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The purpose of this paper is to better understand the management of accounts that sport for development (SFD) agencies provide.

A recognized methodology for analyzing narratives is mobilized to collate a longitudinal sample of one agency’s president’s letters. Using Greimas’s actantial model as a framework, this study analyzes role allocation through president’s letters.

The analysis of empirical data demonstrates the managerial functions of sanctioning and qualifying organizational performance and manipulating current, as well as potential, partners into becoming actors in the studied network.

This study submits that a new typology and associated roles are needed for one categories of actors. Redefining the destinator category of actors previously used in management literature with a new sender label is proposed. Adjusting our view on the roles given to actors in this category demonstrates new meaning and intent embedded in president’s letters.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation of self-service technologies (SST) in two competitors and unravel the process of change in two related setups, offering a comparison as well as an association of cases.

The paper is based on two extensive case studies of SST adoption by leading retailers in a Western European country. The analysis is based on a material-discursive approach using Greimas actantial model to identify actors’ roles in the implementation process.

Results highlight the key role of technology and organizational identity as legitimizers of the change process. The findings also emphasize the role of competition in justifying change.

Due to the specific situation of the market in the country of study (both retailers share 70 percent of the grocery market), this research offers a textbook example of the role of competition in technological change. This helps to understand the role of competition in technological change.

This study explores the implementation of SST in two competitors and unravels the process of change in two related setups, offering a comparison as well as an association of cases.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate to what extent Denise Rousseau's psychological contracts in organizations and Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's social contract present superficial or profound similarities. Having localized more precisely the lines of gaps between both works, “transgressive” research directions are proposed to enrich each of both thoughts of contracts.

This work consists in an analysis in the sense of Descartes, dividing conceptual difficulties into smaller and smaller parts. More precisely, that analysis is a semiotic one, as defined by linguist Hjelmslev, considering each step of the analysis a “level” and assessing the depth of similarities between two works: On the Social Contract and Psychological Contracts in Organizations. The parallel study of both works consists in analyzing the “grammar of use” of concepts at each level, establishing semantic comparative tables. This digging into parallel strata of sense is metaphorically considered as the tectonic study of two continents of thought.

It is established that common ideas and concepts are similar up to the depth of level three but radically differ at level four. At level one, nine main common ideas and concepts are raised. Analysis at level two allows considering those superficial similarities as nine more profound homologies in the sense of Greimas and Courtes. At level three, two different groups of homologies are established, binding, on the one hand, an isomorphism between spheres of contracting and, on the other hand, an isomorphism between substances of contract. At level four a deep tectonic fault is unveiled between Jean‐Jacques' and Denise's thought of contract: the sovereignty/exchange gap. This fault corresponds to two universal different syntaxes of subjects and objects defined by Greimas: the participative communication vs closed circulation of the objects of value.

This analysis is based on a corpus of two major works. However, every grammar of use relies on the study of a finite corpus.

The liberal assimilation of every social contract to exchange dynamics is radically denied by such work. The challenge of raising “sovereignty‐like” dimension in psychological contracts is all the more so critical since those contracts are pervasive in organizational and social life.

This paper proposes rigorous criteria for every trans‐cultural and trans‐disciplinary use of concepts in an original manner. A comparative “geology of thought” is made possible through semiotic instruments.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss what kinds of messages about the risks of polydrug use are mediated in YouTube video blogs and on what kinds of norms and values do the vloggers base these messages.

The data consist of 12 YouTube videos where vloggers share their own experiences of the risks and harms of polydrug use. In the analysis, the actantial model of Greimas’ theory of structural semiotics was applied.

Two main types of videos were identified – sobriety and controlled use – where polydrug use has different meanings. In sobriety videos, polydrug use is presented as the heavy use of multiple substances. In the videos dealing with controlled use, polydrug use is taken as the combining of certain substances. Whereas the sobriety videos emphasized total abstinence from all substances due to their destructiveness, the videos about controlled use emphasized risk awareness when combining substances. Despite modern digital media and a new generation operating in this space, the messages of the risks of polydrug use mainly repeat those of familiar discourses.

This paper offers an analytical insight into the ways in which the risks of polydrug use are conceptualized in a YouTube context that is increasingly gaining a foothold among the youth. Greimas’ actantial model offers a fruitful tool to find semiotic meanings that hide under the surface. The model has not been applied in previous drug research.

Berthon and Pitt (2018) recently highlighted the symbiotic relationship between fake news and brands. This paper aims to draw on semiotics to refine the fake/real news dichotomy to a fourfold typology.

First, the authors turn to semiotics and review Greimas’ (1966) semiotic square. Second, they use this framework to refine the fake/real news dichotomy into a four-fold typology. Third, they illustrate each type with a news report on the topic of climate change. Fourth, they apply this framework to reveal four types of brand: real, fake, empty and ironic.

Given that brand communications are heterogeneous, the authors suggest that the typology can be reconceptualized as dimensions and brands communications decoded accordingly. They conclude by exploring further opportunities offered by the semiotic square for interpretive investigation.

The value of the paper lies in the novel use of the semiotic square to shed light on both news and brand communications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sensemaking processes leading to project managers' responses to an unexpected event in an international project setting. High uncertainty and unexpected events are prevalent in international projects conducted in challenging and complex environments. The paper analyzes how an unexpected event and the ways to cope with it were made sense of by a Finnish and a Chinese project manager in a system supplier's delivery project in China.

This paper builds on a qualitative case study of the two project managers' sensemaking processes in the face of a single unexpected event. Narrative interviews were used as the method for data collection. The actantial framework by Greimas was used in analyzing the interview narratives.

The paper shows how the project managers' sensemaking processes, even within the same project management team, are highly subjective, leading to the coexistence of multiple, and highly divergent responses to the unexpected event. The paper also highlights how these sensemaking processes create the coexistence of multiple, divergent systems of project structures and boundaries for coping with the unexpected event.

While the existing project management literature has distinguished various tactics used by project managers for responding to unexpected events, of lesser attention have been the actual sensemaking processes underlying and producing these responses. The paper especially stresses how the sensemaking processes between project managers coming from culturally different backgrounds can yield highly contrasting interpretations and responses to the same event.

The paper aims to provide a semiotic interpretation of the role played by entanglement in quantum-based models aimed to information retrieval and suggests possible improvements. Actual models are capable of retrieving documents relevant to a query composed of a keyword and its acceptation expressed by a given context. The paper also considers some analogies between this technique and quantum-based approaches in other disciplines to discuss the consequence of this quantum turn, as epistemology and philosophy of language are concerned.

We use quantum geometry to design a formal model for textual semiotics. In particular, the authors refer to Greimas’s work on semantics and information theory, to Eco’s writings on semantic memory and to Lotman’s work on a cybernetic notion of culture.

Quantum approaches imply a particular point of view on meaning. Meaning is not a real, positive quality of a given word. It is a net of relations constructed in the text, whose value is progressively determined during the reading process. Furthermore, reading is not a neutral operation: to read is to determine meaning. If it is said that, from a general semiotic point of view, meaning is stored in quantum semantic memories and is read/written by semantic machines, then the operation of “reading/writing” is analogous to the operation of measuring in quantum theory: in other terms, meaning is a value, and this implies an instance (not necessarily human) according to which values are valuable.

The authors are not proposing a complete quantum semantics. At the present, quantum information retrieval can detect the presence of semantic relations. The authors suggest a way to characterize them, leaving open the problem on how to formalize the document as a vector in four-state semantic space.

A quantum turn shows deep semiotic implications on the approach to language, which shows an immanent semantic organization not reducible to syntax and morphology. This organization is probabilistic and indeterministic and explains to what extent text fixes the meaning of its lexical units.

In the authors’ perspective, signification is not the exclusivity of a human subject. Criticizing Turing test, the great semiotic and cybernetic scholar Jurij Lotman wrote that if we identify “intelligent” and “human”, we raise the failings of an actual form of intelligence to the rank of an essential characteristic. On this line, meaning is considered as a feature of social, artificial and biological systems.

The adoption of quantum formalism seems in line with cybernetic framework, involving a probabilistic, non-cartesian point of view on meaning aimed to critically discuss the human–machine relation. Furthermore, Quantum theory (QT) implies a phenomenological point of view on the conditions of possibility of meaning.