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This paper aims to lay out the goals and challenges in using information for ambitious learning practices.

Through a review of the literature, the authors integrate across learning, information sciences and instructional design to identify challenges and possibilities for information searching and sense-making in ambitious learning practices (ALPs).

Learners face a number of challenges in using information in ALPs such as a problem-based learning. These include searching and sourcing, selecting information and sense-making. Although ALPs can be effective, providing appropriate scaffolding, supports and resources is essential.

To make complex ALPs available to a wide range of learners requires considering the information literacy demands and how these can be supported. This requires deep understanding and integration across different research literature areas to move toward solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between autopoiesis, as described by Maturana and Varela, and Bakhtin's work on dialogue in understanding successful organizational rhetoric.

This paper reviews two foundational texts in order to see the connection between them.

The concept of “organizational closure” will govern the domain of communication and therefore also any act in rhetoric.

This is a first attempt to link “organizational closure” as it exists in autopoiesis to Bakhtin's notion of a superaddressee.

The Sense‐making approach to studying and understanding users and designing systems to serve their needs is reviewed. The approach, developed to focus on user sense making and sense unmaking in the fields of communication and library and information science, is reviewed in terms of its implications for knowledge management. Primary emphasis is placed on moving conceptualizations of users, information and reality from the noun‐based knowledge‐as‐map frameworks of the past to verb‐based frameworks emphasizing diversity, complexity and sense‐making potentials. Knowledge management is described as a field on the precipice of chaos, reaching for a means of emphasizing diversity, complexity and people over centrality, simplicity and technology. Sense making, as an approach, is described as a methodology disciplining the cacophony of diversity and complexity without homogenizing it. Knowledge is reconceptualized from noun to verb.

This article offers an in-depth exploration of university communications practice by describing and analysing a publicity and recruitment campaign, called ‘Challenge Everything’, carried out by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2018. By providing insight into internal sense-making around the campaign it contributes to literatures in science communication and communication management.

This qualitative research uses semi-structured interviews and informal organisational ethnography, mobilising concepts of sense-making and auto-communication to guide analysis. The focus is on how organisation members made sense of the Challenge Everything campaign.

The analysis focuses on four key themes within organisational sense-making about the campaign: the openness of the campaign meant that it was readily picked up on and personalised by university staff; its meaning was always contextual, shaped by organisation members' roles, interests, and concerns; its controversy seems to primarily derive from questions of representation, and specifically whether organisation members recognised within it their own experiences of university culture; and its development points to the rise of new forms of expertise within university organisation, and the contestation of these.

The research offers only a partial snapshot of one instance of university communications. However, in demonstrating how public campaigns also operate as auto-communication it has important implications for strategic communication within complex organisations such as universities.

The research has particular value in offering an in-depth qualitative study of university marketing practices and the effects these have within an organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence of people management practices on the outcomes of organisational change projects through their contributions to organisational learning. The contributions to their outcomes of particular corporate and project-specific people management practices are considered.

Case studies of two organisational change projects undertaken by Arts Council England during 2006-2007 are used to examine how far and in what ways people management practices influence the outcomes of such projects. Organisational change is considered as an instance of organisational learning, which in turn is examined in relation to the twin activities of developing new ideas and internal sense-making.

Evidence is presented that certain people management practices, individually and in combination, influence the outcomes of organisational change projects significantly through their contributions to organisational learning.

Research into the influence of particular people management practices, and the contexts and processes through which it is exerted, is necessary to develop more generalisable conclusions. This influence is liable to be invisible to less granular research into people management as a general construct.

Research into the use of project management methods specifically to implement organisational change is sparse. The findings of this paper contradict findings from research into the influence of people management on project outcomes in general, which suggest that it does not have a significant effect.

This article aims to consider different interpretation(s) of small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME)‐environment behaviour and the potential implications for intervention and change in theory and practice.

The article is primarily a reflection on a supply‐chain environmental management project and the specific and wider SME literature(s).

The proposal is that if/when embracing the internal SME dimension and sense‐making processes it is possible to conceive/describe a landscape of SME‐environment intervention and change. Recognition of this landscape is of use to interventionists involved with the facilitation of change(s) and may support improvements in the quality of outcome(s).

The implication of the work is that there is a need to more effectively and appropriately consider the internal SME dimension and sense‐making processes when investigating and describing SME‐environment behaviour and interventions based on such descriptions.

The work will be of interest to interventionists, those who sponsor their work or develop policy and intervention(s) in this area.

This article identifies some of the impacts and implications for change that lead from the consideration of the internal SME dimension and related sense‐making processes; a dimension surfaced in the case project work but not fully engaged in that work or the SME‐environment and related literature.

This conceptual paper develops a theoretical framework to provide insights with respect to enhancing focus on entrepreneurial sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies. The unique idiosyncrasies of the institutional environment of emerging economies are identified along the concept of scripts.

Sense-making and social identity theory are utilized to draw propositions along with the dimensions of the three stages of the sense-making process: enactment, selection and retention, in order to identify factors that are likely to motivate the next generation of business leaders in emerging economies to undertake greater levels of sustainability initiatives.

When organizations face competing demands of meeting both social and financial goals, sense-making by next-generation leaders becomes relevant. Leaders with greater entrepreneurial orientation (EO) are more likely to take actions decoupled from local isomorphic pressures, such that they turn opportunities for sustainability into novel sustainable initiatives.

This paper proposes a framework to provide insights and directions for future research with respect to enhancing an organizational focus on sustainability initiatives in the context of emerging economies.

This paper aims to understand if, and how, internal communication strategies can promote strategic employee communicative actions such as to disseminate positive information that enhances the company's reputation. These communicative actions sustain the competitive advantage of a company.

This paper is based on interviews with internal communication experts; internal communication managers in ten American and 22 Italian companies. Three focus groups in Italy comprised of internal communication managers, scholars and experts.

Employee communicative actions have been categorized into: exploration, interpretation, sharing and acting. Internal communication strategies enable employees to be effective communicators.

A survey among employees was used to investigate the link between employee communicative actions and internal communication and relationship quality.

Internal communication managers are expected first, to become enablers towards employees and line managers; and second, to facilitate sense-making processes and the quality relationship building.

This article provides empirical evidence of the emerging issues of employee communicative actions and the enablement function of internal communication. It adds a broader and validated range of employee communicative actions to those that had previously been studied, and develops a preliminary inventory of enablement strategies that have been adopted by leading companies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relevance to situated managerial practice of the implementation frameworks contained in the global (key) account management (GAM) literature and to explore what specific GAM-related issues may be faced by key account managers working for an MNC based in Japan.

Following a critical literature review, including a discussion of sales management in Japan, an exploratory case study is conducted of a chemical supplier that claims to be making the transition toward GAM.

The findings confirm that intra-organizational contextual and cultural factors appear to influence the adoption of GAM programs by the focal firm. This suggests there is not a “one size fits all” strategic pathway to implementing GAM, and that western theoretical perspectives on KAM/GAM do not appear to have permeated the sense-making of some Japanese managers.

While the study indicates that the US/European approach to KAM and GAM does not appear to fit well with the Japanese business culture, this conclusion must come with the caveat that this is not necessarily a generalizable case.

Much of the prior B2B marketing literature on KAM and GAM has investigated only western firms. This is possibly the first empirical research on GAM in a Japanese company. The paper offers a number of implications for theory and ponders the wisdom of making recommendations from such a culture-bound study.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, analyze and understand international users' library experience in the Digital Age in order to inform library service design and ensure it provides an inclusive environment. In this study, the behavioral and experiential aspects of user library experience are merged to develop essential interconnections between information behavior (IB) and user experience (UX) in the context of the academic library with the goal of constructing a more holistic understanding of ‘library experience.

The study was built on the concept “library experience” through analyzing its essential components of IB and UX. It was developed through findings from mixed methods research, consisting of the quantitative investigation from a library log analysis, and qualitative investigations via cognitive mapping exercises and semi-structured interviews, both targeted on the largest single group of international students in United Kingdom – international Chinese students.

The findings demonstrated the complexity and multilayered characteristics of international Chinese students' library context, and three unique contexts emerged from the data shaping their library experience. Building on the previous findings on the connections between IB and UX, the work attempted to redefine “library experience” by joining both behavioral and experiential aspects. It is found that the key components of cultural library experience are the multilayered context, cultural group's perception needs, sense-making process and subjective evaluations.

This study joins the behavioral and experiential perspectives together to explore library experience in a more holistic way and proposes a systematic structure to understand and analyze library experience, especially that of international users in a cross-cultural context, which, in turn, will better serve their information needs and inform the design of a more equal and inclusive library system.