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This paper aims to introduce and investigate dialogic interaction as a key element of achieving a transition towards sustainability in people, organizations and society as a whole. Furthermore “sustainability competence” as a potential outcome of such interaction is to be introduced, referring to the capacities and qualities that people, and the organizations and communities of which they are part, need in order to address (un)sustainability.

The argument of the paper is grounded conceptually in emergent thinking among scholars preoccupied with learning‐based change and sustainability in organizations and communities. Empirically, the paper uses two case studies carried out by the authors to ground the argument in real efforts by communities to create a (more) sustainable way of living.

The main results include: a post‐normal understanding of sustainability highlighting uncertainty, complexity, normativity, controversy and indeterminacy; a framework facilitating dialogic interaction; and a number of key competences that appear conducive to both dialogic interaction and a transition to sustainability.

Although the two case studies are quite extensive and rigorous, the conceptual nature of the paper and the word limitation did not allow for a more detailed discussion of the methodology used in the case studies and the contexts in which the two case studies are located.

The paper adopts a post‐normal perspective of organizational transitions towards sustainability and focuses on dialogue and dialogic interaction as a key learning‐based mechanism for facilitating such a transition. Furthermore the framework for dialogic interaction allows for a more holistic approach toward such a transition and the development of competences needed to accelerate its realization.

This paper aims to explain the development of the dialogical conference, develop a framework for understanding the social construction of the dialogical conference and provide research priorities for further developing the practice in the services marketing discipline.

The growing challenge for service researchers is to generate new theory and knowledge to solve complex problems. Dialogical conferences offer an avenue to develop solutions in response to this challenge. Value co-creation provides a useful lens through which to view dialogical conferences. We draw on Ranjan and Read’s (2016) value-in-use and value co-production and Ramaswamy and Ozcan’s (2018) interactive engagement platforms for value co-creation. Mindful of the contributions of both, the paper presents an integrative framework that describes the relationships between the concepts to provide a firm grounding for developing dialogical conferences.

By mapping value co-creating activities in dialogical conferences according to the APPI framework – artifacts, persons, processes and interfaces – on to value-in-use and value co-production, we propose a new category of value-in-use, equality, to the conceptualisation of value co-creation outcomes. Equality in contribution, attribution and effort is under-represented in value co-creation.

Dialogical conferences are increasingly important for knowledge generation and creating potential for action, yet are underexplored in service research. This paper contributes to the literature by using service logic and dialogical conferences to extend our knowledge of value co-creation interactive platforms and outcomes. Second, we demonstrate the value of dialogical conferences for facilitating meaningful service research and knowledge development. Finally, the authors identify research priorities to encourage further work on extending the understanding and application of dialogical interactive platforms and value co-creation to enable the service community to be responsive in solving complex problems through service offerings.

This exploratory study aims to investigate the use of Facebook as a dialogic accounting tool for promoting citizen engagement in Italian regions.

This study adopts a mixed methodology. Indeed, it first collects some quantitative data to construct an engagement index for the Facebook pages of the Italian regions, and then it performs a content analysis of some posts while also examining the tenor of the related comments and the level of interaction between regions and citizens.

The Italian regions have mainly used their Facebook pages for public communication purposes rather than for public participation. Therefore, they have conceived social pages more as an instrument of self-legitimisation and thus monologic accounting and have rarely considered them as a tool for engaging citizens who, in turn, showed low interest in participating in online debates. Nature and environment, tourism promotion and sport were the most engaging content types. Findings also confirm that posting many messages does not automatically increase engagement.

This study is one of the first to investigate the potential of social media from a dialogic accounting perspective, especially in the public sector. Additionally, it focuses on regions which are understudied in the literature, although they are critical actors in implementing public policies. Last but not least, this study offers a framework that integrates the literature on the use of social media for citizen engagement and research on such platforms as dialogic accounting tools.

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.

This paper aims to discuss the concepts of co-creation and value-in-use with a specific focus on big data technology in agriculture. The authors provide a unique narrative of how farmers experience co-creation and value-in-use in monetary and non-monetary forms.

The qualitative study is based on semi-structured interviews with mid-Western farmers. The constant comparative method was used for coding the data. Results were analyzed through open and axial coding, and matrix queries helped establish linkages between different concepts via NVivo 12.

The paper provides rich insight into co-creation through direct and indirect interaction, autonomous co-creation and epistemic, monetary and environmental value-in-use in the digital agriculture sector. Interestingly, co-creation through indirect interaction gives rise to epistemic value-in-use. Also, value-co-destruction can undermine co-creation, while relational actors and the concept of psychological ownership are very relevant to the process of co-creation.

The authors build on the extant literature on co-creation in knowledge-intensive B2B sectors with the unique findings linking different forms of co-creation with value-in-use.

The findings on co-creation and value-in-use are beneficial to diverse agriculture stakeholders such as farmers, agriculture technology providers, extension agents and policymakers. Agricultural technology providers can determine how to make the co-creation process more meaningful for farmers and also create suitable technology tools that enrich farmers’ knowledge about crop management. Agricultural stakeholders can learn how to develop big data analytic tools and marketing narratives to maximize value-in-use and pre-empt value co-destruction.

The research can impact policy, as it addresses a very relevant issue of how farmers relate to big data technology amidst growing consolidation and privacy concerns in the digital agriculture sector.

Our work is both theoretically and contextually relevant. We incorporate elements of service-dominant and customer-dominant logic while analyzing farmers’ perspectives of co-creation and value-in-use.

The main purpose is to investigate what resources young emergent bilinguals use to communicate a multimodal response to children’s literature. In particular, attention is paid to the ways students translanguage as part of the learning process.

An ethnography-in-education approach was used to capture the social and cultural aspects of literacy learning in an English-only context. A multimodal transcript analysis was applied to video-recorded data as a method for examining semiotic resources and modes of learning.

The results revealed that students used technology, paper-based resources and peers to construct meaning relative to books. Experimentation or play with the affordances of the tablet computer served as avenues to determine the agentive selection of resources. As students wrestled with constructing meaning, they gathered multiple perspectives from peers and children’s literature to involve symbols and representations in their texts. Signs, multiple language forms and meaning came together for the social shaping of situated perspectives.

This study addresses the call for educators to engage in multiliterate, multimodal practices with young learners in the contexts of classrooms. It provides insight into the need to create multilingual learning spaces where translanguaging freely occurs and the meaningful ways early childhood learners use technology. To fully understand what emergent bilinguals know and can do, they must be afforded a variety of semiotic resources at school.

The purpose of this research is to develop a scale for measuring customer value co-creation attitude (CVCCA).

Scale development procedures are used for item generation, item purification and validation. Two studies are conducted. In Study 1, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis is used to generate and confirm the factorial structure of the CVCCA construct. Study 2 validates the scale on a large field sample.

The study develops a new scale for measuring CVCCA. Results suggest that CVCCA is a higher-order construct comprising three dimensions: interaction attitude, knowledge sharing attitude and responsive attitude. Additionally, experiential value significantly predicts CVCCA, which subsequently leads to customer value co-creation behaviour confirming nomological validity of the scale.

The CVCCA scale should be of interest for researchers in exploring factors and outcomes of CVCCA. The scale is useful to managers who are interested in measuring their customers’ co-creation of value attitude and their willingness to engage in value co-creation behaviour.

This is the first scale using the service logic of marketing lens. The scale is found to be a valid and reliable tool to measure customer attitude to engage in value co-creation.

The current study aims to develop a comprehensive model of cocreation and immersion/engagement for café brands as well as their antecedent and consequences in a café brand context. Inherently involving highly socially involving consumption settings, cafés are particularly conducive to brand cocreation.

The current study tested a model of these relationships by analyzing data from customers of a local café and those of a global café, Starbucks, situated in the same town, Karakoy, in Istanbul, Turkey. Data from 241 respondents were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the model of the study.

Results show that sense of brand community is a powerful predictor of cocreation and brand immersion, which are also important antecedents of attitude toward a brand including, cognitive, affective and conative dimensions. Results also revealed slight differences between the local and global brands in terms of brand cocreation's influence on brand trust and loyalty.

The study is conducted with a limited number of customers of two cafés in a city in Turkey. Future research with the customers from other locations of these cafés, especially the multinational customers of the international café brand is needed to retest the model for its validity.

The significant differences between ratings of local and global café brands are positive news for local and traditional cafés that are losing considerable market share to their global competitors. Strategic cocreation implementations can be used to instill special and robust relationships with consumers.

The study provides evidence that in highly socially dynamic brand contexts, such as café brands, brand community is a critical predictor of cocreation and brand immersion, which then affect attitude toward a brand with cognitive, affective and conative dimensions, reflected in brand trust, brand love, satisfaction with the brand, brand commitment and brand loyalty.

The paper investigates the role of information asymmetries and sensegiving processes of citizens claiming for social services. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relevance of applicants’ agency, since it has been generally neglected in the analysis of social services provision. On the contrary, the paper proposes an alternative view, considering applicants as actors who are able to develop dialectic strategies for claiming specific forms of social assistance.

The paper is based on a qualitative research, conducted following an inductive approach. The data have been collected in three different Italian municipalities, where the researcher has been the opportunity to perform a period of observation of the interviews between the social workers of the local social services department and the citizens applying for social assistance.

The findings of the research point out that informational asymmetries play an ambivalent role in the definition of applicant’s strategies, since they represent an ambivalent and dynamic factor, rather than a mere source of disadvantage for the user. From this viewpoint, the citizens’ possibilities to access to social assistance are shaped by both institutional and dialectic factors: on the one hand, access to social assistance relies on specific criteria of eligibility (institutionally defined), but on the other hand the access is the outcome of situated sensegiving processes, performed by both the applicants and the gatekeepers of social services during their encounters.

The research is based on the analysis of a small number of cases, within a context that is characterized by a high level of organizational and professional discretion in the regulation of the provision of social assistance.

The findings of the research urge policy maker to re-consider applicants as strategic actors and opens the space for the development of new options of regulation of the delivery of social services.

The paper suggests to consider the applicants for social services as people who, although in a condition of need, are capable to identify specific forms of assistance. From this point of view, informational asymmetries are not be considered as a stigmatic issue, but as a space which calls for further and less superficial investigation.

The paper challenges some of the most taken-for-granted theoretical assumptions in the analysis of the regulation of the access to social assistance. First, it proposes a dynamic interpretation of the notion of informational asymmetries, considering them as a space for action, rather than a binding factor; second, it emphasizes the relevance of user’s agency in the access to welfare services, that is generally neglected since most analyses focus on professional discretion disregarding the hypothesis of the user as a strategic actor.