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The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of communicative interaction on meaning construction in three focus group interviews.

Within the framework of cultural‐historical activity theory, Bakhtin's perspectives of communicative interaction was applied to three interview cases on commercial aerospace supply chains.

These interactions are found to self‐organise without the control of any single actor. However, interventions by interviewees or the researcher affect the outcome when they create disturbances that go beyond the resilience of the established perspectives of the focus group community. The researcher's intervention or guidance is helpful in opening up reality perspectives of the community.

Focus group interviews may be difficult to control by the researcher. The potential for gathering rich data may, however, out‐weigh that.

The paper illustrates how focus group interviews enhance the richness of data collection compared to other interview methods.

This paper aims to explore the key elements and dynamic formation mechanisms involved in the company identity construction during multicompany identification.

This study adopted a longitudinal single case study method, selected a representative company as the study case and analyzed the interactive practice of identity construction between the company and its external stakeholders based on the theory of organizational identity and sensemaking.

This study finds that the process of company identity construction for external stakeholders involves six elements. Companies mainly use a highly controlled, equality and interaction model to develop identity for a single stakeholder. Company identity is based on the company’s core identity claims and is formed by gradually integrating and cooperating with the identity claims of different stakeholders. Meeting the self-defining needs of stakeholders is a key driving force behind the evolution of company identity.

This study offers practical implications for companies to pursue and construct multicompany identity. For different types of external stakeholders, companies can adopt different identity sensemaking models. To build a new company identity, a company needs to do more on the basis of identity insights to break cognitive constraints and build new identity claim. Companies need to integrate new identity claims with the original identity claims. If different identity claims conflict or are difficult to reconcile, it may damage their original identity claims and companies need to evaluate the trade-offs.

This study expands the concept of company identity construction from the individual perspective to organizational identity and contributes to research in relationship marketing. This study identifies the key elements of company identity construction with multistakeholder participation and contributes to theory building in company identity research. The results of this study reveal the company identity construction mechanism for different external stakeholders and the dynamic formation process of multicompany identity.

This chapter examines how proponents of industrialization used multiple modes of communication to socially construct the rational myth of industrialization in the French construction sector after World War II. We illuminate the respective roles of visual and verbal communication in this process. Our findings suggest that actors construct rational myths according to the following step-by-step method: first, they use visuals to suggest associations between new practices and valuable purposes; then they use verbal text to establish the technical rationality of certain practices; and lastly, they employ both verbal and visual communications to convey their mythical features.

This study provides insights into the meanings given to audit quality (AQ) by audit partners responsible for delivering audit services. It explores the influence of contextual factors in the auditing setting on constructing such meanings and its representations.

Drawing on a symbolic-interactionist framework, this study takes an interpretive approach, employing semi-structured interviews with audit partners from the United Kingdom (UK).

Three primary meanings of AQ are identified. First, in contradiction to that offered by “mainstream” AQ research, audit partners in this study predominantly regarded the meaning of AQ as an economic concept in the context of the “business” of auditing, delivering the service quality (e.g. value-added auditing and value-for-money) that is expected by their audit clients. Second, the audit partners also espouse the meaning of AQ to be “fit for purpose” audit documentation and adherence to quality control that meets the standards of compliance demanded by independent audit inspections. Third, and similar to the classic convention of AQ, audit partners consider “inputs” to AQ, attributes related to individual auditors (e.g. qualifications, experience and training) as one of the key AQ meanings. A range of stimuli underlies AQ meaning construction, including the audit firm's commercial interests, legitimacy, image management and social identity resulting from audit partners' interactions with audit clients, regulators, and their own self-reflexivity. Interestingly, this study identifies a considerable potential conflict between the meanings assigned to AQ, which suggests that auditors are struggling to strike a balance between the competing demands of those meanings.

This exploratory study addresses only the audit partners' perceptions concerning the meaning of AQ. Findings of this study are relevant to auditors and other parties, such as regulators, in addressing competing dimensions of AQ and potential choices involving conduct and content in any individual audit engagement.

The study complements existing research into AQ by exposing the rationales and potential behaviours that underlie commitments to quality by those involved in commissioning audit engagements. It also adds detailed evidence of how contextual factors in the auditing environment interact with auditors' notions of AQ.

In this article, we develop and advance an understanding of institutions as multimodal accomplishments. We draw on social semiotics and the linguistic concept of metafunctions to establish the visual as a specific mode of meaning construction. In addition, we make semiotic modes conducive to institutional inquiry by introducing the notion of distinct “modal registers” – specialized configurations of linguistic signs within a particular mode that are adapted and applied in the reproduction of institutions or institutional domains. At the core of our article, we operationalize metafunctions to develop methodology for the analysis of visual registers. We illustrate our approach with data from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting in Austria.

Consistent with current literature, which highlights the role of narration as a key tool for exploring the processes by which people construct the meaning of their critical experiences the authors propose a theoretical and methodological model to analyse the narratives of illness and identify any innovative aspects. The generative model of mind presented refers to a semiotic, narrative and socio-constructivist perspective according to which narration constitutes one of the possible processes by which the affective and pre-verbal sense of experience is transformed into a meaning that can be symbolized and shared.

The onset of an illness represents a critical event which interrupts a person's life narrative, shattering his/her biographical continuity and undermining any assumptions of him/herself and the world. In particular, the model proposes a method of analysis, currently absent in literature, of the narrative interview Narrative Function Coding System (NFC) in order to grasp the ways by which four main narrative functions, namely psychic functions, are classified: the search for meaning, the expression of emotions, the temporal organization and the orientation to action.

NFC appears to be able to capture the complexity of the narrative process of construction of illness' sense-meaning making process, identifying both representative modalities of good functioning, which express a gradual process of connection with the variability of the experience, and modalities that express moments of disorganization and rigidity, which can persist throughout the time of treatment. The NFC represents not only a method for analysing illness narratives but also a method for tracking and monitoring the process of clinical intervention and change.

The sense-meaning making process perspective within the narrative socio-constructivist and semiotic framework of analysis proposed by NFC is currently absent in the literature. NFC can be a device for analysing the narrative process of sense-meaning making both for its use for clinical and preventive purposes. In addition we believe that this method, which focuses on the “form” and “way” of narratively constructing the subjective experience, rather than on the specific thematic content, can be used with all types of illness narratives, in particular the longitudinal one to explore the changes in sense-meaning making process.

This study examines whether online asynchronous discussion forums support student’s meaning-making about citizenship in a globalizing world. Citizenship is an increasingly contested identity for young people, yet they have few opportunities in traditional civic education to consider their own citizenship. Although online discussions are considered effective spaces for increasing dialogue and critical thinking between diverse students, there has been little research to understand how effective they are for helping students to construct new understandings of citizenship.

A content analysis approach was used to analyze and code 89 discussion board posts. The Interaction Analysis Model (IAM) coding scheme was used to describe and analyze the quality of knowledge construction that occurred across the posts focusing on different aspects of global citizenship.

The findings demonstrate that the discussion boards produced substantive talks about the meaning of citizenship that in some instances reached the level of new knowledge construction. The students considered different meanings for global citizenship and negotiated positions on key issues. However, the highest levels of knowledge construction were rarely reached.

A major implication is the need to organize and cue discussion boards to support knowledge construction in addition to fostering dialogue.

This study contributes to the role that technology can play in supporting students’ knowledge construction about global citizenship that go beyond the scripted meanings conveyed in civics classes.

Adoption of sustainability principles is crucial for construction project delivery, and various parameters are being used as a yardstick for its measurement. This chapter discusses profit as one of the parameters used to determine the success of a sustainable construction project. It explains such issues as the nature and important of construction industry and its product (construction project), meaning of sustainable construction as well as meaning of profit and what its entails in construction. It reviews the value of profit as a measure of success for a construction project and also encourages the need for planning and analysis of all activities involved on a construction project in relation to its environment so as to validate the profit as a measure of project success.