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The question of the nature of the collar is pursued drawing on results generated in the field of social ontology as well as on observations from history. In this chapter, it can be tried to seek what the nature of collar is, this is a central question for social theory, not least economics and human resources. Tony Lawson (2019, p. 1, 2021) has recently developed a theory of social positioning “… which is the social phenomena are everywhere constituted by or within process through which social totalities are formed or emerge.” The central idea of the theory of social positioning is that social relations are ultimately power relationships, which structure how social phenomena are organized. This chapter further explores this idea by conceptualizing power drawing on the theory of social positioning. Collar is a social phenomenon and associated with certain kind of structure which is social classes in this chapter. This structure will be taken as a class relation in Marxist approach as it is known, this relation is about power. In this framework, the question of the nature of collar needs to be explained with social positioning theory.

Drawing on positioning theory, the purpose of this paper is to characterize the activities and positions of students and supervisors at workplaces and on-campus skills training sites across the higher health professional educations of medicine, sports science, and nursing. Furthermore, the study explored the impact of work-based learning (WBL) and skills training on students’ personal professional identity development.

A qualitative case study was conducted across six workplace sites and three on-campus skills training sites with 20 days of observation and 21 in-depth interviews. The data were inductively analyzed resulting in the identification of 12 characteristic narratives. This was followed by abductive analysis using Harré’s concept of positioning as the theoretical framework.

Across the three higher health professional educations, work-based and on-campus skills training sites were characterized by two learning spaces with distinct positions, rights, and duties. The WBL sites gave the students rich opportunities to position themselves, act independently, and behave as professionals seriously striving for mastery. On the on-campus sites, the students behaved less seriously, and were conscious of their rights to try out things, get support, and have fun.

The authors recommend that future studies explore aspects of professional identity formation due to its consequences for curriculum design, including the distribution of simulated spaces and professional spaces in students’ learning environments.

This study adds to the empirical evidence and conceptual frameworks of personal and shared professional identity development in the field of skills and WBL, and it underlines the ongoing value of Harré’s positioning theory in educational research.

This chapter builds on status as sociological ordering and introduces the relevance of high status for organisations and their strategic communication. It offers new insights into organisational leadership perceptions from a stakeholder perspective. A neo-institutional framework is combined with social judgement theory and positioning theory to emphasise the importance of high status for organisations. Research questions are derived from previous research and tested in a representative online survey among 4,054 citizens and an online survey among 1,346 communication professionals in 10 European countries. Results suggest that trustworthiness and quality are the main attributes that describe a high-status position. Communication professionals in the surveyed countries overestimate innovation for building a leadership position. In contrast, customer service is clearly underestimated. Not only do the leadership attributes differ widely across the surveyed countries, but so do the communication activities that form a view on the leadership of a company or organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mentoring experience through positioning theory lens. It discusses, specifically, the mentoring experience of beginning teachers and mentors in a school in Singapore.

This study uses a case study approach. The data are collected mainly through interviews with beginning teachers and mentors.

The findings suggest that beginning teachers who had an emotionally assuring mentoring experience had mentors who positioned themselves as emotional providers. Those who had a professionally fulfilling mentoring experience had mentors who positioned themselves beyond the providers of emotional support. Beginning teachers who had a less satisfying experience had mentors who positioned themselves as physically and emotionally unavailable. Mentors who had a professionally frustrating mentoring experience had beginning teachers who challenged their positioning. Those who had a personally enjoyable and professionally satisfying mentoring experience positioned themselves as not averse to learning from beginning teachers.

The findings suggest that schools may want to give more attention to mentor preparation, and it should not be a one‐off exercise. The findings also suggest that it may be a good idea to also consider a pre‐mentoring session for both mentors and beginning teachers before they embark on the mentoring proper.

Although this study is at best a research in progress, it, however, signifies the first step towards initiating a dialogue in this aspect as there are hardly any studies that mentoring particularly in the context of Singapore. For the teaching profession in Singapore, this is especially a significant first step.

Co‐operation and competition characterise the inter‐firm relationships in strategic alliances. This article proposes a paradox approach to studying co‐operation and competition. It explains the paradox perspective and provides an analytic framework for the paradox of co‐operation and competition. In the light of the paradoxical nature, it advocates a multi‐paradigm approach to co‐operative and competitive strategies, which combines strategic positioning, the resource‐based view and game theory. The article suggests that the multi‐paradigms can not only encompass the contradictions of the paradox from the different perspectives, but also emulate the individual ones and provide a holistic picture. The multi‐paradigm approach therefore establishes a better methodology basis than fragmented orthodox theories in exploring the contradictory, interactive and dynamic nature.

This study took place in an elementary English language arts classroom during a comics writers workshop unit and focused on one fourth-grade author. This paper aims to explain how a fourth-grade student receiving special education services positions himself and is positioned by others as an expert during a unit on comics. When students’ knowledge about multimodal composition is recognized and valued, the classroom community can become a place where students can author themselves into positions of power and authority.

Informed by sociocultural theory, social semiotics and positioning theory, the authors conducted a qualitative study to analyze the focal participant’s published comic, classroom interactions and interview data using open and in vivo coding systems.

The findings documented how the focal participant was positioned as an expert by others and how he positioned himself as an expert. The findings also explore how this fourth-grade comics expert left an authorial residue that extended beyond the boundaries of this particular comics unit, impacting his teachers and future iterations of the comics workshop.

Scholars have theorized multimodal approaches to reading and writing pedagogy as an equitable enterprise that values meaning-makers using a wide variety of semiotic resources. This study shows how incorporating an explicit multimodal composition opportunity allowed one fourth-grade author space to craft a comic and re-author traditional classroom positions of power.

This paper aims to find common ground between the supposed incompatible meta-historical positioning of positivism and post-positivism through a turn to mnemohistory in management and organizational history.

Drawing on the idea of creative synthesis and positioning theory, the authors interject concepts from cultural memory studies in historical research on business and organizations to encourage management historians and organization theorists interested in joining the dialogue around how the past is known in the present. Using notions of “aftermath” and “events,” the idea of apositivism is written into historical organization studies to focus on understanding the complex ways of how past events translate into history. The critical historic turn event is raised as an exemplar of these ideas.

The overview of the emergence of the controversial historic turn in management and organization studies and the positioning of its adherents and antagonists revealed that there may be some commonality between the fragmented sense of the field. It was revealed that effective history vis-à-vis mnemohistory may hold the potential of a shared scholarly ethic.

The research builds on recent work that has sought to bring together the boundaries of management and organizational history. This paper explains how mnemohistory can offer a common position that is instrumental for theorizing the relationships among the past-infused constructs such as organizational heritage, legacy and identity.

This chapter analyses the character of Mrs Coulter in BBC/HBO TV show His Dark Materials (2019–ongoing). Mrs Coulter shows clear links with traditional fairy tale figures; in the words of actor Ruth Wilson, ‘She's fairy godmother and she's the nasty queen. She's like Snow White, and she's the Wicked Witch’ (HBO, 2019). Keeping in mind these intertextual references, but focusing on the text, I am going to study the ways in which Mrs Coulter's ‘being evil’ is constructed: are any motivations provided to account for her becoming evil?

Are we supposed to feel sympathy for her – a woman struggling for power in a patriarchal society? How do her interactions with other characters modify the ‘traditional’ roles she evokes and her perceived evilness? To answer these questions, I will employ theoretical tools stemming from queer theory and positioning theory. While arguing for the usefulness of such theoretical outlook for the study of villains, I aim to prove that Mrs Coulter is depicted as a thwarted good character, ruined not only by societal sexist norms, but also by the internalization of ideals typical of toxic masculinity.

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to the perception of music and the understanding of memory using cybernetic tools.

The work uses a methodological approach based on realistic evaluation to deploy two well‐established cybernetic models – the viable system model (VSM) and Luhmann's model of social systems – together with Harré's “Positioning Theory” to show how the process of mental construction and perception might be conceived. Drawing on reflections following a musical performance experiment at the American Cybernetics Society Conference in 2010, phenomenal issues of perception and memory are considered against the background of feedback mechanisms with a material and social environment.

The model situates the process of improvising music, the experience of listening to music, and the experience of recalling musical events within the context of a dynamic regulatory mechanism involving individual agents in a material and social environment.

The paper argues that a model for memory of co‐evolution between agency and environment has ethical and political implications, drawing particularly on recent application of Harré's Positioning Theory.

The bringing together of the VSM, Luhmann's theory and Positioning Theory helps to give more definition to the relationship between what Harré terms “engrams” and “exterograms” thus making possible more sophisticated models of distributed cognition.