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The purpose of this paper is to examine and analyze the prevailing form of rationality that governs the challenges, goals and roles of communication professionals. The authors will also explore alternative forms of rationality and discuss what these would imply.

The paper is based on survey results from The European Communication Monitor (ECM) and qualitative interviews with communication managers in Sweden. First, the authors present the ECM data and the Swedish interview material, i.e. the authors depict the practitioners’ perceptions of what they understand as important work tasks and roles. The interviews focus on the actual practices of linking communication goals to business goals. Second, the results are challenged from a reflexive perspective, using theories from the paradox turn and questioning the “taken-for-granted thinking” in corporate communications.

The ECM data show that the main challenge in practice is “linking business strategy and communication.” The Swedish respondents stand out when it comes to “building and maintaining trust” since this is considered to be almost as important. The qualitative interview study strengthens the results in the ECM. The interviewees seem to do their work according to the traditional management agenda – i.e. they break down overall business goals and translate these to measurable communication goals. The results are reflected upon using paradox theory. Two paradoxes are discussed: between managerialism and professionalism, and strategic generalists and operational specialists.

The study is based on survey data that have been collected through a convenience sample, and the interview study is a pilot study.

The paper focuses conflicts between normative practitioner ideals and reality, and helps practitioners to reflect upon mainstream thinking.

Based on the empirical findings in the ECM, the interviews and the theoretical framework, the authors conclude that if the idea of The Communicative Organization is to be fruitfully realized, it is necessary to depart from a multi-dimensional rationality and question ideas that are taken for granted. The use of paradox theory and concepts such as functional stupidity is rather original in corporate communication research. Additional research could further explore paradoxes in order to spark dialogue, which may undermine one-dimensional thinking and functional stupidity.

This paper's purpose is to develop a meaning-based framework for customer loyalty by examining how consumers make sense of customer loyalty through meanings and metaphors.

A qualitative study based on in-depth interviews and focus group data in the retail context was conducted with Finnish customers. The data were analysed with qualitative data analysis techniques such as the constant comparative technique.

The empirical findings comprise eight loyalty meanings characterised by two dimensions. The first dimension is reflexive vs. routinised, and the second dimension is private vs. social. The loyalty types are dimensionalised through four metaphors: loyalty as freedom of choice; as being conventional and binding; and as belongingness.

The findings improve the way customer loyalty currently is understood in the retail setting. The paper proposes that customer insight that utilises thick data can be used to grasp loyalty meanings. These data are rich in context and detail, and they take into account customers' everyday lives. Utilising thick data in the form of storytelling fuels customers' meaning-making related to customer loyalty, potentially enriching their relationship with the retailer.

Customer loyalty has been driven largely by a transactional and company-centric perspective. This article presents an alternative view of customer loyalty that accounts for the variety of meanings that customers may assign to their loyalty-related thoughts and behaviours.

Among the many perspectives to analyze war, such as rational actor, organizational process, governmental politics and ethics, the perspective that actually incorporates the costs and benefits into a systematic theoretical structure has hardly been analyzed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the costs and benefits perspective.

Three kinds of value are distinguished, i.e. human, economic and influence. Different actors (politicians, populations, stakeholders, etc). assign different weights to the three kinds of value. Six gradually more complicated models are developed. The first subtracts losses from gains for the three kinds of value. Thereafter, the paper accounts for multiple periods, time discounting, attitude towards risk, multiple stakeholders, subcategories for the three kinds of value, sequential decision-making and game theory.

The rich theoretical structure enables assessing costs and benefits more systematically and illuminatingly. The cost benefit analysis is illustrated with the 2003-2011 Iraq War. The paper estimates gained and lost value of human lives, economic value and influence value, and show how different weights impact the decision of whether to initiate war differently.

The paper provides scientists and policy makers with a theoretical structure within which to evaluate the costs and benefits of war, accounting for how different actors estimate weights, the future, risk and a variety of parameter values differently.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of workplace learning, with a focus on the non-formal learning that takes place among online journalists. The focus of this article is journalists working in an online newspaper and their experiences with workplace and non-formal learning, centring on framework conditions and learning environments.

The empirical data in this article are based on qualitative interviews conducted with journalists working in an online newspaper in the Western part of Norway. The sample comprises of five informants. The interviews were based on a combination of open-ended and more specific questions where the aim was to get a broad perspective on the informants’ experiences workplace non-formal learning and to investigate alternative perspectives that emerged during the interviews.

The findings indicate that a theory of online journalists’ workplace learning should take into account the fact that learning, in this context, takes place at various levels of conscious awareness, encompassing cognitive, behavioural, motivational and emotional aspects.

This project provides the field of workplace learning and journalism with context-specific research on the non-formal learning processes of online journalists.

This chapter investigates the mutual relationship between logic and paradox, showing that paradox is indispensable to test logic, as well as logic is necessary to extend our understanding of paradox. Firstly, I consider the lesson that organizational theory can draw from formal logic’s investigation of semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. Subsequently, I survey the plural interpretations of the concept of “logic” in organizational theory (as logic of theory, logic of practice, and institutional logics). I argue that this plurality of meanings is not a source of confusion but offers an opportunity to illustrate different manifestations of, and ways to cope with, organizational paradoxes.

We propose that group affective tone may be dysfunctional for teams faced with complex, equivocal, and dynamically changing tasks and environments. Group affective tone (and in particular, a positive affective tone) may exacerbate pre-existing tendencies of teams to develop a single-shared reality that team members confidently believe to be valid and to be prone to group-centrism. Alternatively, heterogeneity in member mood states within teams may lead to the development of multiple-shared realities that reflect the equivocality of the teams’ tasks and circumstances and other functional outcomes (e.g., multiple perspectives and minority dissent), which ultimately may enhance team effectiveness.

Competencies have come to play a central role in a wide range of settings in UK public and private sector contexts. This phenomenon is usually analysed but rarely recontextualised. The purpose of this paper is to identify the epistemological and ontological paradigms on which these approaches are couched in a British historical socio‐cultural context.

To put into light what this alternative perspective on competencies could add to reflection and practice, this paper realizes an in‐depth two‐year ethnographic study (employing participant‐observer methods) of a consultancy delivered training programme for customer service competency based vocational qualification in a water utilities company based in the north of England.

Based on a wide literature review on competencies, the first main result of this paper is to show that many of competencies approaches are underpinned by an empirical, pragmatic and ultimately modernistic, positivistic predilection. In an attempt to reappraise this rigid and highly structured representation of competencies, the paper draws on the resources of critical management approaches and notions of “lived experience”. The main empirical result is that competencies are richer than competencies (especially NVQs) usually suppose it and that critical perspectives are valuable in seeking to address these lacunae.

The paper offers an innovative insight to alternative dimensions of the experience of working with competency frameworks. Overall, a further value of this paper is to provide an assessment and a critique of the experience of competencies and vocational training in the UK. This recontextualisation underlines that competencies are weak at capturing and portraying the rich panoply of multifarious emotions and social interactions that take place in the workplace and everyday job life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of the relationships between sales and internal and external environmental drivers in a retail company using a systems perspective in order to support retail management decisions with nonlinear methods.

The research and results are presented in two parts: the collection and explorative analysis of the data; and discussion of the managerial implications following a systems perspective. The exploratory analysis is conducted using a statistical comparison of linear and nonlinear models of sales data from a retail company. The data, which comprise two data sets, come from 45 retail stores located in different regions of the USA.

Specifically, nonlinear models provided a better explanation of variation in retail activity (R²=46 per cent) than linear models (R²=16 per cent). In such a situation, the nonlinear analysis captures the influence of internal and external environmental drivers on retail sales.

With a limited variety of external and internal drivers, the exploratory analysis aims to describe a general situation in which retailers are managing activities in complex environments as opposed to reflect on a particular retail chain.

The systems perspective is used to interpret the managerial implications of the nonlinear analysis fits, particularly in cases where retail decision-makers are adapting, transforming and restructuring sources of competitive advantage in complex environments.

The paper provides an alternative perspective (the systemic one) of how retailers could interpret the relationships between internal and external variables in the dynamic environment of the retail chains with nonlinear models.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical discussion of the development of systems thinking and systems methodologies and explain how such approaches can deal with issues of problem complexity and the variety of views, agendas and political positions that the people involved and affected by the problem situation may have.

The paper examines the different ontological and epistemological assumptions that the various social paradigms are based on and uses social theory in order to explain the development of systems thinking and systems methodologies.

As there is a plethora of relevant systems methodologies, managers will need to understand the philosophical assumptions of different systems approaches, their strengths and weaknesses and how to use them creatively in combination. Viewing the problem situation from a holistic perspective and treating alternative systems approaches as complementary rather than in competition will help managers deal creatively with the complex problems that organisations face.

This paper will shed some light on the philosophical assumptions that the various strands of systems thinking are based on and will help managers appreciate the importance of creative holism and the benefits that holistic thinking can bring to their organisation.

The authors explore the market agora and the shaping of markets as controversies over the meaning and practices related to sustainability evolved. This study aims to explore what happened in a market-oriented policy regime, which aimed to address sustainability in farming and food, to assess the impact of the policy on the vegetable sector in England and to consider whether the market-oriented policy regime created a more sustainable food system for Britain.

The authors examined policy documents – agenda setting reports, policy frameworks and operational plans – and conducted interviews with experts – including policymakers, agronomists and the growers themselves, from across this heterogeneous production sector.

The authors found that while controversy over the meaning of sustainability impacted on the evolution of food policy and grower business practices, market conceptualisations remained in a doxic mode – naturalised and beyond dispute throughout the market agora.

This is a study of a single sub-sector of the fruit and vegetable sector in a single European country and over a particular period of time. It presents a detailed, authentic representation of that sub-sector in context and diverse information sources were used to gain a variety of perspectives. However, it is acknowledged that this is a limited, qualitative study involving relatively few key informant interviews.

The authors’ explanation suggests that market doxa limited how policymakers and market agora understood the economic challenges and the solutions that could be deployed for English vegetable growers, a sector so pivotal for sustainability. The authors propose that ideas from industrial marketing can be used to reignite controversy, challenge market doxa, and in doing so create space for progress in creating sustainable markets.

The authors deploy an approach advocated by Blanchet and Depeyre (2016) and use controversy to explore the evolution of policy for sustainability and market shaping in the English vegetable sector agora. In doing so the authors create a novel explanation of why policy, which aimed to usher in a sustainable market, fell short of its aims and contribute to an under-researched area examining policy for sustainability in a B2B context.