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Strategy scholars have widely recognized the central role that narratives play in the construction of organizational identities. Moreover, storytelling is an important strategic asset that firms can leverage to inspire employees, excite investors and engage customers' attention. This chapter illustrates how advancements in computational linguistic may offer opportunities to analyze the stylistic elements that make a story more convincing. Specifically, we use a topic model to examine how narrative conventionality influences the performance of 78,758 craftsmen selling their handmade items in the digital marketplace of Etsy. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective narratives display enough conventional features to align with audience expectations, yet preserve some uniqueness to pique audience interest. By elucidating our approach, we hope to stimulate further research at the interface of style, language and strategy.

The study's main goal is to investigate different leadership styles that characterize middle-level leaders, the intermediate leadership tier of role holders in school, as they practice leadership scenarios through active participation in a professional learning process of role-play simulation, using a social-ecological approach.

Thirty middle-level leaders from different Israeli high schools and districts participated in the study during an M.A. course in an educational leadership program. The authors used qualitative analysis to examine role-play simulations of leadership scenarios based on group debriefings. This content analysis was conducted within a two-dimensional theoretical framework composed of leadership style theory and a social-ecological model.

The study findings address four main leadership styles: authentic, transformational, participative and transactional. Regarding their appearance within different social-ecological layers, the interpersonal layer was the most salient one with a prominent appearance of transformational and authentic leadership styles. On the organizational and communal layers, authentic leadership was more prominent. The study findings demonstrate multidimensionality in both the leadership styles and social-ecological layers, as different styles appeared in different layers concurrently.

The findings may help articulate the nature and characteristics of middle-level school leadership. They may also provide relevant theoretical content and instructional strategy to develop simulation-based preparation programs for middle-level leaders.

The study findings highlight unique leadership characteristics of middle-level school leaders and suggest a contextual perception of their leadership styles within a social-ecological framework.

The paper discusses some of the central features of IMP and industrial network research. Different types of empirical phenomena that are in focus of this research are presented. The paper also comments on epistemology, acknowledging some of the underpinnings of industrial network research and how they affect the use of case studies. Examples of case or narrative methodology are provided, taking a starting point in a set of chosen doctoral theses. In addition, a condensed version of the author’s own experiences from a case research and case-writing process covering a period of more than five years is provided (Andersson, 1996a, b). Literature support is brought in for the fact that case writing and the creation of narratives is often a long and ambiguous process of finding a final plot which merges the theoretical with the empirical. The conclusions and comments summarize some of the main implications and ideas emerging from the text, and points also to some emerging discussions in social science on the importance and status of narrative knowledge.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of online advertising on advertising message involvement (AMI) and brand attitude formation among adolescent consumers. More specifically, the impact of advertising copy type and individual task orientation on brand attitude is examined through the mediating role of AMI among a sample of adolescents in India. Moderating role of product’s technology intensiveness is also examined.

Experimental design with three-way factorial analysis of variance was conducted along with independent t-tests and regressions.

The results show that the effect of ad copy type and individual task orientation on brand attitude is mediated by AMI. While both narrative and factual ad copies are found to increase AMI among the respondents, narrative ad copies generate greater AMI when compared with factual ad copies, irrespective of respondents’ task orientation or technology intensiveness of the product. Managerial insights regarding the type of online advertising that would generate a greater AMI and more favorable brand attitude among adolescent consumers are discussed.

The contribution of this research lies in providing the empirical evidence regarding the type of online advertising that can help marketers generate a greater AMI and cultivate more favorable brand attitude among the adolescent consumers.

Carers play a vital role in looking after people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Caring role can be stressful and challenging in nature. Carers use various coping strategies to deal with stressors. The purpose of this paper is to explore coping strategies of carers looking after people with ID and dementia.

Qualitative methodology was used to explore coping strategies. Focus groups and face-to-face interviews were carried out. These interviews were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis.

Nine interviews with carers (six paid carers and three family carers) and two focus groups with nursing staff looking after people with ID were carried out. Three key themes of “Narrative”, “Strategy toolbox” and “Compartmentalisation” emerged from analysis. Narrative and strategy took box were further subthemed. Carers had narratives about them and the person they look after. These “narratives” helped them to deal with day to day stressors. They also carried a “strategy toolbox”, which they used when they were in stressful situations. Compartmentalisation helped them to separate their personal life from work life as a carer.

Understanding carers’ coping strategies is important when planning services to help carers who play an important role in our society. Professionals can support carers to understand and improve their existing coping skills and help them to thrive in their role as carers.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the concept and creation of choose-your-own-adventure flip-books for use in teaching information literacy in higher education.

This is a conceptual paper that examines how to use choose-your-own-adventure style flip-books to teach knowledge practices from the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Using constructivist theory and active learning methods, the authors discuss how flip-books offer a hands-on learning strategy to build on students’ knowledge and experiences while promoting learner-centered interactions.

As academic libraries evolve from teaching bibliographic instruction via lecture to information literacy through student-centered learning, activities such as the one discussed in this paper provide a way for librarians to better engage with students. Creating curriculum based on educational theory and learner-centered approaches is necessary for librarians to use to optimize classroom time.

This paper provides a practical and pragmatic evaluation of how to incorporate narrative flip-books into information literacy instruction, providing an additional instructional tool for information literacy practitioners.

The choose-your-own-adventure story narrative has been used as a learning tool through all levels of education, including in university settings, but there is a lack of research on their use in information literacy instruction. This paper provides insight on how this teaching method and teaching tool can be used by librarians in the information literacy classroom.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which narratives of collaborations tagged as successful may be constructed around common characterizations of participants, in order to provide insights to the ways in which stories may be constructed as vehicles for the adoption or adaptation of good or promising practices.

Qualitative interview data from three collaborative situations are analysed through a narrative‐centred procedure with a particular focus on micro‐stories.

The paper provides a set of recurring characterizations observed within narratives of successful collaboration and their employment within the stories offered by collaborating partners. It also suggests the relationship that these characterizations might have to the stimulation or retardation of good collaborative practices.

The paper is derived from interviews in the UK context and extrapolation to other contexts seems plausible but should be conducted cautiously and with reflection.

The particular style of narrative analysis conducted in this work has not been employed to the consideration of collaborative accounts and the characterizations derived may have utility as anchoring elements in stories of collaboration, helpful in both the elicitation and interpretation of such accounts.

Imagining a new business model is a creative process that requires entrepreneurs to define how a firm can create and capture value with a new activity. The literature emphasises various tools and approaches for prototyping business models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the suitability of story-making as a means of designing new business models and to shed light on its potential for stimulating creative entrepreneurial thinking.

This paper tests the use of story-making for business modelling in a real-life case to show its usefulness and shed light on its potential for stimulating creative entrepreneurial thinking.

The authors argue that story-making should be recognised as an approach to business modelling that can foster creativity and empathy. Building on insights from design thinking literature, the paper shows that planning for a long exploratory phase is necessary to allow system thinking. It also shows that anchors can act as intermediary stopping rule and help manage complexity.

The paper introduces an original method for crafting business models during early stages of the innovation process and argues that this method could also be used to design business processes, especially when they are not already formalised.

This paper aims to explore what is known in the literature about leadership and burnout within mental health clinicians (MHC).

The Arksey and O’Malley (2005) framework was used to conduct a systematised scoping review of three databases: PsycInfo, PubMed and CINAHL. To ensure a broad scope of the literature, Google, Google Scholar and three sources of grey literature were also searched.

In total 1,087 articles were identified and 36 were included in the final review, 23 of which were cross-sectional and correlational studies. There is a lack of experimental studies, longitudinal research and qualitative approaches. The literature repeatedly demonstrated an association between leadership and burnout; transformational-leadership style, good quality supervision, supportive relationships, positive communication and fostering autonomy are areas of interest.

Future research activity should aim to follow the recommendations made in the literature; more experimental and longitudinal approaches are needed to support practical application of the findings.

To the best of the author’s knowledge there is no other review which maps out the research pertaining to leadership and burnout among MHC. These findings can be used to guide future research to ensure that efforts are directed toward original, meaningful and practical ventures that will add to the evidence base and benefit clinical practice.