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Based on theoretical principles of Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis/Discourse Studies, the present work analysed a corpus of opinion articles, published in Portuguese newspapers and news magazines from December 2011 to March 2013, in order to foreground the dominant social representations of ‘Troika’, ‘The Portuguese Government’ and ‘The Portuguese’ in these discourses.

A systematic analysis of discourse structures in the corpus was developed in order to examine their potential in the expression of ideological content. Concepts such as Semantic/Thematic Roles, Force Dynamics and Symmetry were combined with analytic models from Discourse Studies to illustrate the Ideological Discourse Representations and the Positions in the Discourse Space (DS) of Social Actors. The linguistic hypotheses and generalisations were generated bottom up, departing from the regular patterns observable in the empirical data and extracting conclusions from them. The interpretative practice was, therefore, made in adherence to corpus evidence.

This integrated analysis has shown that the reconstruction of ‘Portugal’ and ‘the Portuguese’ vis-a-vis ‘Europe’, represented by ‘Troika’, corresponds to opponent positioning that polarise these entities, foregrounding the distance and the conflict between them and contributing to a vision of a disintegrated Europe. In fact, the reality depicted in the opinion articles analysed was a polarised reality, in the sense that these articles repeatedly used linguistic constructions that placed (through several rhetoric devices that will be analysed) Europe and Troika on one ‘pole’ and ‘The Portuguese’ on the other ‘pole’, expressing, thus, the movement of the actors to polar opposites.

On the theoretical level, this chapter proposes an integrated approach towards opinion discourse in the press, combining Critical Discourse analytic and DS Theory perspectives with the insights from Socio-Cognitive approach by Van Dijk and aspects of Cognitive Linguistics by Talmy.

Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezależna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

This chapter begins with a brief introduction to the growing field of entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education is considered as a framework for training students to be primarily agents of change rather than generators of economic wealth. Next, trends in experiential learning are explored with particular attention being given to service learning. Finally, the merits of a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary change curriculum that is grounded in the principles and practices of innovation and entrepreneurship and its experiential in design are argued.

This chapter address how critical feminist organization studies can shed light on the dominance of masculinist logics in TM theorizing in both theory and practice and open up opportunities to review TM systems that stress inclusion and equity. The exclusive approach is most worrisome given that contemporary events such as the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein the global ‘#metoo campaigns and the Sustainable Development Goals have highlighted the importance of equality agendas. We draw on transnationalism, intersectionality and postcolonialism approaches to illustrate how TM reinforces inequalities. Our contribution questions the elite logics, and the white Global North males that dominate both TM theorizing, and TM practitioners and denies many stakeholders voices and contributions to organization life. We also question the longevity of the elite mantra of MNCs’ HRM policy given that the Sustainable Development Goals are increasingly being advocated by the business community, and contradict entirely an organizational ethic premised on valuing the elite.

Our point of departure is a reservation concerning the validity of cosmopolitan ideas in response to 9/11. Cosmopolitanism in the social and political sciences plays an important role in the reconstruction of conceptual tools, the diagnosis of the current epoch and the creation of new normative standards. Its key motif, however, that of epochal change from a nationally-based to a cosmopolitan world order, is prematurely dismissive of traditional categories and assimilative of a normative vision. The separation of the present from the past is as overstated as is its conflation with the future.

This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

Stakeholder theory may be the Archimedes lever that allows defining a possible Economy for the Common Good; however, the theory’s current level of development does not enable it to escape the criticism that considers it nothing more than shared egoism. The expansion of the concept of stakeholder, including not only groups that collaborate in the creation of value or which are actively impacted by the organisation, but also incorporating those affected by omission – non-stakeholders – would lead to the reconciliation of stakeholder theory and the common good. Nevertheless, to set it within corporate practice, besides having selfish and altruist incentives, would be of interest for the conceptual development of shapeholders, understood as the link between non-stakeholders’ interests and needs, and firms.

We are three teacher educators – Christi, Bethney, and Abby – representing literacy, educational leadership, and special education, who have collaborated in self-studies of our teacher education practices (S-STEP) over a period of five academic years. Through this collaborative engagement, we came to recognize the similarities and differences in our language and values found within each of our individual disciplinary cultures. It was through the juxtaposition of studying ourselves alongside of that of our colleagues that we further generated a shared culture and common understandings. In our chapter, we explore the ways in which self-study enabled collaboration with teacher educators representing different disciplines. The research brought to light specific disciplinary values, assumptions, and terminology that, when articulated and examined among critical friends, facilitated our ability to both broaden and deepen our individual understandings of teacher education practices in light of each other’s diverse disciplinary perspectives.