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This paper aims to use the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to reveal new insights into the role and impact of social media in health-care settings.

With the help of Bakhtin’s constructs of dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia and carnival, the power and influences of the social media phenomenon in health-care settings, are explored.

It is apparent from the in-depth analysis conducted that there is a delicate balance between the need to increase dialogue and the need to safeguard public health, in the use of social media for health-related communication. Bakhtin‘s constructs elucidate this delicate balance and highlight the need for health-care providers that use social media to find the right balance between these competing communicational priorities.

This paper advances a nascent theoretical approach to social media research. By applying Bakhtinian ideas to consumer health informatics, this paper has the potential to open a new approach to theorizing the role of social software in health-care settings. Stakeholders in digital health will find this paper useful, as it opens up dialogue to further discuss the role of social media in health care.

The purpose of this paper is to reframe the role and function of perceived “bad English” in an international business (IB) context to illustrate that “bad English” could in fact facilitate cross-cultural communication in individuals who do not have English as first language.

This study uses the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia as a theoretical framework. For the method of analysis, applied linguistics is used in particular through the lens of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as discourse analysis method to analyze transcribed interview texts. Data collection is via long interviews with 33 top level managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore offices.

The study illustrates, through respondent interviews and discourse analysis, that perceived “bad English” could help facilitate communication across cultures in a cross-cultural working context. The study also shows how different individuals, depending on personal experience and cultural background, employ different means to navigate and manage language differences at work.

The findings confirm a Baktinian perspective of language as a heteroglot, where individual identities and understanding of context at work including work behavior are an amalgamation of collected experiences. While many individuals who do not have English as mother tongue might feel embarrassed by their poor English, this study shows that there are many Englishes existing in different working contexts. This study has a limited sample of respondents, pertaining to Swedish and Singaporean top managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore.

This study could be useful for multinational corporations that are interested in strategically managing their corporate language policies, taking into account cognitive differences or cultural identities in different offices worldwide.

At a social level, Bakhtin’s language as a heteroglot brings to awareness that at any one time, while individuals are drawn to identify with their dominant (national) culture and language, in effect, with increased contact with other cultures in working environments, both language and cultural identities shift and evolve with the workplace.

This study contributes to the growing language in IB research. The novelty in this study is the employment of a Bakhtinian perspective and specifically the employment of SFL as a method of data analysis.

This paper aims to look into changing future landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks using the lens of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his key notions of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism.

This is a conceptual paper exploring the complex dualities of Bakhtin’s approach involving eternally competing, paradoxical forces of unity and fragmentation; continuity and change; and coherence and incongruity.

Bakhtin’s approach suggests that all phenomena at all levels involve a complex struggle between organizational unity and dis-organizational fragmentation. Bakhtin provides theoretical support for David Boje’s notion of “antenarratives” as key in the making of socially constructed futures. Antenarratives are bridging “tropes” between unifying narratives and fragmented stories.

Antenarratives need to be a focal interest in researching Bakhtinian dualities because they are a catalyst and chiasmus traveling between and inter-animating relations between narratives and stories.

The Bakhtinian schema suggests that practitioners need to maintain a reliance upon “phronesis” or practical wisdom and dexterity that allows them to adapt and improvise in fast-changing and multiple situations and contexts. To enable them to do this, such practical capabilities need the combined cultivation of appropriate embodied skills, capabilities in communicative and symbolic persuasion, as well as analytical reasoning.

Bakhtin’s concepts provide a unique and operationalizable approach to encompassing duality, which addresses the increasing need in business marketing to understand and adapt within increasingly complex and changing landscapes of business interaction, relationships and networks.

The practitioners of postmodern organization theory have had to respond to the charge that postmodernism has a declivity toward skepticism. Their response to organizational skepticisim is to decenter dominant theories, paradigms and organizational forms, rather than to negate them. Decentering supplements discourse by augmenting its repertoire; the opposite of skepticism, which diminishes its object. The main ways in which postmodern organization theories try to overcome the specific sceptical position of paradigm incommensurability (the reduction of discourse about organizations and organizational discourse to a solipsism of private language games) are described and assessed in terms of three positions: John Hassard’s “multiple paradigm” approach on the level of methodology, Stewart Clegg’s “embedded rationalities” on the level of empirical conceptualization, and Kenneth Gergen’s “heteroglossia” on the level of discursive practice. Hassard and Clegg are engaged in the mapping function of postmodern organization theory, whereas Gergen is engaged in deconstraining organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comparative perspectives on how educators teach issues that affect two countries with a history of governmental tensions. The investigation examines how teachers in Cuban classrooms engage in discourses on the recent developments in Cuban and US relations, including the teaching of historical and territorial issues. This research considers border pedagogy, critical border dialogism and critical border praxis as approaches for those who educate on the effects of US international policies. Ultimately, pragmatic hope offers the possibilities for an emergent third space for Cuban and US relations, including educational exchanges.

The research took place in Cuba during an educational exchange to Cuban secondary and university educational sites. Cuban educators of pedagogy and social education engaged in dialogue and shared information on how they address US international policies during their classroom discussions. The researcher employed methodologies that followed Stake’s (2000) model for a substantive case study. Impressions, data, records and salient elements at the observed site were recorded. Transcriptions were documented for face-to-face interviews and hour-long focus group sessions. Participants also logged responses to written survey questions. The study focused on how Cuban educators taught, discussed and addressed the US international policies in classrooms.

Heteroglossia, meliorism, critical cosmopolitanism, nepantla, dialogic feminism and pragmatic hope were components of the data analysis. Heteroglossia was an essential consideration throughout the study as multiple interpretations of Cuban and US interconnectedness emerged. Meliorism factored into Cuban educators’ commitments to their professions. Critical cosmopolitanism developed as educators put forth different conceptualizations of human rights and democracy. Nepantla emerged as a key aspect as indigenous and self-determined viewpoints emerged. Dialogic feminism was preeminent as patriarchy continues to exist, despite a new awareness of gender roles and gender violence. Pragmatic hope offers possibilities for a transnational community of inquiry and collaboration.

The most obvious limitation to this study is, as a case study, the limited scope of perception.

If future relations between Cuban and the US are deemed uncertain, critical border praxis has an essential role in addressing new sets of uncertainties. This study recommends that educational communities engage in discourses addressing ongoing issues facing the dynamic, fluid border environs. Critical border praxis provides conditions in which we, as educators and members of diverse communities of learners, become cross-borders and broaden the possibilities to achieve what had been considered the unattainable. Resources need to be prioritized and redirected toward educational efforts on national, state and local levels so critical border praxis becomes a reality.

Through transnational and transborder engagements, such as educational exchanges, both US and Cuban educators are provided opportunities to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their own educational systems. The role of education, formal and informal, then serves to transform perceptions one-by-one, school-by-school, community-by-community and to influence policy makers to reconstruct education country-by-country as part of pragmatic hope for an enduring Pax Universalis. Pax Universalis serves as a third space where transborder students and educators alike are positioned as co-creators of knowledge and agents of change.

This study proposes a new emergent third space resulting from critical border dialogism that utilizes border pedagogy and critical pedagogies of place to seek new zones of mutual respect and cooperation among educators. Common educational understandings are the key starting point for a critical border praxis that facilitates ongoing dialogue between the two countries and offers pragmatic hope for the futures of both nations and opportunities to ameliorate relationships. An emergent third space is possible through sustained critical border praxis, a praxis that seeks to address points of contention and the bridges that need crossing between the two neighboring countries.

Narrative and dialogic modes of theorizing identity are both premised on textuality. However, theories of narrative identity tend towards unity and coherence (in accordance with the notion of narrative as constant and pre‐given), whereas the dialogic mode is more aligned with the postmodern novelistic literature (thus drawing heavily on dispersion, voice, disorder, and otherness). In accordance with the approach of Mikhail Bakhtin, the present study attempts to remedy the shortcomings of narrative identity by proposing change as involving shifting identities that are achieved through the transposition of utterances. Only through the recognition of the undecidable, unfinalizable nature of utterance can change be conceived as being shaped and reshaped through shifting identities. Such an approach reveals the interlocking relation between change and the varied texts people inhabit as they contemplate change.

One major aspect of T.D. Wilson’s research has been his insistence on situating the investigation of information behaviour within the context of its occurrence Ö within the everyday world of work. The significance of this approach is reviewed in light of the notion of embodied cognition that characterises the evolving theoretical episteme in cognitive science research. Embodied cognition employs complex external props such as stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings to reduce the cognitive burden on the individual and to augment human problem‐solving activities. The cognitive function of the classification scheme is described as exemplifying both stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings. Two different but complementary approaches to the investigation of situated cognition are presented: cognition‐as‐scaffolding and cognition‐as‐infrastructure. Classification‐as‐scaffolding views the classification scheme as a knowledge storage device supporting and promoting cognitive economy. Classification‐as‐infrastructure views the classification system as a social convention that, when integrated with technological structures and organisational practices, supports knowledge management work. Both approaches are shown to build upon and extend Wilson’s contention that research is most productive when it attends to the social and organisational contexts of cognitive activity by focusing on the everyday world of work.

In the UK, higher education (HE) is being positioned as the new global business, and the power relations between its various stakeholders – society, the business community, management, staff, students – makes this not only uncharted, but also contested ground. This paper aims to map the new terrain with a focus on, and analysis of, one key government policy document: The Harnessing Technology (2005).

Critical theory and textual analysis are used to research and analyse power relations as inscribed in policy discourse – the structures, the language, and the voices. The document is explored particularly in relation to its impact on prime stakeholders within the new contexts of today's HE; a HE that is embracing information communications technology (e‐learning) – “for business”.

Harnessing Technology boasts a heteroglossia and the capturing of many authentic voices in its composition which should open up a dialogic between its stakeholders; in fact power is revealed as refined, unified – deferring to centralised authority. Textual analysis reveals HE as a journey into silence for the student as stakeholder, where the voices that are not repressed are those with economic and institutional power. This analysis shows the student is constructed as either silent or deficit and the conclusions suggest that rather than a discourse of transformation, “regulation not education”, is the real goal of the dominant educational stakeholders.

The critical approach to policy analysis in the paper can be adapted by others seeking to critique policy in a variety of different policy contexts. This is particularly significant where policy is not interrogated, but where nevertheless it influences institutional mission statements and the seepage pollutes practice.

This paper seeks to explore the effects of communicative interaction on integration and coordination of a commercial aerospace supply chain.

A perspective of supply chains as complex activity networks is used for data analysis based on in‐depth interviews in a global setting. Themes for interviews were identified through literature research.

The paper finds that integration through risk‐sharing partnerships is chosen for co‐developing expertise and innovative capacity. Practices of integration and coordination through communicative interaction are emerging while they are producing innovative solutions and competitive advantage. The multi‐voiced interaction between partners in the supply chain is assisting in moving the product beyond what the airframe manufacturer could have created alone.

The paper provides evidence of changing interactive practices in commercial aerospace supply chains. By applying concepts of supply chains as he interaction of multiple work activities this assists in comprehending the forces of change. Communicative interaction within the supply chain is used for co‐construction of meaning to enhance change and development.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach to analyzing qualitative data that uses Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue as a framework.

Polyphonic Analysis (PA) is proposed as a critical approach to qualitative data analysis that emphasizes creating virtual dialogues of participants’ voices, bringing together views that typically do not interplay in order to escalate voices that might otherwise be silenced, reduced, or objectified.

PA, with its emphases on revoicing and dialoguing participants’ words, seeking understanding in the tensions between voices, and striving for hegemony in the development of themes, heightens researchers’ awareness of key principles of qualitative research, suggesting its use as a pedagogical approach for teaching qualitative research as an interpretive paradigm. The authors reference their study on the impact of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the USA to draw examples that illustrate the utility of this research design for pedagogy and practice.

PA creates meaning by recognizing multivocality and dialogism. The authors propose and describe this novel application of a literary analysis tool for use as a tool for pedagogy and research methodology.