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The purpose of this study is to examine what individual motives (e.g., self-expression or rewards) and brand communication aspects (such as content) influence consumers' brand engagement behaviors, and how these behaviors are linked to their intentions in favor of a brand.

The authors conducted an online survey with a quota sample of 629 adults in the United States. Participants were recruited through a Qualtrics online panel.

Data indicate that the motivations of entertainment and remuneration are positively associated with consuming and contributing to brand content on social media. In addition, the motive of obtaining information prompts people to consume brand content (e.g., reading a brand's posts or watching videos), while the motivation for self-expression leads to contributing activities (e.g., conversing on a brand's account and uploading videos). After controlling for these motivations, brand communication strategy (such as content and tone) appears to influence consumers' brand-related activities on social media, which subsequently results in consumer intentions in favor of the brand.

Consumer engagement in social media has become the primary focus of corporate communication. This work is one of few studies that have explored how consumer motivation and brand communication come together to generate consumer engagement on social media. The overall findings shed light on how corporate communications can generate consumer engagement on social media and how companies reap benefits from it.

Since the end of the previous century social partners in different branches of industry have laid down measures to stimulate individual learning and competence development of workers in collective labour agreements. Special attention is given to stimulating learning demand among traditional non‐participants to lifelong learning, such as lower educated and older employees. The paper examines one such measure, the individual learning account (ILA).

This paper is based on a quasi‐experimental study, in which we evaluate the impact of ILA on learning intention and work floor learning culture is evaluated. The study focuses on lower educated employees in two sectors of employment: the elderly care sector and SME's in the technical installation (TI) sector. The point of departure is Ajzen'se theory of planned behaviour. In this study, we attempt to examine the effects of ILAs on intention to engage in learning activities and behavioural predictors such as attitude, perceived behavioural control and perceived learning culture. A number of authors point out the pivotal influence of supportive learning culture on learning behaviour, in which employer and employees are portrayed as partners. Therefore, for this study the variable perceived dialogical learning culture was constructed.

Differences were found in the effect of ILA on learning intention and perceived learning culture between both sectors. Especially, in TI companies ILA had significant effect on the learning intention of older employees and employees working in level three functions.

The paper assesses ILAs.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

The COVID-19 lockdown severely impacted organizations in the cultural and tourist business as their products all of a sudden “disappeared”. This study aims to explore if and how the unexpected and disruptive nature of the pandemic accelerated the development of new communication strategies on their social media.

The study draws on data from 24 midsize cultural institutions and tourist attractions in Denmark over the first two months of the lockdown in 2020. Approximately 900 posts on Facebook were collected and analyzed through the netnographic method. The analysis followed a two-layered qualitative approach. First, open coding to identify typologies and enable a comparison with established strategies from the literature review. Then, an exploratory examination was conducted across the typologies.

Nine different content categories were identified in the data and subsequently assessed and discussed in relation to the literature on strategies and dialogic intentions. This resulted in the emergence of two new overarching strategies: hope and host.

While hope is particularly relevant in crisis situations, the utilization of employees in the host role presents an opportunity for further development and engagement. Further, the results call for future research that breaks with the traditional quest for ideal strategies for the benefit of exploring the notion of “strategic doers”.

The identification of the hope and host strategies, along with the analysis of content categories and their alignment with various strategic intentions, contributes to the existing knowledge in this field. Further, the classic perception of engagement as driven by explicit interaction and dialogue is also challenged.

The purpose of the paper is to show power mechanisms of in- and exclusion in moments where certain participants appeared to be othered in two collaborative research and development projects in a healthcare setting.

The paper contributes to critical-reflexive analyses of reflexive processes within collaborative knowledge production. The authors use an analytical framework combining Bakhtin and Foucault to investigate processes of inclusion and exclusion in the interplay between dominant and subordinated voices in a moment-by-moment analysis of two incidents from interdisciplinary workshops.

The analysis illuminates how differences between voices challenge participants’ reflexive awareness and lead to the reproduction of contextual power and knowledge hierarchies and the concomitant silencing of particular participants. Thus, the findings draw attention to the complex and ethical nature of collaborative knowledge production.

To invite researchers to be reflexive about the complex, situated and emergent character of reflexive processes and consider ethics to be a critical stance that encourages continuous reflection and critique of collaborative knowledge production.

To show the importance of not sweeping incidents in which participants are othered “under the carpet” in collaborative research. To present an analytical framework for analysing the contextual and emergent nature of collaborative research processes and discuss the ethical conundrums, which arise in the research process.

This paper aims to present findings from a qualitative case study which investigated how workers engage in workplace learning for safe work in a precarious workplace. The findings from this research suggest that learning to work safely is firmly embedded within the social cultural fabric of workplaces, and is intentionally driven to maintain coherence in ideologies, values and practices for effective praxis.

This study was conducted in a petrochemical plant in Singapore. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with 20 site operators who held positions as engineers, plant workers and maintenance technicians. These site operators were directly involved in working with dangerous chemicals and high-risk equipment and processes; their conversations elicited an in-depth understanding of individuals’ experiences, providing an account of how participants learnt safe work practices in a precarious work setting. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. Data were coded and analysed using an inductive analytical approach to identify key themes about workers’ learning in the workplace.

The findings suggest that learning to work safely is a socially constructed and facilitated process – leading to intentionalising what is learnt. The participants’ experiences suggest that safe work practices materialise through collective action, shared knowledge and responsibility to generally seek sameness for recursive practice. The significance of inter-subjectivity and intentionality are discussed with respect to how they intersect within the social cultural context of precarious work sites, where learning and praxis are seamlessly commingled to achieve effective praxis in workplace safety. A combination of contributions at organisation, individual and group levels supports the social cultural environment. The study concludes that a combination of mutually bound learning space, relational agency and dialogic interactions provides communicative spaces and mediates learning that nurtures inter-subjectivity and intentionality to work safely.

As the study is situated in a particular case context, replication of this research with different occupational groups in other precarious workplaces is needed for further insights on social construction of learning spaces for safety practice.

This paper concludes that deliberate and cautious efforts are necessary to create contextual conditions for learning and to promote greater inter-subjectivity and intentionality for effective praxis. Group interactions and partnerships at work are advocated to generate mindful learning and a common frame of reference that the work community recognises, values and shares. These social processes provide necessary communicative spaces for clarification and validation of what is learnt and what is being interpreted by individuals. The quality and legitimacy of guidance are also emphasised to validate the expertise of those providing guidance, effective mentorship and intervention for the distribution of knowledge. Furthermore, strong and committed leadership is necessary to sustain the social cultural architectures that will support learning and praxis for safety.

This study offers insight about pedagogical contributions to learning about safe work practices in distinct circumstances of work.

There is an identified need in higher education research for methods which have the capacity to generate conceptual insights grounded in concrete local practice but with wider applicability in understanding and facilitating research-based change. This chapter outlines an intermediate approach to qualitative data analysis which can support theoretical knowledge advancement from practice-based research, which I call the difference-within-similarity approach. It involves a particular way of conducting dialogues with our data: of interanimating similarities and differences within our qualitative datasets. The approach outlined involves first identifying a similarity, then systematically examining differences within that similarity to generate theoretical explanations. Drawing on sociocultural theorising, particularly dialogic theory and cultural–historical activity theory, the approach is based on the idea that new meanings arise from a comparison of multiple perspectives on the ‘same’ phenomenon. The tensions between such perspectives are seen as a key driver for change in educational practice. Therefore, articulating and examining such tensions in our data gives an opportunity to simulate the possibility of change in our analysis and, hence, develop insights which can inform change beyond local settings. Important here is that the differences examined are bound together by an analytically productive similarity. Through multiple research examples, the chapter identifies and illustrates a range of ways of articulating productive analytical similarities for comparison in our data: through theory/literature, through forward and backwards processing of data itself and through a process termed ‘weaving’.

Within the context of a research program on the most relevant discourse types in chronic care medical encounters, this contribution reports on a qualitative study on the role caregivers play within the process of shared understanding occurring between health-care professionals and elderly patients. The purpose of the paper is to highlight one dimension of such complexity, by bringing to light the challenges connected to the achievement of shared understanding between health-care professionals and elderly patients when caregivers are involved in the conversation.

The paper reports on a two-step analysis of a corpus of transcripts of interactions in diabetes and hypertension settings. In the first step, caregivers’ contributions to deliberative sequences have been analyzed. In the second step, the analysis was extended to caregivers’ contributions to the whole encounter.

The results show that professionals’ ability to engage caregivers in deliberations during the encounter and, more generally, to assign a role to caregivers as legitimate participants in the consultation may favor the smooth development of the interaction and an effective process of shared understanding among all participants.

The paper further develops original research about the functions of the argumentative component in dialogues occurring in clinical settings.

Purpose – When organisations behave irresponsibly, a question remains: Can they use a messaging strategy based in the organisation's commitment social responsibility to effectively respond to the crisis? The purpose of this chapter is to analyse stakeholder attitudes and their antecedents in such a case. Because of its scope, magnitude and use of a response strategy based on messages of social responsibility, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico serves as an excellent case for measuring the effectiveness of such a messaging strategy.

Methodology/approach – The present study drew from two data sources: a content analysis of interactions on BP's Facebook page (N=1,515) as well as an image survey of BP (N=749).

Findings – BP's messaging strategy had limited positive effects in terms of (1) being viewed as a ‘socially responsible’ organisation and (2) creating significant good will towards the company. However, these data also reveal that BP has effectively opened lines of communication between stakeholders and the company.

Practical and social implications – This study has two central implications. First, for both organisations and activists, personal investment and the relevance of issues are both critical in order to change stakeholder attitudes about organisations. Second, based on this research, we can begin to develop stakeholder profiles based on age, sex and political identity.

Originality/value – In the last couple of years, considerable attention has been paid to describing and analysing the response strategies that organisations deploy; however, scant attention has been paid to measuring stakeholder evaluations of those crisis response strategies.

This article addresses the issues of career counseling and career‐based satisfaction. It is argued that taking a narrative approach to career counseling is both theoretically and practically justified. The article explores narrative theory in relation to career counseling and identity, and illustrates the central notions that arise from the theory, with a brief case study. It is concluded that a narrative approach to career counseling can assist clients who are uncertain about where to go next in their careers, particularly within the context of the boundaryless career.