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This paper aims to address third actor introductions to interaction episodes aiming at fast-forwarding the continuous development of business relationships of new firms.

The study is qualitative, collecting data from 30 interviews from 28 informants associated with creation of new ventures and business network development in the context of a novel type of third actor called venture builder. Venture builders are privately owned organizations devoted to new firm creation in a factory-like mode, collaborating with individual entrepreneurs.

The findings suggest that interaction episodes, central to the development of new relationships, may be triggered by introductions managed by third actors using different types of involvement depending on the location and focus of the potential relationship. A framework is presented including four types of introductions to interaction episodes, aiming at saving time by removing the perceived distance between new firms and their counterparts in the initiation of business relationships. The framework describes four types of introductions of interaction episodes: Managed, Advised, Facilitated and Monitored.

Triggers and introductions of interaction episodes for new firms has previously been sparsely addressed. This paper presents how third actor involvement, by the introductions of interaction episodes with internal and external counterparts is managed with an aim of fast-forwarding relationship development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore networked business models on a nascent market for a sustainable innovation.

The study takes a qualitative approach through a comparative case study of three solar photovoltaic (PV) parks in Sweden. Data was collected from 14 interviews with multiple supply chain and network actors as well as secondary data. Industrial marketing and purchasing is applied for theoretical framing.

The study demonstrates transactional, relational, environmental and social drivers for participating in the network. The study reveals the duplicity of the nascent market, which encourages supply chain actors to develop their individual business models to take a larger market share or become future competitors to current collaborators. On the nascent market with few developed regulations, the network enables actors to influence regulations on local and regional levels.

The study is limited to the nascent solar PV industry in Sweden, which is characterized by institutional turbulence, market uncertainties and few established supply networks.

Practitioners need to consider multifarious drivers for participating in networked business models, where the economic driver may be the least motivating.

This study provides several multiactor business models and classifies them into specific applications and general applications. The study provides unique insight into the complexity of interactions among supply chain actors in networked business models on a nascent market for sustainable innovation. Due to the scarcity of available partners on the nascent market, actors need to look beyond their on-going relationships and their network horizon, or actors’ roles evolve to include activities that was not part of their individual business models.

Some fairy tale characters have transcended their original fairy tale genre and their influence can be perceived in other fictional genres. One illustration of this is the character of Blue Beard. This story, written by Charles Perrault, was first published in 1697 (Hermansson, 2010, p. 2). It moved through several themes or topics from anxiety to money to the right of the husband and wives (Warner, 2014, p. 82). In Perrault's story, Blue Beard is conceived as a serial killer and a jealous husband. ‘Whatever the medium, whatever the date: in opera, cartoon, X-rated film or graphic novel, he is an archetypal serial murderer, terrifying and yet alluring’ (2015, p. 76).

The influence of this character and examples that carry, at the very least, remnants of Blue Beard can be clearly identified in several contemporary narratives. In the BBC television series The Fall (Cubitt, 2013), Jamie Dornan portrays a serial killer named Paul Spector. Alternatively known as the Belfast Strangler, Spector, like Blue Beard, has a wife and children who are unaware of his murderous spree. Another example of the attempted enforcement of extreme patriarchy can be seen in Cult, the seventh season of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story anthology series. The season is dedicated to the 2016 US election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (Raddish, 2017). In this fictional narrative Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) symbolises toxic masculinity and models patriarchal archetypes to create a cult and become a senator.

Through a contextual post-structuralist analysis of the aforementioned characters, this chapter intends to examine the representation and evolution of male character under the umbrella of the fairy tale ‘man’.

This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

Anchored in the theories of brand gestalt and stakeholder perspectives, this study aims to undertake a comprehensive examination of the brand gestalt concept, emphasizing its multidimensional nature and the process of co-creation.

Focused within the context of the Wonderful Indonesia brand, the research draws upon a rich qualitative data set derived from in-depth interviews conducted with 18 international tourists, supplemented by netnography (or internet ethnography) of websites, social media and online articles related to Wonderful Indonesia. Using grounded theory methodology, the qualitative data undergo rigorous analysis to identify emergent themes and patterns.

The research elucidates the four dimensions (4S) comprising brand gestalt: storyscapes, sensescapes, servicescapes and stakeholderscapes. Each dimension is further delineated into essential categories, providing a comprehensive understanding of brand gestalt. This study highlights the collaborative nature of brand gestalt, emphasizing the involvement of multiple stakeholders in shaping the brand's identity and perception. Consumer perceptions of co-creation are identified as significant contributors to brand gestalt, enhancing the brand's value proposition.

Destination management and practitioners can use the insights from the research to refine their brand management and marketing strategies by leveraging the dimensions of brand gestalt. Recognizing the collaborative construct of brand gestalt can guide businesses in fostering meaningful relationships with stakeholders and aligning branding efforts with collective visions. Understanding the role of consumer co-creation in brand development can inform strategies aimed at enhancing brand equity and fostering consumer loyalty.

This study extends existing literature on brand gestalt by providing a comprehensive examination of its four dimensions and essential categories. By emphasizing the collaborative nature of brand gestalt, this study contributes to advancing the understanding of brand co-creation paradigms. The identification of consumer perceptions of co-creation as a significant factor in brand gestalt adds novel insights to the literature, offering valuable implications for brand management and marketing strategies.

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for undergraduate Ecuadorian polytechnic students.

This research followed a mixed method design to obtain quantitative information through a researcher-made survey and paired T-test, which would be corroborated by the qualitative data obtained from semistructured interviews.

From the descriptive and T-test results and the interview answers, it is concluded that students have a favorable view of the effectiveness of using comics to improve their writing skills. They also expressed their engagement and motivation to work with comics.

First, the research sample, comprised of 109 students, may restrict the generalizability of the findings beyond the specific context of this study. This constraint suggests caution in extrapolating these findings to broader student cohorts, emphasizing the need for larger-scale studies to validate the robustness and applicability of the outcomes. Second, the study’s focus solely on students from a polytechnic state university introduces a potential limitation concerning the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool. Consequently, the findings might be limited in their applicability and may not fully encompass students’ varied responses and attitudes from other educational backgrounds.

The scaffolding afforded by comics aligns with genre-based literacy perspectives, valuing instruction in textual genres and social purposes. From a practical pedagogical point of view, this paper’s results suggest the potential of comic narratives and storyboarding. Comics writing could be added to classroom activities to vibrantly aboard brainstorming, drafting and peer reviewing before dealing with higher-stakes assignments. Legitimizing alternative mediums like comics for academic writing tasks has social implications for promoting literacies in a multimedia world.

Writing comics nurtures multiliteracies aligned with participatory digital cultures by expanding traditional linguistic-centric norms. This multimodal composing can potentially increase access and representation and amplify voices across identities and cultures.

Although the paper addresses a topic that is not entirely novel in research, its originality lies in its focus on data originating from Ecuador, where specific cultural nuances and educational contexts may influence the effectiveness of using comics to enhance EFL writing skills. Thus, it fills a gap in the existing literature on this subject.

Taking the dialogic organizational development perspective, this study aims to investigate the framing processes when engaging in dialogue for strategy implementation and how these enable the evolution of implementation opportunities.

Through a qualitative exploratory study conducted in a large multinational, the authors analyse the dialogue and interactions among 25 dyads when identifying opportunities to contribute to strategy implementation. The data analysis relies on a process-coding approach and linkography, a valuable protocol analysis for identifying recursive interaction schemas in conversations.

The authors identify four main framing processes – shaping, unveiling, scattering and shifting – and provide a framework of how these processes affect individuals’ mental models through increasing the tangibility of opportunities or elevating them to new value hierarchies.

From a theoretical perspective, this study contributes to the strategy implementation and organizational development literature, providing a micro-perspective of how dialogue allows early knowledge structures to emerge and shape the development of opportunities for strategy implementation.

From a managerial perspective, the authors offer insights to trigger action and change in individuals to contribute to strategy when moving from formulation to implementation.

Rather than focusing on the structural control view of strategy implementation and the role of the top management team, this study considers strategy implementation as a practice and what it takes for organizational actors who do not take part in strategy formulation to enact and shape opportunities for strategy implementation through constructive dialogue.

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.

In an era of polycrisis, we argue that responsible leaders need to unlearn common thinking patterns imprinted by old (management) paradigms in order to find new solutions to the grand challenges of our time. To be able to overcome the “crisis of the imagination” and spur narratives about more sustainable futures, leaders need to update and restructure their skill sets and invest in developing anticipatory and futures (thinking) skills, as well as futures literacy as a competence. To achieve this on the student level, we also need to rethink business and management education at the university level by challenging the ways we teach, i.e., teaching pedagogics, as well as the content and story we want to tell about the future of management. Thus, with this chapter, we aim to rethink pedagogical methods and tools by introducing educators to potential pathways for equipping students with adequate skills to be able to “use-the-future”. As the process of unlearning is difficult, we argue that we need to venture out of the business discipline and push the barriers of the business and management curriculum so as to be able to further unleash creativity and imagination. To achieve this aim, we propose the integration of methods and approaches from art-related disciplines, such as theater, visual arts, or design, into the business curriculum.

The modern fairy tale hero identity falls into a general spectrum of tropes that spans from the charming prince who seals the fate of the beautiful princess with a kiss to borderline villains with little break in this spectrum. The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia brings to light an often overlooked hero's identity by representing neither ends of this heroic spectrum but rather a different breed of hero entirely. We argue that Geralt of Rivia differs from the typical representation of the fairy tale hero by embodying the spirit of the Huntsman archetype as depicted in stories such as Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.

This creates a new means of exploring fairy tales as genres by giving perspective to the bloodier, messier sides of these tales which have since deviated from their darker origins. Geralt exists as neither hero nor antihero, but rather a sword-for-hire who cleans up messes that ‘heroes’ otherwise cannot or will not handle themselves. Across his depictions in the books, games, and show, Geralt involves himself as a witcher; hunter of monsters. Geralt's method in overcoming this style of quest is unlike the usual hero. Standing in for the Huntsman, Geralt understands the nature and balance of man and beast and carries this responsibility while looking to accomplish his goals. In this chapter, we seek to document and bring to light this underrepresented style of hero that the witcher has to offer to show that such a hero needs not be black nor white.