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The purpose of this paper is to explore the spillover effects of offensive commenting in online community from the lens of emotional and behavioral contagion. Specifically, it examines the contagion of swearing – a linguistic mannerism that conveys high-arousal emotion – based upon two mechanisms of contagion: mimicry and social interaction effect.

The study performs a series of mixed-effect logistic regressions to investigate the contagious potential of offensive comments collected from YouTube in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign videos posted between January and April 2016.

The study examines non-random incidences of two types of swearing online: public and interpersonal. Findings suggest that a first-level (a.k.a. parent) comment’s public swearing tends to trigger chains of interpersonal swearing in the second-level (a.k.a. child) comments. Meanwhile, among the child-comments, a sequentially preceding comment’s swearing is contagious to the following comment only across the same swearing type. Based on the findings, the study concludes that offensive comments are contagious and have impact on shaping the community-wide linguistic norms of online user interactions.

The study discusses the ways in which an individual’s display of offensiveness may influence and shape discursive cultures on the internet. This study delves into the mechanisms of text-based contagion by differentiating between mimicry effect and social interaction effect. While online emotional contagion research to this date has focused on the difference between positive and negative valence, internet research that specifically looks at the contagious potential of offensive expressions remains sparse.

Conversational agents (chatbots, avatars and robots) are increasingly substituting human employees in service encounters. Their presence offers many potential benefits, but customers are reluctant to engage with them. A possible explanation is that conversational agents do not make optimal use of communicative behaviors that enhance relational outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to identify which human-like communicative behaviors used by conversational agents have positive effects on relational outcomes and which additional behaviors could be investigated in future research.

This paper presents a systematic review of 61 articles that investigated the effects of communicative behaviors used by conversational agents on relational outcomes. A taxonomy is created of all behaviors investigated in these studies, and a research agenda is constructed on the basis of an analysis of their effects and a comparison with the literature on human-to-human service encounters.

The communicative behaviors can be classified along two dimensions: modality (verbal, nonverbal, appearance) and footing (similarity, responsiveness). Regarding the research agenda, it is noteworthy that some categories of behaviors show mixed results and some behaviors that are effective in human-to-human interactions have not yet been investigated in conversational agents.

By identifying potentially effective communicative behaviors in conversational agents, this study assists managers in optimizing encounters between conversational agents and customers.

This is the first study that develops a taxonomy of communicative behaviors in conversational agents and uses it to identify avenues for future research.

Negotiating effectively in multicultural contexts or others is not only a very important skill for all organizational elements but also crucial to inter-organizational relations (Adler, 2008). If defined as a process that occurs when one party feels adversely affected by another (De Dreu, 1997). Conflict management styles can be analyzed as a function of personality variables. In this respect, cultural intelligence and self-monitoring appear to be relevant variables, as they are characterized by the demonstration of flexibility and interest in elements that are present in conflict management styles. This study aimed to evaluate the extent to which variables such as cultural intelligence and self-monitoring can positively influence the ability to solve interpersonal conflicts more effectively.

This study, with a sample of 399 individuals, aimed to test a model that explores how cultural intelligence and self-monitoring are related as predictor variables in the styles of conflict resolution.

It was observed that cultural intelligence presents itself as a reasonable predictor of conflict management styles, whereas self-monitoring appeared as a dispositional and controversial measure in relation to those styles. Self-monitoring exhibited itself as an important predictor of conflict management, but on the other hand, it had an influence on the choice of the dominating style in conflict situations.

Understanding the predictors of conflict management style and, in particular, realizing the extent to which cultural intelligence promotes a more effective conflict management style can help in the development of selection processes and skill training programs. The development of these multicultural skills will contribute to individual, social and organizational well-being.

This study contributes to the literature of individual differences and conflict management, demonstrating that some individual differences that predict the styles of conflict management can lead to a certain ambiguity in understanding the behaviour that an individual may adopt in situations of conflict.

Presents a new theory about the communication structure used by ocean‐living odontocetes. Draws conclusions from eight biological singularities in dolphin communication found in empirical research but not yet put into a systematic context. They suggest the interpretation that in dolphin communication information is encoded by way of SOund PAttern VAriation. Discusses the formal prerequisites of this theory; negative and positive predictions are made. Interprets both the results of Bastian's communication experiment and the scouting behaviour observed in the wild as evidence that dolphins possess a highly developed SOund PAttern VAriation LAnguage (SOPAVALA). Complements this by examining considerations concerning the evolutionary process which may have made this development possible. Discusses characteristic features of the proposed new language structure and suggests how to decode successfully and understand a dolphin's SOPAVALA, should it exist.

The era of globalization has increased the challenges for multinational corporations (MNCs) to retain legitimacy. In striving for legitimacy, MNCs increasingly engage in dialogue processes with their stakeholders. However, the era of globalization and the parallel rise of the Internet and the new “Web 2.0” have dramatically widened the range of options for such dialogue processes. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in particular make use of “social media” (e.g., Facebook, Weblogs, Twitter) which enable them to quickly generate attention regarding socially and environmentally harmful business practices by MNCs. In response, MNCs have started applying social media technologies for corporate communication purposes. However, given the novelty of these activities, we lack knowledge on how these organizations make use of social media. Therefore, in this chapter, we examine how MNCs and NGOs utilize one particular social media application, that is, Twitter, for dialogic stakeholder communication.

In our empirical study, we examine current practices of Twitter usage by MNCs and NGOs. We investigate a dataset of more than 3,000 Twitter articles from 30 MNCs and 30 NGOs in the German-speaking world. Our analysis is based on the “conceptual orality or literality” scale by Koch and Oesterreicher (1994).

The comparative analysis shows that on average MNCs and NGOs exhibit a surprisingly similar profile on Twitter. Both tend toward conceptual literality. However, the analysis of Tweets per organization reveals a much larger variance. At the extreme poles, while some NGOs (like Greenpeace Youth) make extensive use of the medium’s potential for conceptual orality, some MNCs (like Deutsche Börse) almost entirely adhere to conceptual literality. In other words, these MNCs promote a classical one-way model of communication and fail to make use of the dialogue-like qualities of the medium.

We analyzed a small number of organizations and we restricted our study to MNCs and NGOs in the German-speaking world. Furthermore, Twitter only allows for short messages with a maximum of 140 letters or signs. This, in turn, renders questionable whether the medium is suited to establish deliberative dialogues between MNCs and NGOs that are based on more elaborate arguments which can be expressed in the short format.

Our study addresses the lack of research regarding new possibilities for stakeholder communication in the age of social media. Moreover, the study methodologically contributes to the study of social media in the context of corporate communication by applying the scale of “conceptual orality or literality” to MNCs’ and NGOs’ Twitter usage.

The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions.

The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions.

The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools.

An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the interaction-sensitive skills medical practitioners enact as they manage multiple organizational factors in the context of discharging patients.

For that purpose, we carried out a cognitive ethnographic study in a Danish hospital, where we video-recorded three pre-ward round meetings, five discharge conversations and conducted seven semi-structured interviews. Fieldnotes and interview transcripts were analyzed using the method Cognitive Task Analysis, and video-recordings were analyzed via the interactivity-based approach Cognitive Event Analysis.

Our findings show that practitioners coordinate multi-scalar resources (e.g. verbal patterns and cognitive artifacts) in order to discharge patients in a safe and integrated way, which we propose amounts to the social and intercorporeal ability to align simultaneously emerging factors, like organizational procedures in the hospital, artifacts in use, sociocultural resources and the individual medical expertise of the practitioner in the emerging social interaction with the patient. In pursing this claim, we investigate the linguistic and cognitive processes emerging in a single case study of a nurse who discharges a patient. We propose that the interaction-sensitive skill which enables the nurse to solve the task of discharging the patient can be characterized via hybrid cognition.

Thus, the value of the article is dual: On the one hand, it empirically contributes with knowledge of the complex organizational structures that constrains micro-level medical interactions in discharges, and on the other, the article contributes theoretically with a hybrid cognitive framework that allows organizational researchers to understand and assess complex cognitive and linguistic processes that goes into the social micro-coordination in complex organizational-medical task.

This study aims to investigate the treatment of translation within the international business and management (IBM) literature to highlight colonialist assumptions inscribed in this treatment as a result of the hegemonic status of English.

This investigation takes the form of a systemic literature review to examine the treatment of translation in the IBM literature through a postcolonial lens.

The findings demonstrate that despite growing interest in language in international business, matters of translation have received comparatively little attention. However, those articles that do address translation matters tend to do so in five key ways, including epistemological/methodological considerations, exploring translator agency, the investigations of the discursive void/conceptual fuzziness between languages, and approaches that discuss translation as social practice.

Despite the authors’ critique of English-language hegemony, this literature review is restricted to English-language journals, which the authors acknowledge as problematic and discuss within the article.

In exposing the limited treatment of translation within the literature, the authors provide a call to action for IBM scholars to be more explicit in their treatment of translation to ensure representation of cultural and linguistic Others, rather than providing domesticated accounts of multilingual research.

Although there have been other articles that have examined translation in the past, this paper is the first to do so through a postcolonial lens, demonstrating from a linguistic perspective the colonialist assumptions that are still prevalent in IBM knowledge production, as evidenced by the treatment of translation in the field.

This paper aims to explore how social enterprises are treated in scholarly research on quasi-markets. In so doing, the paper aims to show that a number of critical knowledge gaps persist which require deeper engagement from researchers, practitioners and policymakers alike.

This study adopts a conceptual analysis of the existing literature concerning social enterprises and quasi-markets.

The paper finds that there are four main knowledge gaps in this area. First, there are moral dilemmas created by boundary shifts, arising from the development of quasi-markets. Second, the phenomenon of “tactical mimicry” (Day and Teasdale 2016) represents a key theoretical platform not yet fully explored. Third, the lack of clear, comparative assessments of social enterprises across quasi-markets, and other types of service providers is also apparent despite offering a significant methodological opportunity for scholars. Fourth, there is the issue of how social enterprises engage in, and resource the operational functions that will support their management of conflicting logics, especially rigorous impact measurement.

This paper uses a synthesis of key social enterprise and quasi-market studies to extend current debate in this area, which tends to be diffused and complex. By focussing on critical knowledge gaps, the paper contributes a meta-level appraisal of the key areas for future research, providing a focussed agenda for scholars to target their efforts in growing this important body of knowledge.