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To examine the post 9/11 communication of the bond‐trading firm, Cantor Fitzgerald and its CEO Howard Lutnick, according to the discourse of renewal framework.

This case‐study of the discourse of renewal draws upon the messages and statements made by the company and its employees following the 9/11 attacks. The discourse of renewal framework emphasizes provisional responses, prospective statements, and the role of the leader as a symbol of stability in the face of a crisis.

This study provides support for viewing crisis as change‐inducing events with the potential to fundamentally alter the form, structure and direction of an organization. Renewal discourse helped the company survive an attack where over 600 employees were killed and the company offices completely destroyed. While a crisis inevitably create severe harm, it also has the potential to serve as a renewing force for the organization.

Few examples of post‐crisis discourse of renewal have been examined in the literature and more research is needed. Work needs to identify the conditions necessary for this kind of discourse.

Organizations may have the opportunity to fundamentally reframe a crisis, focusing on the opportunities that arise from these events.

This paper explores both organizational crisis and organizational discourse from unique positions. Discourse is positioned as the means whereby crisis can become a positive force for change

There is a small amount of research that examines the post-crisis communication efforts of organizations (Coombs, 2012). The discourse of renewal has a focus on learning and positive views of the future. However, there have been some efforts to link it with memorials (Veil et al., 2011). More can be done so that memorials and remembering enhance our understanding of the effects of post-crisis communication. This paper analyzes the Texas A&M Bonfire tragedy as an example of how remembrance, through the shared experience of grief and memorializing, communicates renewal and how the narrative of the crisis has been successfully institutionalized within the organization.

The study relies on 12 qualitative interviews with undergraduate students attending Texas A&M.

The findings indicate that memorials are important facilitators of renewal as they carry multiple messages. The results from the study indicated that the narrative of the Bonfire crisis has been embedded within the organizational culture of A&M through a memorialization process facilitated by renewal discourse. Additionally, renewal was found to influence stakeholder perceptions of crises and to be an underlying force of learning and change following organizational crisis.

The paper explores how an organization presents a past crisis to new stakeholders. This paper explores how stakeholders experience and interpret that post-crisis communication. Additionally, the memorial creates a remembering-forgetting tension as organizations want stakeholders to forget the negatives from a crisis.

Post-crisis renewal discourse (Ulmer et al., 2007) is one form of communication that stakeholders may use as they attempt to organize for resilience. The purpose of this paper propose extending Discourse of Renewal Theory to explain how it could enact a different kind of resilience than scholars typically consider. Organizational resilience strategies often focus on the recovery or prevention stages of crisis management. Under conditions of persistent threat, it would be more productive for renewal discourse to emphasize greater preparedness.

To illustrate the need for this kind of theorizing, the author analyzes a case study that follows the public relations efforts of Canadian energy company Enbridge, Inc., in the aftermath of the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill.

By the criteria of Discourse of Renewal Theory, Enbridge attempted a renewal strategy, but it failed. By other criteria, however, it succeeded: it created the opportunity for richer dialogue among stakeholders about their interdependence and their competing interests.

By considering how elements of the resilience process may vary, this paper offers resources for more nuanced theory-building and theory-testing related to organizational and system-level resilience.

Based on a case study of the Logan Renewal Initiative (LRI) in Queensland Australia, this chapter examines the competing aims bound up in programmes of urban renewal and the way different stakeholder groups advocate for one component of the programme while seeking to prevent another.

A qualitative case study approach is used based on interview and documentary material to elicit the competing views and opinions of local residents, state and local governments, housing providers and other stakeholders around a renewal programme.

It is found that there are two competing agendas bound up within the LRI, with gentrification at the heart of each. One focuses on the virtues of the social housing reform agenda, but sees gentrification as an unintended and undesirable outcome that needs to be carefully managed. The other is a place-improvement ambition that sees gentrification as an effective policy mechanism, but one that will be undermined by any increases in the stock of social and affordable housing.

The chapter emphasizes that programmes of renewal are rarely coherent policy tools, but are subject to change, contestation and negotiation as stakeholders compete to impose their own desired outcomes. In the case of the LRI, both outcomes will likely result in the marginalization of low-income groups unless their needs are placed at the forefront of its design.

The chapter engages critically with the widely held view that urban renewal is a means of gentrifying local neighbourhoods by showing how local conditions and circumstances render the relationship between renewal and gentrification far more complex that generally conceived.

This paper aims to analyse the post‐crisis communication response of the UK oil industry both from a management and employee perspective following two major helicopter incidents in 2009. The purpose of this paper is to develop further understanding of the merits of a cross‐industry post‐crisis communication strategy for certain crisis types.

This research is a single case study focusing on the Helicopter Task Group (HTG). Thirteen members of the HTG were interviewed and 250 questionnaires distributed to the workforce. Results were analysed against a literature review of current post‐crisis communication theory.

The study demonstrates that where a crisis is deemed to genuinely cross company boundaries, an inter‐organisational approach to post‐crisis communications is of mutual benefit to all stakeholders, providing certain conditions for dialogue are met.

This paper only focuses on one crisis event. Further research is required with other inter‐organisational groups formed to lead a cross‐industry response to a crisis.

This case study provides a model for cross‐industry pre‐crisis planning and post‐crisis renewal strategy where the aim is not to attribute blame, but to respond to a wider community of concerns and issues that are deemed to cross company and institutional boundaries.

The research demonstrates that the process of rebuilding stakeholder relationships and renewal is possible prior to any formal attribution of blame or apology.

What do economists talk about? This seemingly innocent interrogation conceals a broader and innovative research programme, with the potential to renew the reflection on heterodox economics in a post‐crisis scenario. The aim of this paper is to show that convergence between language for specific purposes and economics is possible, so as to single out the genesis and the emergence of critical economic discourse.

After underlining the necessary collaboration between language and subject‐matter specialists, the paper addresses the question of the problematic use of economics textbooks in English‐speaking countries. Then, it deals with the fascinating question of the multiplicity of specialized meanings in economics. After pointing out the shortcomings of orthodoxy characterized by hyper‐formalization and its inevitable corollary, the mathematical nature of the discipline, it investigates the genesis of critical economic discourse, which requires the acknowledgement of pluralism and the components of heterodoxy, in order to converge towards a process of disciplinary acculturation that goes hand in hand with the learning process of language for specific purposes.

A deep‐seated renewal of economics, consisting of a methodological shift towards the components of heterodoxy, has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of teaching English for economics, so that the latter effectively conveys specialized meaning.

Teaching and researching English for specific purposes necessitates enhanced collaboration between subject‐matter specialists and applied linguists. However, this type of collaboration can be hampered by institutional or socio‐professional obstacles.

Discursive analysis has become indispensable in order to surmount the collective failure of mainstream economics in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. With the help of textbooks of a new kind, one must go beyond the vision of students as mere consumers of knowledge.

Language for specific purposes has long shown interest in economics, but is the reciprocal true? This paper proposes an original association, by putting the two disciplinary fields on an equal footing, and by bringing new synergies forward.

The paper aims to explore the gap between theory and practice in foresight and to give some suggestions on how to reduce it.

Analysis of practical foresight activities and suggestions are based on a literature review, the author's own research and practice in the field of foresight and futures studies, and her participation in the work of a European project (COST A22).

Two different types of practical foresight activities have developed. One of them, the practice of foresight of critical futures studies (FCFS) is an application of a theory of futures studies. The other, termed here as praxis foresight (PF), has no theoretical basis and responds directly to practical needs. At present a gap can be perceived between theory and practice. PF distinguishes itself from the practice and theory of FCFS and narrows the construction space of futures. Neither FCFS nor PF deals with content issues of the outer world. Reducing the gap depends on renewal of joint discourses and research about experience of different practical foresight activities and manageability of complex dynamics in foresight. Production and feedback of self‐reflective and reflective foresight knowledge could improve theory and practice.

Contemporary practical foresight activities are analysed and suggestions to reduce the gap are developed in the context of the linkage between theory and practice. This paper is thought provoking for futurists, foresight managers and university researchers.

This paper aims to examine the contribution that discourse analysis can make to understanding organizational change.

It identifies five key contributions. Discourse analytic approaches: reveal the important role of discourse in the social construction of organizational change; demonstrate how the meaning attached to organizational change initiatives comes about as a result of a discursive process of negotiation among key actors; show that the discourses of change should be regarded as intertextual; provide a valuable multi‐disciplinary perspective on change; and exhibit a capacity, to generate fresh insights into a wide variety of organizational change related issues.

To illustrate these contributions the paper examines the five empirical studies included in this special issue. It discusses the potential for future discursive studies of organizational change phenomena and the implications of this for the field of organizational change more generally.

Provides an introduction to the special issue on discourse and organizational change.

The philosophical reflection on the essence of what we call the market has largely disappeared from the textbooks of the economic discipline. This paper intends to contribute to a renewal of this discourse by explicitly looking on basic concepts of mainstream market theory from an ethical point of view. There is not so much new information given; rather, a different, ethically conscious light is shed on the information we already have on the market. With its philosophical emphasis on the frame of reference, which is always normative in nature, the paper contributes to the new emerging approach of integrative economic ethics (integrative Wirtschaftsethik), introduced by Peter Ulrich. After touching the interrelationship of (descriptive) theory and (normative) ethics, the outlines of a brief and, as I claim, complete theory of the basic structure of the market are sketched. Central to this theory is the view of the market as a system. This systemic view permits us to explain phenomena like economic growth or unemployment as well as to discover ethical problems and to raise normative questions that are often overlooked and passed over.

This chapter provides an account of the multi-dimensional injustices faced by public housing tenants in inner-city Salford; a contemporary, post-crash ‘austerity’ British city.

Two phases of qualitative empirical fieldwork were conducted by the author between 2003 and 2016 supplemented by documentary research and analysis of media articles released since 2009.

The empirical data presented demonstrates the challenges of living in partially gentrified, partially abandoned, semi-ensnared spaces. Salford is a city where ‘austerity’ has hit hard; where household incomes, social services and public housing tenancies have been undermined to such an extent that many live in extremely uncertain conditions. This has occurred against the backbeat of longer term restructuring where the state has been rolled back, out and back again at a bewildering rate, shunting residents from one logic of renewal and retrenchment to another.

This chapter looks beyond what can seem like linear accounts of restructuring within ‘planetary’ accounts of neoliberal urban transformation and recognizes the chaos of urban renewal and welfare state retrenchment in the global Northern urban periphery. In so doing, it argues we have a better platform for understanding the nuances of residents’ responses, resistances and relations on the ever-shifting ground.