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Drawing from findings of a case study of inter‐organisational collaboration, this paper aims to employ organisational theory to examine the potential learning that opens between educational organisations. The focus is discursive practices. Two questions guide the analysis. What (unique) practices are implicated in the “knotworking” of inter‐organisational collaboration? What knowledge and capacities are learned in these discursive practices?

A case study was conducted of a collaboration between a university unit, school district, elementary school and parent executive board to govern a laboratory school. Documents were examined and 17 interviews conducted and analysed inductively. Document analysis and second stage transcript analysis employed methods of discourse analysis.

The case analysis suggests that collaborations open unique sites for organizational learning. Actors (teachers, administrators, parents) engage with various discourses in the “knots” of inter‐organisational networks. Those who thrive in the “knot” of collaboration learn how to be flexibly attuned to shifting elements that emerge in negotiations. Further, these actors appear to develop capacities of mapping, translating, rearticulating, and spanning boundaries among the diverse positions of organisations.

The case study is limited in scope in order to allow in‐depth discourse analysis of the data.

The combination of theories employed here – a practice‐based organizational learning theory called “knotworking” and critical organisational discourse analysis – is unique in educational administration research. It is argued that together, these theories provide a useful analytic approach for administrators wanting to understand and work through the cultural and political complexities of inter‐organisational collaborations.

To illustrate methodologically and conceptually how understanding of entrepreneurial management can be enhanced through a discourse perspective which focuses on discourse as both noun and verb, encompassing discursive resources and discursive practices.

An ethnographic study of SME managers and their companies, which deployed a discourse perspective to managing, organising and learning. Through two case study companies the paper explores how managers' formal management learning influenced their organisation practice.

Demonstrates how significant communicative acts are to understanding a company. Illustrates how apparent organisation dysfunction might be analysed and sense made of it.

By differentiating between discursive practice and discursive resource it shows that entrepreneurship research can be enriched through ethnographic study of both the content of communication between organisation members and their communicative practices.

Illustrates a method of gaining insight into dysfunctional organisational processes. Provides new ways of understanding and researching the interconnections between learning, knowledge and management in small enterprises.

In the small firm sector there are still few empirical discursive analyses of organization and managing. Discursive organization studies have also tended to be undervalued as “an obsession with talk” and “an intellectual luxury”. This article addresses both these gaps, both offering evidence of the practical utility of the methodological approach for advancing organisation understanding and providing a rare empirical discursive study of managing in SMEs.

Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus of the study is on health promotion in a context of illness and/or decline, which form the core of the studied organizational activities. The paper addresses the following question: how do care workers working in elderly care and mental health care organizations accomplish health promotion in the context of illness and/or decline?

The article develops a performative approach and analyses material-discursive practices in health promoting care work. The empirical material includes 36 semi-structured interviews with care workers, observations and organizational documents.

Two central material-discursive health promoting practices in care work are identified: confirming that celebrates service users as residents and the organizations as a home, and balancing at the limits of health promotion. The practices of balancing make the limitations of health promotion discernible and involve reconciling health promotion with that which does not neatly fit into it (illness, unachievable care aims, the institution and certain organizing). In sum, the study shows how health promotion can structure processes in care homes where illness and decline often are particularly palpable.

The paper explores health promotion in a context rarely explored in organization studies. Previous organization studies have to some extent explored health promotion and care work, but typically separately. Further, the few studies that have adopted a performative approach to material-discursive practices in the context of care work have typically primarily focused on IT. We extend previous organization studies literature by producing new insights: (1) from an important organizational context of health promotion and (2) of under-researched entanglements of human and non-human actors in care work providing a performative theory of reconciling organizational tensions.

This paper aims to develop understanding of how the pursuit of practice change in auditing, especially in relation to audit methodologies, is conveyed, presented, reflected in and enabled (or hindered) through discursive, textual constructions by audit firms.

The paper uses an extensive series of interviews with audit practitioners, educators and regulators and a textual study of the content, concordances and narratives contained in two key audit methodological texts published by KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.

Major discursive shifts in audit methodologies are identified over the last decade, with the dominant audit discourse switching from one of “business value” to one of “audit quality”. Such shifts are analysed in terms of developments in the wider, organisational field and discursive (re)constructions of audit at the level of the audit firm.

The identified shifts in auditing discourse are important in a number of respects. They demonstrate the significance of discursive elements of audit practice, contradicting influential prior claims that methodological discussions and developments in audit over the last decade had focused consistently on notions of “audit quality”. Methodologically, they demonstrate the importance and opportunities for knowledge development available by combining institutional, field‐wide analysis with a detailed discursive study of individual interviews and texts.

The purpose of the paper is to describe the ways in which people use language to achieve mobilization. Recognizing and anticipating the discursive practices that are used online, for instance for mobilization, increasingly is a primary concern for professionals in crisis communication or issue management.

A discursive psychological perspective is drawn upon to conduct a qualitative analysis of the interactional and rhetorical features of mobilization on two Facebook event pages, and to discover patterns of talk.

Three dominant discursive patterns were identified: disputing the integrity of authorities, constructing a positive atmosphere and a feeling of “togetherness” and constructing decisive identities. These activities play an important role in mobilization and are accomplished by the use of language. Furthermore, it demonstrates that mobilization involves the concern of not overtly presenting oneself as a victim or activist.

Insights into the discursive strategies people use to achieve mobilization are important for recognizing these discursive phenomena during media monitoring. The analysis presented in this paper does not allow the authors to draw general conclusions nor the success of the strategies in terms of the actual events.

The study offers important insights for communication professionals (for instance, in the domain of crisis communication), enabling them to recognize mobilizing practices in other contexts and designing an adequate response.

The study exposes those issues that are important for mobilizing a community and creating public engagement.

In addition to other studies on the role of language in mobilization, the current study adds a perspective that takes into account both the rhetorical and the interactional features of mobilization. Furthermore, the findings are implemented in a training for professionals in the domain of crisis communication.

Despite the growing amount of research on the social and organizational role of legitimacy, very little is known about the subtle discursive processes through which organizational changes are legitimated in contemporary society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the subtle processes of interdiscursivity and intertextuality through which an organization constructs a sense of legitimacy.

Drawing on the case of a newly privatized oil company in a transitional, post-communist economy, the authors’ research uses critical discourse analysis to analyze the annual reports, corporate press releases, and relevant media from the four years following privatization.

The authors argue for a relational understanding of legitimacy construction that emphasizes how legitimacy relies on the multiple processes of intertextuality linking corporate narratives and media texts. Corporate narratives are not produced solely by the discourses that occur at the individual and organizational levels; they are also produced by the much broader discourses that occur at the societal level.

This study’s main contribution is that it reveals the intertextual and interdiscursive construction of corporate narratives, which is a key element in understanding how discourses around privatization are interlinked and draw upon other macro-level discourses to construct legitimacy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of a struggle for power over the regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) within the European Union.

The paper combines insights from institutional theory (Lawrence and Buchanan, 2017) with Vaara et al.’s (2006) and Vaara and Tienar’s (2008) discursive strategies approach in order to interrogate the dynamics of the institutional “arena” that emerged in 2001, following the European Commission’s publication of a Green Paper (GP) on CSR policy and reporting. Drawing on multiple sources of data (including newspaper coverage, semi-structured interviews and written submissions by companies and NGOs), the authors analyse the institutional political strategies employed by companies and NGOs – two of the key stakeholder groupings who sought to influence the dynamics and outcome of the European initiative.

The results show that the 2001 GP was a “triggering event” (Hoffman, 1999) that led to the formation of the institutional arena that centred on whether CSR policy and reporting should be voluntary or mandatory. The findings highlight how two separate, but related forms of power (systemic and episodic power) were exercised much more effectively by companies compared to NGOs. The analysis of the power initiatives and discursive strategies deployed in the arena provides a theoretically informed understanding of the ways in which companies acted in concert to reach their objective of maintaining CSR and SEAR as a voluntary activity.

The theoretical framework outlined in the paper highlights how the analysis of CSR and SEAR regulation can be enriched by examining the deployment of episodic and systemic power by relevant actors.

This article sheds light on the legal services offered by antiviolence centers through a discursive practice-based analysis of women who have experienced domestic violence and the lawyers who volunteer in the center.

Using a practice-based framework, the article utilizes a case study of the first legal meeting between a lawyer and a woman who has experienced violence. The case study illustrates how the legal advisors' expertise is deployed in the use of “discursive practices” in dealing with women who have experienced domestic violence. Through a systematic analysis of the verbatim narrative, the case shows how the lawyer performs her legal help through expert “discursive practices” which are situated in recognition of the texture of practices experienced by women in the legal system.

The case study shows how a practice-based approach is able to account for lawyers' discursive and interactional knowledge in dealing with domestic violence. This expert doing and saying includes the ability to read the complexities of abusive situations, using “professional vision” to identify, highlight and codify clues and patterns of a partners' violent behavior; the mastery of “co-implication” with women to support the development of a narrative of the abuse as a crime recognizable both by the victim and the legal system.

The analysis shows that practice-based approaches to knowing and learning in investigating discourse practices can provide insights on practitioners' interactional expertise as well as the relevance of the service. While a close look at the actual practices illustrates the lawyer's interactional mechanisms, the crucial role of legal aid in the antiviolence center can be appreciated by contextualizing within the texture of practices that characterizes women's experiences with violence.

The formation and spreading of market‐, management‐ and individual‐rights discourses into society, as well as the movement of consumerism, have paved the way for a transformation of the linguistic usage. The transformation suggests that the view of the care seeker has shifted from a waiting patient, via a consumer to a customer creating value. Another example of the process is that the former medical meeting between patient/doctor now is described as a service meeting. With this background, the purpose of this paper is to explore the transformation of linguistic usage and to analyse the performativity of the service management discourse in health care.

The concept of performativity (Butler) supported with discursive formation and subjectivization (Foucualt) is used as theoretical framework. The performativity of the discourse is understood as a vehicle within the discourse, which influences people on an ontological level that names and makes them active subjects in line with what the discourse is saying.

When the service management discourse travels into the world of health care, discursive tensions between medical‐, care‐ and management discourses follow. These become apparent in the distinction between the different discursive constructions of patient – related to passivity, and customer – related to the performative image of active participation in value creating health. Even if the customer in service management discourse is imagined as an agent for himself with power and individual responsibility it is doubtful if people view themselves as customers. The dialectics between the use of the customer concept in commercial service meetings and the patient – doctor meeting, which is illustrated, point to unexpressed and implicit presumptions of an ontological kind in the ways service management researchers describe service meetings. Recent health care research can be interpreted as if a majority of patients have a desire to be part of their value creating processes. Since the responsibilities and tasks of the professions in health care however are regulated by law and institutionalised, the process of delegating tasks to patients seems not to be a matter of course.

It seems to be problematic to replace the patient concept with the customer concept in general. This concept gives hardly much room for the vulnerability that characterises a sick person. A reasonable approach would of course be to use the customer concept in a nuanced way.

The paper demonstrates that the performativity of service management theories, through the use of discursive analysis, is valuable in order to understand shifts in linguistic usage.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that qualitative researchers have much to learn from conducting methodological analyses of their own talk in relation to research participants in interviews. Yet there are specific difficulties in representing findings from methodological analyses of research interviews.

Although qualitative researchers have for some time followed recommendations to analyze both “how” interview data are generated in addition to “what” is discussed, little has been written about the challenges of representing these sorts of analyses. The paper uses a case to first examine difficulties in the representation of an analysis of interview data that draws on discursive psychology. After discussing the case, the paper further explores the challenges of conducting and presenting these sorts of methodological analyses of interview data to research participants and readers in ways that clearly convey what might be learned by examining how interviews are accomplished.

The paper outlines considerations for researchers in doing methodological analyses of interview data, including challenges, reconciling interpretations of “what” and “how” topics are discussed in research studies, and possible areas of focus.

This paper examines what researchers might learn from examinations of their own interview practice and does not focus on representations of topical analyses.

The paper argues that when interviewers subject their own talk to analysis, they learn about themselves, their craft, and the ways in which knowledge about social worlds are collaboratively produced in research encounters with participants.

By developing expertise in how to analyze their interview interaction methodologically, qualitative researchers can attend to significant features of their interview practice and in so doing, develop a reflexive research practice.