased, contemporary portrayals of villains, as in the television series Once Upon a Time (Horowitz & Kitsis, 2011–2018), have shifted away from presenting villains as one-dimensional and restricted characters.

Instead, the construct of evil is depicted as a multifaceted and evolutionary trait of the character. Whereas previously evil was the fundamental core of the character it is now presented as a fluid concept. This chapter investigates how the construct of evil, and therefore the villain, has been redefined through a contemporary television narrative.

Using a dialogic approach to narrative analysis through the lens of fairytale, this paper explores the shared construction of corporate environmental stories. The analysis provided aims to reveal the narrative messaging which is implicit in corporate reporting, to contrast corporate and stakeholder narratives and to bring attention to the ubiquity of storytelling in corporate communications.

This paper examines a series of events in which a single case company plays the central role. The environmental section of the case company's sustainability report is examined through the lens of fairytale analysis. Next, two counter accounts are constructed which foreground multiple stakeholder accounts and retold as fairytales.

The dialogic nature of accounts plays a critical role in how stakeholders understand the environmental impacts of a company. Storytelling mechanisms have been used to shape the perspective and sympathies of the report reader in favour of the company. We use these same mechanisms to create two collective counter accounts which display different sympathies.

This research reveals how the narrative nature of corporate reports may be used to fabricate a particular perspective through storytelling. By doing so, it challenges the authority of the version of events provided by the company and gives voice to collective counter accounts which are shared by and can be disseminated to other stakeholders.

This paper provides a unique perspective to understanding corporate environmental reporting and the stories shared by and with external stakeholders by drawing from a novel link between fairytale, storytelling and counter accounting.

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of popular management literature, proposing a reflection about its role in the managers’ subjectivity. Pop-management literature comprises books and magazines produced by the business media for fast consumption. Adopting the psychoanalytical approach to fairy tales as a perspective, we conducted a content analysis of two success stories published in the business media. We observed that the structure and key elements of fairy tales are present in these stories. We argue that the success stories help to reduce tensions and mitigate frustrations, supposedly offering answers for anxieties and professional problems. We also argue that continued access to these texts might keep individuals linked to their power fantasies and therefore might affect their development and maturing processes.

The Witcher (Netflix, 2019) premiered seven months after Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2018) concluded. Given the similarities of genre (historical/high fantasy) and audience (indicated by nudity, violence and profanity), comparisons were quickly drawn. Game of Thrones earned criticism for the ‘sexist’ outcomes for some of its female characters, and so early analysis of The Witcher often evaluated its female representation and feminist values.

This chapter argues that the female representations in season one of The Witcher offers prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs. These representations are somewhat at odds with some initial reaction to the show as sexist. Notably, it uses a dialectic approach to women who are framed by males as villainous (as Stregobor characterizes Renfri in ‘The End's Beginning’). However, the spectator positioning challenges this through devices such as its unrestricted, non-linear narrative structure.

Nevertheless, The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities. Its archetypal male protagonist further emphasizes the difference of the female deuteragonists, placing him at various times in opposition to characters such as Ciri, Yennefer and Calanthe. This chapter also considers the issues of intersectionality in relation to Yennefer, whose transformative narrative arc has provoked ableist criticism, and how her representation is also impacted by the racial discourse in the series.

Through textual analysis and with reference to relevant folkloric, feminist and media scholarship, this chapter interrogates the representations the significant women of The Witcher through the lenses of gendered authorship, essentialist ‘female’ concerns, such as motherhood, the dynamics of the gaze and the varieties of responses to the female characters evident in online discourse.

Considerable attention has been given to the vulnerability of young people leaving care in the UK in their transition to adulthood. To date, however, there has been limited focus on the perceptions of care leavers about what factors enable and inhibit effective practice. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This systematic literature review sought to elicit the views of UK care leavers in identifying barriers and facilitators to the process of transition to adulthood. Qualitative studies in the care-leaving field were identified, of which seven met inclusion criteria and were included in the final synthesis.

The findings yielded a range of facilitators, including authentic and consistent relationships with those acting in the role of corporate parent; and flexible systems, which accommodated personal readiness for leaving care. Barriers included insufficient recognition of, and a lack of support for, the psychological dimensions of transition, exacerbated by insufficient support networks.

This literature search yielded seven qualitative papers, some with small sample sizes, meaning that the findings may not be representative of a wider population or directly relevant to international contexts.

Suggestions for enhancing the transition process are posited. In particular, the potential usefulness of an “interdependence” transition approach for UK care leavers is proposed.

This study analyses qualitative data, thus constituting a response to policy calls for care leaver views to be central to transition processes.

The purpose of this research is to provide academics and practitioners with an insight to the barriers involved in knowledge transfer, arising from the levels of learning in the organization (i.e. individual, team, organizational, and inter‐organizational).

An empirical research methodology, called the Delphi technique, was employed to investigate these barriers. Owing to the non‐threatening nature of the process, and its usefulness in obtaining a reliable consensus of opinion from a group of experts, it was deemed suitable for this research. The Delphi process was applied in two stages. In the first stage the major barriers in the transfer of knowledge in the levels of learning were obtained. Only the primary paths of transfer were considered, i.e. individual to team (and vice versa), team to the organization (and vice versa), and organization to inter‐organization. In the second stage Delphi process, the critical sources from which these barriers arise were derived.

A total of 14 sources from which the barriers arise were obtained. The significant impact of these sources on the levels of learning, as perceived by the Delphi participants, was derived.

This research provides useful insights for practitioners wanting to minimize barriers and optimize knowledge transfer across the organizations. It also serves as a useful base for researchers to expand further research into barriers of knowledge transfer.

This research is the first attempt made, using Delphi methodology, to analyze the barriers to knowledge transfer from a holistic perspective. It considers the levels of learning, providing academics with a base to consider other paths of knowledge transfer.

This article seeks to examine the various functions served by storytelling, from its origins in prehistoric times to the post‐industrial age.

Historical records are rich in stories, yet they seldom provide the full social context in which these were told. This article attempts to reconstruct part of that context on the basis of anthropological and biological theories.

Storytelling appears to have developed in archaic times as a means to organize vast and confusing amounts of information. It retains that function and becomes particularly important in transitional times such as the present.

Today, however, neither empirical nor theoretical analysis is able to cope with the information overload caused by new electronic media. As traditional markers of identity such as ethnicity and class become elusive, individuals, and companies as well, need to articulate their stories in order to define themselves.

This article places storytelling, arguably the most traditional of arts, in the context of a culture dominated by electronic media, thus helping people and institutions to use the power of narrative.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of self-service technologies (SST) in two competitors and unravel the process of change in two related setups, offering a comparison as well as an association of cases.

The paper is based on two extensive case studies of SST adoption by leading retailers in a Western European country. The analysis is based on a material-discursive approach using Greimas actantial model to identify actors’ roles in the implementation process.

Results highlight the key role of technology and organizational identity as legitimizers of the change process. The findings also emphasize the role of competition in justifying change.

Due to the specific situation of the market in the country of study (both retailers share 70 percent of the grocery market), this research offers a textbook example of the role of competition in technological change. This helps to understand the role of competition in technological change.

This study explores the implementation of SST in two competitors and unravels the process of change in two related setups, offering a comparison as well as an association of cases.

This paper aims to explore the “Fellowship-Tale” as an alternative tale type for narrating entrepreneur stories. The authors illustrate this by telling the Pilgrim business story. It is common for the deeds of men who founded businesses to be narrated as heroic entrepreneur stories. Such fairy tales are dominant narratives in Western culture but do not resonate with everyone, particularly women. Consequentially, many businesswomen do not engage in the rhetoric of enterprise.

The qualitative, analytic approaches adopted in this study include narratology, semiotics and aesthetics. This complementary triage helps us appreciate the complexity of entrepreneur stories while unravelling the nuances of the tale. It also permits triangulation of the data gathered from an in-depth interview of the respondent with newspaper and Internet research.

The research indicates that “fellowship-tales” provide a viable and credible alternative to the fairy-tale rendition common in entrepreneur and business stories.

An obvious limitation is that one merely swaps one narrative framework for another, albeit it offers dissenting voices a real choice.

This study has the potential to be far reaching because at a practical level, it allows disengaged entrepreneurs and significant others the freedom to exercise their individual and collective voices within a framework of nested stories.

A key contribution is to challenge the hegemony of a dominant and embedded social construct allowing new understandings to emerge via a novel combination of research methodologies.