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By juxtaposing Paulston’s [Paulston, R. G. (1999). Mapping comparative education after postmodernity. Comparative Education Review, 43(4), 438–463; Paulston, 1977] demonstration of relationships between theories of social and educational change/‘reform’ and Delamont’s Four great gates: dilemmas, directions and distractions in educational research (2007), this metanarrative explores how comparative and international education research in Australia and China has evolved in terms of self-determination, planned change and strokes of luck. The tendency to adopt a deterministic/fatalistic perspective in comparative education research in this part of the world rises from the general perception that, unlike its North American and European counterparts, the field is too narrowly defined by local institutions [Denman, B. D., & Higuchi, S. (2012). At a crossroads? Comparative and international education research in Asia and the Pacific. Asian Education and Development Studies, 2(1), 4–21] and often resorts to ‘hits’ and ‘misses’. By utilizing Paulston’s work and comparing it with Delamont’s, this analysis serves as a stop-gap measure to not only help justify its means and recognize its potential but also to counter the persistent dissatisfaction that scholars try to prove and promote comparative education as a field of study in the region. In addition, the terms of reference of self-determination, planned change and strokes of luck are broadly interpreted metaphorically, using the iChing or Book of Changes (Van Over, 1971), in order to help rationally order and rhetorically clarify trends in educational scholarship, policy and practice. In the Asia and Pacific region generally, comparative and international education research can be viewed as different ways of thinking and knowing, regardless of the research methods employed. The trends, challenges, opportunities and risks associated with the field are identified as location-specific, time-sensitive and culturally unique.

Trajectory is the path a moving object takes in space. To understand the trajectory movement patters, data mining is used. However, pattern analysis needs semantics to be understood. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to enrich trajectories with semantic annotations, such as the name of the location where the trajectory has stopped, so that the paper is able to attain quality decisions.

An experiment was conducted to explain that the use of raw trajectories alone is not enough for the decision-making process and detailed pattern extraction.

The findings of the paper indicates that some fundamental patterns and knowledge discovery is only obtainable by understanding the semantics underlying the position of each point.

The unavailability of data are a limitation of the paper, which would limit its generalizability. Additionally, the lack of availability of tools for automatically adding semantics to clusters posed as a limitation of the paper.

The paper encourages governments as well as businesses to analyze movement data using data mining techniques, in light of the surrounding semantics. This will allow, for example, solving traffic congestions, since by understanding the movement patterns, the traffic authority could make decisions in order to avoid such congestions. Moreover, it could also help tourism authorities, at national levels, to know tourist movement patterns and support these patterns with the required logistical support. Additionally, for businesses, mobile operators could dynamically enhance their services, voice and data, by knowing the semantically enriched patterns of movement.

The paper contributes to the already rare literature on trajectory mining, enhanced with semantics. Mainstream literature focusses on either trajectory mining or semantics, therefore the paper claims that the approach is novel and is needed as well. By integrating mining outcomes with semantic annotation, the paper contributes to the body of knowledge and introduces, with lab evidence, the new approach.

The purpose of this article is to understand how participants make sense of career through the lens of a path metaphor. Inkson's three types of career paths are used as a framework to determine whether the participants followed either a traditional and/or boundaryless career.

The research is based on interviews with 59 men and women employed in the accounting profession in Australia. The participants were asked to describe their career development to date.

During the interview the participants often used metaphoric language to describe their career development, especially “path”, “journey”, or “road” metaphors. Analysis of these career metaphors revealed that the participants experienced aspects of both a traditional and a boundaryless career. On the one hand, the professional structure of an accounting career required some participants to follow a more traditional career path, whilst, on the other hand, the increasing desire for a better work‐life balance and for stimulating work meant that other participants followed a boundaryless career.

The study has implications for organizations trying to recruit, retain, and develop accounting professionals. The dilemma for individuals appeared to be focused on whether to follow a traditional career path, or pursue their own individual goals and carve out their own unique or boundaryless career.

The benefit of using the journey or path metaphor is that it helps to explain and illustrate the various career options open to individuals. The journey metaphor was derived from the participants' own explanation of their career trajectories, and thus was not a metaphor imposed by the researcher.

Gillette’s historically successful “razor and blade” business model (RBM) has been a promising benchmark for multiple businesses across diverse industries worldwide in the past several decades. The extant literature deals with very few nuances of this business model notwithstanding the fact that there are several variants of this business model being put to practical use by firms in diverse industries in grossly metaphorically equivalent situations.

This study adopts the 2 × 2 truth table framework from the domains of mathematical logic and combinatorics in fleshing out all possible (four logical possibilities) variants of the razor and blade business model for further analysis. This application presents four mutually exclusive yet collectively exhaustive possibilities on any chosen dimension. Two major dimensions (viz., provision of subsidy and intra- or extra-firm involvement in the making of razors or blades or both) form part of the discussion in this paper. In addition, this study synthesizes and streamlines entrepreneurial wisdom from multiple intra-industry and inter-industry benchmarks in terms of real-time firms explicitly or implicitly adopting several variants of the RBM that suit their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of evolution in situations that are grossly reflective of the metaphorically equivalent scenario of razor and recurrent blades. Inductive method of research is carried out with real-time cases from diverse industries with a pivotally common pattern of razor and blade model in some form or the other.

Several new variants of the razor and blade model (much beyond what the extant literature explicitly projects) have been discovered from the multiple metaphorically equivalent cases of RBM across industries. All of these expand the portfolio of options that relevant entrepreneurial firms can explore and exploit the best possible option chosen from them, given their unique context and idiosyncratic trajectory of growth.

This study has enriched the literature by presenting and analyzing a more inclusive or perhaps comprehensive palette of explicit choices in the form of several variants of the RBM for the relevant entrepreneurial firms to choose from. Future research can undertake the task of comparing these variants of RBM with those of upcoming servitization business models such as guaranteed availability, subscription and performance-based contracting and exploring the prospects of diverse combinations.

Smart entrepreneurial firms identify and adopt inspiring benchmarks (like razor and blade model whenever appropriate) duly tweaked and blended into a gestalt benchmark for optimal profits and attractive market shares. They target diverse market segments for tied-goods with different variants or combinations of the relevant benchmarks in the form of variegated customer value propositions (CVPs) that have unique and enticing appeal to the respective market segments.

Value-sensitive customers on the rise globally choose the option that best suits them from among multiple alternatives offered by competing firms in the market. As long as the ratio of utility to price of such an offer is among the highest, even a no-frills CVP may be most appealing to one market segment while a plush CVP may be tempting to yet another market segment simultaneously. While professional business firms embrace resource leverage practices consciously, amateur customers do so subconsciously. Each party subliminally desires to have the maximum bang-to-buck ratio as the optimal return on investment, given their priorities ceteris paribus.

Prior studies on the RBM have explicitly captured only a few variants of the razor and blade model. This study is perhaps the first of its kind that ferrets out many other variants (more than ten) of the razor and blade model with due simplification and exemplification, justification and demystification.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a phenomenological approach can help to understand embodied dimensions and compare different and shared qualities, functions and potential, as well as ambivalences and limitations of metaphors and stories in organisations.

Based on a phenomenological understanding and use of multiple discourses, the specific expressive and communicative nature, linkages to meaning, mediation and integration, as well as transformational, innovating and generating potentials of metaphors respectively, narratives are analysed conceptually and discussed. Accordingly similarities and differences, overlapping and conflicting patterns, thus correspondences and rapprochements of both metaphors and narratives are shown and illustrated.

The critical comparison of various, especially transformative functions, ambivalences and ambiguous uses of metaphorical and narrative sides and practices reveals their inherently dynamic inter‐relational nexus. The analysis shows how metaphors and stories/narratives can serve each other, as well as how they work together and contribute for transformation in organizations. In turn, this also offers new potential for understanding the practical opportunities and obstacles to the management of change.

The originality of this paper lies in that besides using multiple discourse, it follows an advanced Merleau‐Pontyian phenomenological approach and thus considers embodied dimensions of metaphors and stories/narratives and its implication for organizations critically. Working out the intriguing relationship between metaphor and narrative offers significant new insight and avenues for the research of organizational inertia and change.

Purpose – This chapter will discuss how the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, for example, being a sibling and losing a sibling. It explores the researcher’s emotional experience when working with children and their families, with a specific focus on the influence of the researcher presence and the sibling equilibrium.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on the dramaturgical social interactions encountered in qualitative research which explored the experiences of siblings living in the context of cystic fibrosis. The study uses narrative inquiry and creative participatory methods to elicit sibling stories and provides insight into their worlds.

Findings – The chapter reflects on specific situations encountered on entering, engaging in and leaving the field, which had a significant emotional impact. Two sibling vignettes will be presented along with a discussion of how reflective metaphorical expression can be applied as a method of processing and coping with the research context.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, and that reflective metaphorical expression can be used as a strategy to process thoughts and gain greater understanding of a situation as well as to provide an emotional release for the researcher. It also suggests that conducting research over a longer time period, as opposed to one visit, can be beneficial in terms of participant and researcher emotional transition.

For several decades, scholars have called for “open” or “living systems” approaches to the study of complex organizations. These approaches were especially characterized by the presence of various nonlinear dynamics. Unfortunately, the formal mathematics required to capture these dynamics did not become widely available until the recent mass computing revolution. Meanwhile, these realms of mathematics, known variously as “catastrophes,” “chaos,” and more recently as “complexity,” have caught hold in the physical, biological, and cognitive sciences. This article contends that it is now time for these recent advances in the sciences of nonlinearity to emerge full scale in the social realm as well. However, thus far, this movement is much more metaphorical than it is methodological. Thus, a review of some policy and management applications is undertaken. Of particular interest are those where the uses of phase plane analysis and genetic algorithms portend significant practical import.

The intellectual trajectory of a central figure in contemporary organisation theory – Gareth Morgan – is identified and assessed through a detailed analysis of his published work over the last decade.