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Based on Landowski’s sociosemiotics theory, this paper aims to propose an alternative outlining of online brand communities’ social dynamics, not for their collective behaviors but for their discursive interactions.

Data were collected during a three-year netnographic immersion into a Disney-related Facebook group and authors’ trips to Walt Disney World.

The findings point to four styles of discursive interactions that shape an online brand community’s social dynamic. On the one hand, utterances based on the guiding and following styles of discursive interactions inform desired behaviors, which subsequently become tacitly routinized. On the other hand, utterances based on the adapting and venturing styles of discursive interactions mark random and unusual communicational situations.

This work expands current theoretical discussions on online brand communities by unveiling an unexplored linguistic dimension of them.

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.

This paper aims to propose an approach for exploring industrial marketing network environments through a social semiotic lens.

This conceptual paper introduces social semiotic perspectives to the study of business/industrial network interaction.

This paper describes how structures of meaning derived from a cultural history of signification and interpretive processes of meaning in action are co-determined in social semiosis. The meaning of environments using this social semiotic approach is emphasised, leading us to explore the idea of the “atmosemiosphere” – the most highly complex business network level, in illustrating how meaning is made through structuration between structures of meaning and their enactments in interactions between actors within living business networks.

Figurative language plays an important role in the structuration of meaning. This facilitates establishing plots and, therefore, in the actors’ capability to tell a story, which starts with knowing what kind of story can be told. By implication, the effective networker must be a consummate moving “picture maker” and, to do so, she must have competence in narrative, emplotment, myth-making, storytelling and figuration in more than one discursive repertoire.

In using a structurational discourse perspective informed by social semiotics, our original contribution is a “business networks as discursive constructions” approach, in that discursive nets, webs of narratives and stories and labyrinths of tropes are considered just as important in constituting networks as networks of actor relationships and patterns of other activities and resources.

How is it possible to evidence whether students are engaging with a course? What can be done to increase their level of engagement? Since the advent of blogs in 2002 a comprehensive body of research has developed around the pedagogic benefits of educational blogging and its value in teaching and learning, notably in encouraging reflective practice, social interaction and participatory learning (Burgess, 2006. Blogging to learn, learning to blog. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs (pp. 105–114). New York, NY: Peter Lang; Farmer, Yue, & Brooks, 2008; Williams & Jacobs, 2004). This chapter investigates whether blogs are also an effective tool for supporting and sustaining a community of learners in Higher Education and increasing their engagement in a university course.

The researchers used a case study methodology to examine whether the introduction of blogs had led to the development of a community of practice around an undergraduate course at the University for the Creative Arts. The data collected revealed that the course team had successfully developed a thriving online community involving students, staff, alumni and industry, with students displaying high levels of engagement and interaction. The discursive, commentary nature of blogging enabled students to engage in peer-supported learning, with the online ‘always on’ nature of the community providing a 24/7 support network. In addition, tutors were able to assess clearly the level of engagement of each student and provide targeted, timely feedback for those students who required more support.

It is hoped that this research will be informative to tutors and academic support staff who wish to explore the potential of using collaborative online technologies to enhance student learning and engagement.

A brief critical review of the existing literature on the topic of integrity opens up the scope for a detailed approach to the meaning of social integrity, or integrity in its social relational sense. The tenor of explanation of this concept is then taken up as a subspace of the meaning of the supreme good and therein the concept of goodness. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

All such concepts are studied in the relational sense of epistemic origin of values. Such ethical values arise from the epistemic ontology of the moral law. They are contrasted with the contrary meanings under the episteme of rationalism.

Rationalism as philosophy of mind and matter devoid of a substantive acceptance of the divinely inspired functional ontology of the moral law is also critically and formally studied.

More empirical work needed and which indeed can be done both statistically as well as by quantitative mathematical models. The scope for this extension remains wide open in the paper.

The paper presents an immense import in the study of cognitive economics, behavioral finance, and decision making in the area of ethical finance and organizational behavior as a conscious institution. An example is provided. Many more areas are indicated. Altogether a vast scope of conception and applications in the area of endogenous ethics and socio-scientific field remains open.

The paper is truly original crossing the boundaries of social cybernetics and systems into mathematical algorithmic treatment exemplified by a game-theoretic example of the imminent place of the meanings of the good, goodness, and the trait of integrity in social behavior. All these are together embedded in the study of embedded social system and cybernetic study. This is a foundationally original field of research investigation playing out its analytical part in the study of social system and cybernetic.

To conceptualize and theorize dialogue's diagnostic as well as generative functions for strategic innovation and organizational change.

Conceptual development with case illustration.

Strategic innovation requires shifts in existing mental models of organizational actors that underlie the overall strategy paradigm of a firm. Dialogue as a form of reflective conversation enables actors to alter managers' mental models through conscious, critical exploration.

Conceptual framework introduces reflective dialogue, as a crucial processual element for encouraging shifts in mental maps and as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for strategy innovation; provides an analytical framework for enhancing understanding of the emergent processes of strategic innovation, and for studying shifts in organizational actors' mental models.

Provides organizational change agents and strategists with perspectives and frameworks for appreciating and fostering reflective dialogue in the context of strategic thinking and innovation.

Concept of reflective dialogue and associated frameworks link micro‐levels and macro‐levels of strategy innovation and address critical process elements.

The purpose of this paper is to present a metaphor of organizations as discursive gravitational fields.

The metaphor was built based on Einstein's general theory of relativity and Lacan's theory of discourse. The dialogue with organization studies was made possible through the utilization of the communicative theory of organizations as theoretical background.

A number of insights were derived from the metaphor. First, organizations can distort their discursive surroundings up to the point of stopping any flux of independent discourse; second, the boundaries of organizations are to be understood as a gradient of discursive influence which fades away, often much beyond its legal limits; that also creates degrees of “stakeholding”, corresponding to different levels of influence and dependence on a specific organization by their stakeholders; third, the discursive fields of different organizations are often superposed, creating the phenomena of interference and superposition among organizational discursive fields; fourth, speciation among organizations is related to the kind of symbolic element attracted predominantly by their surrounding fields; and fifth, Lacanian theory suggests that no absolute and permanent discursive power is possible to persons or organizations, leaving room to the continuous production of new and potentially emancipating meaning, whose appearance, however, can be very difficult to predict due to its “discursive quantum nature”.

This metaphor can help researchers and managers to interpret the discursive phenomena involving organizations as a whole, as well as organizational relations with stakeholders.

By bringing together organization theory, Einstein's and Lacan's theories, this paper provides a new view on the relation between organizations, discourse and society.

Scholars have primarily focused on how language represents categories. We move beyond this conception to develop a discursive perspective of market categorization focused on how categories are constructed through communicative exchanges. The discursive perspective points to three under-researched mechanisms of category evolution: (1) the interaction between market participants, (2) the power dynamics among market participants and within the discourse, and (3) the cultural and material context in which categories are constructed. In this theoretical paper, we discuss how each of these mechanisms shed light on different phases of category evolution and the methods that could be used to study them.