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The purpose of this paper is to stimulate discussion within mental health and psychiatric nursing as to how the open dialogue approach can contribute to their work. The paper is mainly theoretical, though relates to practical examples of open dialogue in mental health care research and practice to illustrate the actual potential in practice.

First the authors raise issue with the narrow lens of psychiatric diagnosis and question its usefulness against a contemporary backdrop of personalised care and recovery orientated practice. Open dialogue as a way of being and as a process are explored as they relate to people interaction and contribute to therapeutic interaction, organisational and community development. The authors reflect on how open dialogue can be and is practiced in different ways and at different levels.

The authors consider open dialogue as a suitable approach for working with people who have mental health and/or psychiatric problems. The approach is also recommended for working in larger circumstances as families and social network, on organisational and community levels in different ways. Open dialogue should be considered not as a method or technique but as a process of interaction which can be applied to different conditions and circumstances.

Within mental health discourse open dialogue is increasingly evident and filtering into the broader discussion on increasing effectiveness of mental health interventions. Perfectly suited to mental health and psychiatric nursing as a way of being with service user, this reflection on open dialogue offers further thoughts on how as a process it has already filtered into nursing practice and how as nurses we can easily accommodate it within the therapeutic approach.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.

Presents the first chapter in this work with regard to the search for new ideas and better interpretations in the growth and development of new ideas. Investigates the exchange of views between thinkers of different points of view. Invites co‐operation between various factions to investigate unification of all known sciences (natural and economic) and to include the arts. Mentions all the great thinkers in these areas and unreservedly discusses their contribution in the school of thought. Proffers that modern technology cannot and should not be slowed down and that for the social economy of human solidarity should be aimed for, to begin a new era for humanity.

The purpose of this paper is to show that too often decisions concerning change are made on the basis of partial understanding, limited data and unreflective assumptions about people and organizations. In the discussion of the Socratic dialogue the aim is to uncover a useful method for ensuring more reflective decision making that involves active participation of employees on the receiving end of change.

Although dialogue is used in management processes today, it is contended that the Socratic dialogue is particularly useful in making sense of complex change processes. Data drawn from research conducted in two UK higher education institutions are used to illustrate how lack of knowledge and understanding often pervades and constrains change, and how techniques of Socratic dialogue can be used to secure higher levels of employee involvement and commitment to change.

It is argued that Socratic dialogue can be used as a practical tool to facilitate “participative” change and contend that further research is required to develop the use of this method as a qualitative research instrument for uncovering data on processes of change in organizations.

If practised consistently by organizational members, the Socratic techniques can lead to a more concrete understanding of the complexities of changing organizations. It is a collective process of change through critical questioning and, as such, it lends itself to further exploration on the part of both change managers and qualitative researchers for its uses as a diagnostic and research instrument.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and evaluate the role of hybrid forums as tools to address specific controversies related to sustainable practices in localized agro-food systems (LAFS).

In contrast with other conventional public engagement methods, such as citizen juries, consensus conferences, focus groups or deliberative processes, hybrid forums entail a more dynamic and democratic mechanism to reflect and act together, with the aim of constructing a common project around a defined challenge (Callon et al., 2001, 2009). They can offer an enriching and challenging methodological approach in the context of LAFS, especially in the discussion of controversial issues around food chain sustainability. The authors present here a new generation of hybrid forums: HF 2.0.

HF 2.0. represent both a methodological tool and a real experience of dialogic democracy, two interactive aspects which are closely interlinked and rest upon each other. The authors argue that the attractiveness of HF 2.0. is notable in at least two ways: first, they provide a solid democratic and reflective mechanism to stimulate effective dialogue and knowledge-exchange among different stakeholders; second, they contribute as an important methodological evidence-based tool, which can be used as a launching pad for shaping local action groups and community partnerships’ strategies aimed at fostering local development.

This paper attempts to provide a methodological discussion over the experimental use of HF 2.0. in the context of LAFS and assesses their effectiveness in the co-construction of knowledge. The authors explore their pragmatic validity in addressing controversies over local and sustainable seafood via empirical applications in Norway and the UK.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which global financial institutions are using Web 2.0 technologies and social media initiatives to transform the way in which they perform their corporate disclosure, that is, if these entities are opening a real corporate dialogue.

The web sites of 132 major global financial entities – in Europe (54 entities), the Asia‐Pacific region (55) and the Americas (23) – have been scored according to a Sophistication Index, considering various relevant Web 2.0 technologies and social media implementations. The analysis, by means of least squares and logistic regression models, is consistent across both techniques.

Web 2.0 technologies and social media are not fully available in the corporate reporting arena. Nonetheless, a significant influence is detected. The size of each entity and the region in which it operates influence the scored utilisation of Web 2.0 and social media initiatives.

Web 2.0 tools and social media initiatives have been researched via corporate web sites. Corporate visibility in the major social networks, and also the use of advanced web metrics, will remain topics for further research.

A lack of strategy for implementing an effective corporate dialogue is clearly observed. Based on these findings the banking industry and the supervisory authorities, which are under special scrutiny due to the recent global crisis, can take much greater advantage of the potential of social media to open a real corporate dialogue, increasing the level of transparency.

As social media are becoming more useful and ubiquitous, both academics and practitioners need some initial and reliable background data on this preliminary situation. The extraordinary role of protagonist that the banking industry has played in the recent economic upheavals justify its selection as a first sample for this exploratory study.

The purpose of this study is to identify which stakeholder dialogue approach has the best outcomes. Moreover, it is investigated how stakeholder dialogue practices are linked to the quality of stakeholder management and the maturity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy.

Twelve CSR managers of 11 French enterprises are interviewed.

Four different types of stakeholder dialogue are identified and their characteristics, as well as the opportunities and risks connected to each approach, are discussed.

Only a limited number of enterprises operating in France are studied. More research is needed to ensure the generalisability to other countries and to identify the prevalence of each dialogue type.

Proactive companies manage their stakeholders in a mutually beneficial way and receive more stakeholder support on strategic issues. They discuss issues material to stakeholders, include a wide range of stakeholders and organise frequent meetings. This approach, the Hanoï Dialogue, has the best outcomes and is, therefore, best practice.

Stakeholder dialogue is key for the development of CSR strategies which truly benefit society.

Although stakeholder dialogues become empirically more relevant, most researchers conduct single-case studies of good practices and do not systematically compare a range of practices.

The purpose of this study was to explore how the employees of a company experience the concepts of customer satisfaction and retention. A phenomenological method was used, allowing the informants’ own interpretations to be discovered. Satisfaction was discussed from three perspectives: definition of the concept, how to recognise when a customer is satisfied, and how to enhance satisfaction. The informants’ experience pertaining to these three categories varied, and a total of seven ways to define, recognise or enhance satisfaction were discovered. These were: service, feeling, chemistry, relationship and confidence, dialogue, complaints and retention. All except the first two of these categories of experience were found to enhance retention, implying that the informants have found that strategies for enhancing both satisfaction and retention are similar. The strongest connection between retention and satisfaction strategies turned out to be in terms of relationship and confidence.

Traditionally, in the Netherlands, the procurement procedure for infrastructure does not start until the public decision-making procedure is fully completed. In the new procurement strategy, early contractor involvement is applied by carrying out the procurement procedure and the public planning procedure simultaneously. This article explores the first experiences and lessons learned with early contractor involvement in four Dutch infrastructure projects. It can be concluded that the new strategy adds value in terms of time gains, improved project control and more innovative solutions. However, to optimize early contractor involvement, the differences between the competitive procurement procedures and the open, cooperative public planning procedures need to be bridged.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the early stages of change and the way that stories can open up forms of collaborative dialogue and creative thinking among divergent stakeholders on known but “intractable” problems by enabling multiple voices to be heard in the co-construction of future possibilities for change. The empirical focus is on a project undertaken by two organizations located in Australia. The organizations – AAC, a large aged care provider and Southern Disability Services, a disability support service – collaborated with the researchers in identifying and re-characterizing the nature of the problem in the process of storying new pathways for tackling the transitioning needs of people with intellectual disabilities into aged care services.

An action research approach was used in conducting interviews in the case organizations to ascertain the key dimensions of the presenting problem and to identify change options, this was followed by an ethnographic study of a Pilot Project used to trial the provision of disability day service programmes within an aged care setting.

A key finding of the study centres on the importance of stories at the early stages of change in widening the arena of innovative opportunities, in facilitating collective acceptance of new ideas and in initiating action to resolve problems. The paper demonstrates how stories are used not only in retrospective sensemaking of existing problems but also in giving prospective sense to the possibilities for resolving protracted problems through innovative solutions that in turn facilitates a level of collective acceptance and commitment to opening up new pathways for change.

The paper focuses on problem characterization during the early stages of change and bring to the fore the often hidden notion of time in utilizing concepts from a range of literatures in examining temporality, stories and sensemaking in a context in which future possibilities are made sense of in the present through restorying experiences and events from the past. On a practical and policy front, the paper demonstrates the power of stories to mobilize commitment and action and presents material for rethinking change possibilities in the delivery of aged and disability care.