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The debate on digitalization in the public relations (PR) literature has fragmented considerably over the past decade because of its focus on upcoming media-technological innovations, required professional skills and management concepts. Yet the field has difficulties in developing an integrative perspective on the implications of digitalization as a broader socio-technological transformation with a balanced consideration of prospects and risks.

This paper proposes an integrative perspective that focuses more on the enduring imaginaries of how digitalization can transform society for better or worse. It traces the historical roots of five imaginaries of digitalization, which have already emerged over the past century yet have experienced a significant revival and popularization in the current debate. Based on these five imaginaries, the authors performed a narrative literature review of the digitalization debate in 10 leading PR journals from 2010 to 2022.

The five imaginaries allow for a systematization of the fragmented digitalization debate in the field, reconstructing recurrent narratives, prospects and risks.

The originality of this contribution lies in its reconstructive approach, tracing societal imaginaries of digitalization and their impact on the current disciplinary debate. This approach provides context for a balanced assessment of and engagement with upcoming, increasingly fragmented digital advancements in PR research and practice.

This paper aims to explore the concept of sustainability imaginaries – unifying core assumptions on what sustainability entails held by stakeholders – set within a large suburban Canadian university. The study aims to expand the field of research into imaginaries by focusing on imaginaries within an institution as opposed to a societal or national level.

The paper is conceptual in nature and draws upon empirical tools, such as collaborative thematic coding of interviews of university community members, to illustrate emergent imaginaries around sustainability at the institution.

This paper identifies four core sustainability imaginaries in an analysis of the interview data: sustainability as performance, sustainability as governance, sustainability as techno-efficiency and sustainability as community organizing. The paper then uses these imaginaries to analyse two recent university-wide events: the establishment of a high-level sustainability council and an energy management program.

Because of the institutional focus of this study, the research may lack generalizability to other institutions. Thus, researchers are encouraged to explore what other imaginaries may exist at other institutions.

This paper includes implications for how universities can manage conflicting expectations and definitions in relation to new sustainability initiatives on campus.

This paper offers reflections on the concept of sustainability imaginaries and what they might offer the field of sustainability in higher education.

This paper aims to examine the antagonistic coexistence of different tourism imaginaries in global post-viral social landscapes. Such antagonisms may be resolved at the expense of the ethics of tourism mobility, if not adjudicated by post-human reflexivity. Currently, unreflexive behaviours involve the refusal to conform to lifesaving “stay-at-home” policies, the tendency to book holidays and the public inspection of death zones.

Each of the consumption styles explored in this paper to discuss post-COVID-19 tourism recovery corresponds to at least one tourist imaginary, antagonistically placed against social imaginaries of moral betterment, solidarity, scientific advancement, national security and labour equality. A multi-modal collection of audio-visual and textual data, gathered through social media and the digital press, is categorised and analysed via critical discourse analysis.

Data in the public domain suggest a split between pessimistic and optimistic attitudes that forge different tourism futures. These attitudes inform different imaginaries with different temporal orientations and consumption styles.

COVID-has exposed the limits of the capacity to efficiently address threats to both human and environmental ecosystems. As once popular tourist locales/destinations are turned by COVID-2019s spread into risk zones with morbid biographical records their identities alter and their imaginaries of suffering become anthropocentric.

Using Castoriadis’ differentiation between social and radical imaginaries, Foucault’s biopolitical analysis, Sorokin’s work on mentalities and Sorel’s reflections on violence, the author argue that this paper has entered a new phase in the governance and experience of tourism, which subsumes the idealistic basis of tourist imaginaries as cosmopolitan representational frameworks under the techno-cultural imperatives of risk, individualistic growth through the adventure (“edgework”) and heritage preservation. This paper also needs to reconsider the contribution of technology (not technocracy) to sustainable post-COVID-19 scenarios of tourism recovery.

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries,” that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts.

The purpose of this study is to identify discourses of sustainability of community colleges and how they related to sustainability imaginaries.

This study used a combination of research strategies associated with corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Data included 57 issues of Community College Journal, a professional magazine published by the American Association of Community Colleges, and 2,972 abstracts of dissertations about community colleges. Publication dates ranged from 2010 to 2020.

Community college discourse of sustainability coheres around six themes: careers and fields of study; curriculum and credentialing; campus ecological sustainability; administrative roles and processes; external organizations, partnerships and processes; and fiscal sustainability. There is little evidence of a sustainable living imaginary found.

The analysis is limited to a specific set of professional and academic texts about community colleges. Future researchers should explore discourses of sustainability in other contexts.

There has been no research associated with critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to explore community college discourses of sustainability, specifically in the field of community college leadership. The findings of this study situate the community college within contests over sustainability competencies in the practice of community college leadership development.

This paper seeks to demonstrate that gender research is crucial to understanding post‐socialist transformations and wider changes in social life. Focused on employment experiences and gender identities of two generations of Bulgarian women, it aims to highlight the complex intertwining of social structure and individual agency and to point out how processes of continuity and change constitute the post‐socialist transformation and individual life journeys.

Informed by feminist analyses of gender and citizenship, generation theory and qualitative interviews, the paper employs the notion of gender imaginaries in comparing continuity and change in gender policy and individual experiences.

The paper argues that significant changes occurred after 1989 in the ways official gender imaginaries were constructed through law, policy, and public discourses. In comparison to this, individual women's gender imaginaries entailed not only change but also sustained attachment to paid work, rejection of domesticity, and continued feelings of gender equality. This suggests that stable and often unquestioned notions of gender had a significant role for individual imaginaries. In addition to this, some of the most considerable changes were manifested in the notions of risk and uncertainty, which have become central aspects of the post‐socialist gender imaginary, particularly in relation to paid work.

The paper engages in a comparison of employment experiences of two generations of women thus directing its enquiry to the combination of individuals' agency in crafting one's life journey and the constraints of social structures and existing gender inequalities. Thus, transformations in individual lived lives of women are seen as interrelated with social change and historic location.

Organizations are increasingly dependent on various forms of partnerships to develop and to perform. These organizational partnerships may become potential learning arenas, broadening the learning capacities of the alliances involved. Thus far, the literature on learning in organizations has chiefly been concerned with how traditional and integrated organizations learn. Consequently, a unit of analysis has not been developed to highlight how a collection of actors may learn and create value. To address this issue, I will discuss how “imaginary organizations” can provide an arena for actors to build knowledge on a joint basis. This type of partnership forms metasystems that integrate various partner organizations in order to share resources, pool competencies, and gain flexibility. As an empirical illustration, learning processes within the imaginary organization of Scandinavian PC Systems (SPCS) are described.