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Open Access
Article
Publication date: 21 November 2022

Chris Brown and Jana Gross Ophoff

Background: Ideas always have and always will change the world; with ideas-engagement enabling individuals to become more knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions and…

Abstract

Background: Ideas always have and always will change the world; with ideas-engagement enabling individuals to become more knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions and better positioned to re-align their values in response to new progressive norms and beliefs. Given these potential benefits, of primary interest is how citizens can be most effectively encouraged to engage with new ideas.

Methods: With this study we test the efficacy of two approaches designed to enhance citizen’s perceptions regarding the value of ideas-engagement. Specifically, we recontextualise a previously undertaken small-scale randomised control trial designed to stimulate states of either curiosity or pragmatic prospection amongst two randomly allocated groups of respondents. Our target variables involve the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date, as well as to four related attitudinal variables. Our target audience is the voting age population of England.

Results: 515 participants took part in the experiment, with 269 receiving the curiosity stimulating intervention and 246, the prospection intervention. Our findings suggest that, by the end of four weeks, only the intervention designed to promote pragmatic prospection had significantly impacted on the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date. It also positively impacted the value-scores for one of the secondary attitudinal variables (relating to the importance of supporting physical and mental-health).

Conclusions: While this study provides useful insight regarding ideas-engagement, further work is needed. In particular, future studies will require a larger sample, so as to ascertain the impact of these approaches on “ideas refusers”. Also required is the inclusion of a control group to provide a definitive counter factual. Furthermore, since positive changes in attitudes towards ideas-engagement also ideally leads to changes in behaviours, questions are also needed to examine the sources of ideas respondents subsequently engage with (or not) as a result of these interventions.

Article
Publication date: 7 August 2017

Anne Kari Bjørge, Alexander Madsen Sandvik and Sunniva Whittaker

The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate values are interpreted by local and international employees in a multilingual organisation that has opted for the local…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate values are interpreted by local and international employees in a multilingual organisation that has opted for the local language, not English, as its corporate language.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a research paper exploring how the recontextualisation and resemiotisation of value terms impact on how corporate values are interpreted, employing triangulation of questionnaire and interview results.

Findings

When values are recontextualised in employee discourse, proficiency in the corporate language and cultural background was found to have an impact on their interpretation. Internationals were found to have a broader and not exclusively professional interpretation compared to the locals. Internationals with a low level of proficiency in the local language were more sceptical than the locals as to whether there was a shared understanding of the values.

Research limitations/implications

The questionnaire yielded fewer respondents than the authors expected, which should be taken into account when interpreting the results.

Practical implications

The paper suggests best practices for communicating corporate values to a multilingual workforce.

Social implications

This paper contributes to the understanding of linguistic challenges in the multilingual work contexts.

Originality/value

To the authors’ knowledge, there is little prior in-depth research on how language impacts on employees’ interpretation of corporate values. As values are cohesive devices in organisations, the language used to convey them is worth addressing as the present paper aims to demonstrate.

Details

Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 22 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-3289

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 May 2019

Carmen Daniela Maier and Silvia Ravazzani

The purpose of this paper is to address the need to reconsider online external communication that integrates diversity management (DM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to address the need to reconsider online external communication that integrates diversity management (DM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining the multimodal discursive strategies purposefully employed by organizations to reflect the symbiotic relationship between these two areas of management practice and to communicatively emphasize their corporate commitment.

Design/methodology/approach

Building on the recently emerged stream of literature linking DM and CSR, and adopting a critical perspective on discourse analysis, this study delves into the multimodal discursive strategies that help bridge DM and CSR in online external communication. The analytical approach proposed is used for the qualitative analysis of 43 web pages selected from Microsoft company’s “Global Diversity and Inclusion” website.

Findings

Findings highlight the discursive efforts made by the organization to strategically integrate DM and CSR communication into one single framework. The analysis reveals how the coordinates of social practices (social actors and social actions) are purposefully and multimodally recontextualized in the corporate discourse when communicating this integration.

Originality/value

This study extends the focus of critical discourse analysis from exclusively language to the interplay of different semiotic modes, offering a fine-grained exploration of the multimodal meaning construction performed by organizations in the context of online external communication.

Details

Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 24 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-3289

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 2 September 2015

Jackie Sydnor, Linda Coggin, Tammi Davis and Sharon Daley

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of…

Abstract

Purpose

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of contact in which preservice teachers create their own idealized vision of their future classroom.

Methodology/approach

Using the multimodal text as a point of departure, each researcher used a different analytical method to approach the data, allowing for examination of different aspects of the product and process of digital storytelling. These analysis methods include theoretically driven analysis based upon theories of Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978), metaphor analysis, and performative analysis. This chapter describes the findings from each analytic lens, as well as the affordances of the multiple research lenses.

Findings

The results of the study shed light on how preservice teachers constructed a dialogue around their beliefs about themselves as teachers and visions of their future classrooms. The space between the real and the imagined provided a critical writing space where preservice teachers were able to vision their evolving identity and make visible their negotiation of intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional discourses they encountered. These artfully communicated stories engaged preservice teachers in creating new meanings, practices, and experiences as they explored possibilities and imagined themselves in their future classrooms. In these compositions, the preservice teachers maintained, disrupted, and/or reinvented classroom contexts to accommodate their own understandings of literacy teaching and learning.

Practical implications

The zones of contact that were consciously created in this digital storytelling assignment allowed teacher educators to provide the cognitive dissonance which research shows makes teacher beliefs more amenable. Additionally, asking preservice teachers to engage in the type of analysis described in this chapter may prove to be a useful avenue for helping to make the negotiation that took place during the composing of the digital stories more explicit for the preservice teachers.

Details

Video Research in Disciplinary Literacies
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-678-2

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 16 January 2023

Susan Albers Mohrman and Jean M. Bartunek

The field of Organization Development and Change (ODC) is facing the same tensions as those confronting humanity more broadly: how to build a sustainable future. There is an…

Abstract

The field of Organization Development and Change (ODC) is facing the same tensions as those confronting humanity more broadly: how to build a sustainable future. There is an urgent need to preserve the viability of our species by changing our relationship to the natural environment and slowing the ravages of climate change and the degradation of the earth's resources. Simultaneously, technology advances are changing our lives, work, institutions, and culture in unpredictable ways. Social upheaval and geopolitical tensions are exposing deep fissures in values, preferences, and beliefs about what constitutes a just society and how to govern. The development needed for a sustainable future must enable us to operate in ways that are fundamentally different from the status quo – not just increase our effectiveness in the way we currently operate.

ODC will have to recontextualize its methodologies and frameworks that currently focus primarily on individual organizations to deal with the complexity and urgency of the challenges humanity is facing. In this Reflection, we consider some of the tensions and key questions that ODC faces: What does, and might, sustainable development mean in a globally intertwined world where divisions at both the macro and micro levels reflect conflicting interests, tensions, and fundamentally different aspirations for the future? How do ODC methodologies and frameworks need to change to help develop sustainable ecosystem level transformation cutting across hierarchies, institutions, geographies, and cultures? How does ODC need to design itself to operate differently with different outcomes? We suggest some possible next steps forward in addressing these tensions.

Article
Publication date: 1 October 2001

Richard A. Slaughter

For futures studies to progress toward a fully‐fledged discipline its knowledge creation processes must be clear and comprehensible. They must be capable of being taught, learned…

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Abstract

For futures studies to progress toward a fully‐fledged discipline its knowledge creation processes must be clear and comprehensible. They must be capable of being taught, learned, critiqued and modified. This paper provides a rationale for using a version of Wilber’s four‐quadrant model as one way of understanding the knowledge creation process in futures studies. It applies this structurally to knowledge creation through four contrasting futures methodologies. The latter are then recontextualized within the four‐quadrant framework. It is suggested that a rapprochement between futures studies and an emerging “integral agenda” provides a sound approach to the civilizational challenge facing humankind.

Details

Foresight, vol. 3 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 May 2008

Richard Parsons

In recent years, Australian minerals companies have increasingly considered Aboriginal communities to be “stakeholders”, suggesting that new practices of respect have superseded…

2589

Abstract

Purpose

In recent years, Australian minerals companies have increasingly considered Aboriginal communities to be “stakeholders”, suggesting that new practices of respect have superseded past colonial practices of dispossession, and apparently challenging neoliberal ideology. The increasing pervasiveness of the term “community engagement” exemplifies this apparent transformation. However, in common with the similar interdiscursive notions, “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR), the meaning of “community engagement” may be contestable. In this case study of a minerals‐processing site in eastern Australia, discourses of “community engagement” among company staff and local indigenous community members are critically compared. The overall aim is to illuminate discursive tensions and multiple subjectivities among participants' assumptions and worldviews.

Design/methodology/approach

Broadly speaking, the paper uses a discourse analytic approach to demonstrate how apparently rational processes are contestable, unstable and discursively constructed. Using transcripts of interviews with 12 indigenous community members, and five company staff, the study firstly describes participants' conceptual relationships and identifies the discursive formations from which participants draw. Using closer textual analysis, it then investigates how participants' meanings and worldviews are constituted through discursively produced texts.

Findings

The paper finds that both company and community participants interdiscursively draw on competing discourses, but sometimes they do so in different ways. Most notably, company participants implicitly see indigeneity as static, non‐negotiable and non‐problematic, while community participants view indigeneity as inextricably bound up in identity, land and respect. Furthermore, participants have competing understandings of notions such as development, industry and money.

Originality/value

Concepts such as “sustainable development”, “CSR” and now “community engagement” are often cited as evidence that corporations are responding adequately to criticisms regarding their historical misdemeanours. The implicit assumption is that the contemporary capitalism can satisfactorily address social concerns. Yet, this study suggests that it does so by internalising antithetical discourses, thereby neutralising opposition, and maintaining both capitalism's legitimacy and colonialism's power relations. Thus, the capacity to challenge assumptions underlying the colonial‐capitalist project may be constrained by historical relations of power.

Details

Critical perspectives on international business, vol. 4 no. 2/3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-2043

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 4 September 2017

Belinda Mendelowitz

Imagination in critical literacy research is usually referred to as a taken for granted concept that is seldom theorised, leaving the assumptions unchecked that everyone has a…

Abstract

Purpose

Imagination in critical literacy research is usually referred to as a taken for granted concept that is seldom theorised, leaving the assumptions unchecked that everyone has a shared understanding of imagination. This paper aims to challenge critical literacy researchers to rethink the relationship between criticality and imagination and its implication for a critical writing pedagogy. It aims to synthesise the imagination and criticality in the context of critical literacy, both theoretically and empirically and in doing so to illustrate what form a critical writing pedagogy that foregrounds the critical imagination might take.

Design/methodology/approach

This argument is illustrated through analysing two sets of data that contain embodied enactments of contested gender issues across different modes and genres. Data from student teachers’ embodied enactments of contested gender issues and from their writing on these issues were analysed thematically.

Findings

A crucial aspect of the critical imagination entails creating pedagogical spaces that mobilise affect and empathy alongside criticality. Embodied literacy work across different modes and genres can play a significant role in facilitating the critical imagination by enabling students to enact, perform and immerse themselves in different discourses, ultimately generating new insights and ways of seeing.

Research limitations/implications

Data was drawn from a relatively small sample of 30 assignments in the context of teacher education in South Africa. More empirical research needs to be conducted across a wider range of contexts.

Practical implications

The paper provides a theoretical framework and practical ideas for implementing a critical writing pedagogy that foregrounds the critical imagination and thus could be used in both teacher education contexts and school literacy classrooms.

Originality/value

This paper challenges critical literacy researchers to rethink the relationship between criticality and imagination and its implication for a critical writing pedagogy.

Details

English Teaching: Practice & Critique, vol. 16 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1175-8708

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 April 2009

Jocelyn Cranefield and Pak Yoong

This paper aims to investigate how online communities of practice facilitate the embedding of personal professional knowledge in a complex online environment.

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate how online communities of practice facilitate the embedding of personal professional knowledge in a complex online environment.

Design/methodology/approach

This research consisted of exploratory, interpretivist case research, using qualitative methods. Forty‐one individuals from five online communities in a national professional development programme were interviewed. Additional data were drawn from diverse online records. Data were coded via text analysis. A wiki was used for participant feedback.

Findings

Embedding of new knowledge was facilitated by individuals' crossings between different engagement spaces – communication and sense‐making contexts. Community members repeatedly crossed between online and offline, visible and invisible, formal and informal, and reflective and active engagement spaces as they sought to meet diverse needs. As they did this, they had to continually recontextualise knowledge, adapting, varying and personalising it to fit the function, genre and conventions of each engagement space. This promoted the embedding of professional knowledge. The complex online environment in which they operated can be seen as providing a situation of enhanced polycontextuality, within which multiple boundary crossings facilitated strong personalisation. At the community level, knowledge convergence was fostered by the recurrence of dominant, powerful mnemonic themes.

Research limitations/implications

An opportunity exists to investigate the applicability of these findings in other online professional contexts.

Originality/value

The paper extends the concept of boundary crossing to crossings in a polycontextual online environment. It updates literature on communities of practice by outlining the dynamics of a complex online community system. It provides an explanation for how personal knowledge evolves to fit emerging trends and considers how information systems can support deep knowledge transfer.

Details

Online Information Review, vol. 33 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1468-4527

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 August 2021

Wahid Ahmad Dar

This paper aims to explore the contextual problems and priorities that create tensions in the implementation of activity-based learning reforms such as learning enhancement…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the contextual problems and priorities that create tensions in the implementation of activity-based learning reforms such as learning enhancement through active pedagogy in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). By doing so, it aims to understand the relevance of activity-based learning (ABL) in diverse contexts as perceived by stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach

Using qualitative data drawn from semi-structured interviews with 29 teachers, this study uses an anthropological approach to policy implementation to unleash factors creating a disjunction between policy text and policy practice.

Findings

Narratives from teachers reveal how critical awareness about context raises tensions and shapes beliefs about ABL. Their beliefs about ABL can be summed as “pedagogy for its own sake”, reflecting the perceived ineptness of ABL in bringing about considerable improvements in students learning outcomes. Reference to “outcomes” was invoked as a crucial recontextualising discourse in teacher’s pedagogic orientation which resulted primarily from the poor learning attainments of rural children in the prevalent outcome-focussed educational setup.

Research limitations/implications

The study is the first of its kind conducted in J&K and amongst very few around the world elucidating tension around the implementation of pedagogic reforms in underserved areas. This is the only study providing a critical analysis of pedagogic reforms in the school education system in J&K.

Practical implications

The study has significant implications in terms of helping immediate functionaries such as headmasters, teacher trainers and administrators and policy planners in understanding the dilemmas faced by teachers in enacting pedagogic reforms. It also adds to the field of policy implementation in terms of understanding the tensions of policy implementation at peripheries.

Originality/value

The study is the first of its kind conducted in J&K and amongst very few around the world elucidating tension around the implementation of pedagogic reforms in underserved areas. This is the only study providing a critical analysis of the school education system in J&K.

Details

Quality Assurance in Education, vol. 29 no. 2/3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0968-4883

Keywords

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