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This study was designed to be an agonistic encounter between two pre-service teachers from different academic disciplines and with opposing climate change beliefs. The purpose of this study was to create an opportunity for this pair of future educators to voice, acknowledge and engage their differences, rather than avoid or skirt them.

Using a paired interview approach, two pre-service teachers discussed online sources about climate change. The analysis focuses on critical literacy practices of textual critique and reader reflexivity, considering how students from different beliefs and perspectives engage in agonism and negotiated practices.

While there was evidence of the two students engaged in critical literacy practices of textual critique, most of this engagement with the sources remained more at a surface level with somewhat superficial criteria to evaluate the sources. The two students engaged reflexively during the interview discussion in terms of their academic disciplines and climate change beliefs. This reflexive work produced the most compelling exchanges during the interview discussion and pointed to two rich sites for agonistic engagement: their differing conceptions of reliability and their competing perspectives about the intersection of science and politics.

Agonism offers a lens that helps ensure we understand that all pursuits toward facts and truth are necessarily contested as we engage with respected adversaries, not enemies we need to vanquish. There is an urgent need for dialogue across difference, especially for people in the increasingly polarized USA with complex topics and challenges such as climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a personalised overview of the content of English Teaching: Practice and Critique for the years it was hosted at the Wilf Malcolm Institute for Educational Research (WMIER) at the University of Waikato (2002-2014).

It notes trends in relationship to the context of origin of 335 articles published in this period (excluding editorials), including significant increases in articles originating in the USA and Pacific Rim Asian nations, particularly South Korea and Taiwan. It comments on articles that relate to the original vision of the editors’ founders, especially their emphasis on practice, criticality and social justice.

Prevailing themes across 13 years are mapped and in some cases discussed.

A number of reflections are shared in relation to the future of the journal and some challenges currently facing subject English.

The purpose of the paper is to pay homage to Dorothy E. Smith (1926–2022), and her lifelong significance for organizational ethnography. Building on Smith, the empirical purpose of the paper is to analyze professional boundary setting on behalf of innovation management as it occurred in the recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committees (TC) 279 committee on innovation management.

The paper is an ethnographic study of the drafting and publication of a novel international management standard on innovation management, the ISO 56000-series published in 2019. It is based on fieldwork from the ISO committee and integrates relevant standardization documents, observations and interviews.

The paper analyzes four occasions for textual professional boundary work ranging from negotiations of content and choice of ISO standard formats to the unprecedented high-level liaison agreements across international organizations. In each instance, the analysis depicts distinct textual features related to ISO standardization. The analysis shows how the standard becomes positioned as extending and complementing the ISO 9001, not as a radical, freestanding alternative to quality management.

The paper presents original data from the ISO standardization committee. It develops Smith's general textual ontology into a theoretical framework for analyzing how professional boundary setting occurs in the textually structured context of ISO standardization. It gives attention to the implications of questions of objectification and standardization as these apply to contemporary research into innovation and organization.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise and examine the processes through which abstract concepts, or abstractions, can be utilised in co-creating knowledge within “impact-focussed” organisational and business research, i.e. applied research that primarily seeks to promote change in practice rather than principally aiming to make theoretical contributions to academic debates. The paper uses the abstraction “hospitality” as an empirical example and discusses the techniques used to “operationalise” this concept, i.e. make it understandable for research participants enabling researchers to use it within data generation and the creation of practical insights in organisational enquiry.

The study employed two methods: first, participant-generated photos; and second, two interactive workshops with 38 practitioners where the abstract concept “hospitality” was used to generate practical organisational insights.

The paper distinguishes between four stages: the elaboration of abstraction, concretisation of abstraction, probing perspectives on abstraction and exploring experiences of abstraction. It is argued that utilising specific techniques within these four stages facilitates: recognisability: the extent to which organisational stakeholders understand the content and meanings of the abstraction; and relatability: the extent to which stakeholders appreciate how the abstract concepts are relevant to interpreting their own practices and experiences.

This is an exploratory study, used to develop and refine elicitation techniques, rather than to draw definitive conclusions about the applicability of specific abstract concepts. Nevertheless, reflecting on the processes and techniques used in the utilisation of abstractions here can help to operationalise them in future impact-focussed research.

The paper conceptualises the processes through which abstract concepts can be made apprehendable for non-specialist, non-academic practitioners. In doing so, it discusses how various elicitation techniques support the utilisation of abstractions in generating insights that can support the development of constructive, context-specific practices in organisations and businesses.

This paper aims to identify what motivates young people to play video games, and the extent to which video games are perceived as facilitating learning and information literacy.

The study adopted a qualitative approach, interviewing a convenience sample of 28 young people who enjoy playing video games. They were aged between 12 and 19, and all resident in Northern England. The interview transcripts were analysed thematically.

Entertainment and challenge were key reasons for playing video games. Of the respondents 89 per cent said they had learned something from gaming, including skills with real‐world application. Respondents used a variety of texts to solve gaming problems and to choose new games. Analysis of respondents' reported information behaviour showed that they were carrying out activities (e.g. searching, evaluating) that corresponded to models of information literacy, and these activities are mapped to the SCONUL Seven Pillars model. The interviewees showed determination in working out game problems and puzzles, rather than opting straight for an easy solution.

Librarians and other educators should design information literacy games, which challenge learners, using a problem‐solving approach. They also need to take account of learners' varying preferences for game genres.

There have been relatively few empirical studies into information literacy in videogaming (the focus is more usually on digital literacy, or literacy in reading and interpreting text). The paper identifies gamer preferences and behaviours that should influence design of information literacy games, and extend the information literacy model to include an attitudinal focus, fostering persistence and determination to solve information problems.

The paper aims to explore an affirmative, discursive perspective for its potential to expand the current understanding of processes of institutional transformation.

First the notion of institutional transformation is discussed and the “discursive model of institutionalization” as developed by Phillips et al. is described. Then the concept of “positive textual deviance” is introduced and defined. The discursive model is read to explore possibilities for institutional transformation through instances of positive textual deviance.

The insertion of the concept of positive textual deviance into the discursive model of institutionalization reveals openings for transformation which are captured in propositions that address the agency of texts and their authors in the creation of desired change.

The paper is unique in its synthesis of three distinct theoretical perspectives – institutional, discursive, and affirmative – in the definition and application of positive textual deviance. Its affirmative, constructionist stance goes beyond a critical deconstruction of taken for granted practice by proposing a hopeful, emancipatory approach that enables institutional actors to become agents of change.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings of an enquiry into the use and experience of information, in learning to become an ambulance officer. The paper aims to explore how the information environment is constituted for novice and experience practitioners. The paper also aims to consider what type of information is considered important by novice and experienced practitioners in learning about practice and profession.

The study is approached from an information literacy (IL) perspective, where IL is viewed as the catalyst for learning about work and professional practice. It draws on constructivist‐influenced grounded theory method to explore how an IL experience is constituted for the worker.

Three modalities of information which inform practice are described. IL is illustrated as more than just an experience with text or skills‐based literacy. It is viewed as socio‐cultural practice which is shaped by discourse.

The research was limited to an in‐depth exploration of one professional group in one geographic location.

The study highlights the value of an IL approach to understanding how information is experienced in a workplace context.

This paper reports original research of significance to information professionals and educators.

The purpose of this article is to explore the contribution that an information literacy approach to the empirical study of workplace learning can make to how people understand and conceptualise workplace learning.

Three cohorts of fire‐fighters working in two regional locations in NSW, Australia were interviewed using a semi‐structured interview approach. Constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed to work with the data; post‐structuralism.

Study findings indicate that an understanding of information literacy and information literacy practices contributes to workplace learning by highlighting the relationship between different modalities of information, and the relationship between workplace learning and professional identity. Information literacy is not solely confined to developing skills related to accessing information in textual or digital modalities, but requires access to social and physical sources of information.

The information literacy approach contributes to a developing understanding of the role of workplace learning by highlighting the process as a catalyst for learning. This process is underpinned by ways of knowing about the types of situated information sources that are valuable for learning about practice and profession.

This paper aims to develop understanding of how the pursuit of practice change in auditing, especially in relation to audit methodologies, is conveyed, presented, reflected in and enabled (or hindered) through discursive, textual constructions by audit firms.

The paper uses an extensive series of interviews with audit practitioners, educators and regulators and a textual study of the content, concordances and narratives contained in two key audit methodological texts published by KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms.

Major discursive shifts in audit methodologies are identified over the last decade, with the dominant audit discourse switching from one of “business value” to one of “audit quality”. Such shifts are analysed in terms of developments in the wider, organisational field and discursive (re)constructions of audit at the level of the audit firm.

The identified shifts in auditing discourse are important in a number of respects. They demonstrate the significance of discursive elements of audit practice, contradicting influential prior claims that methodological discussions and developments in audit over the last decade had focused consistently on notions of “audit quality”. Methodologically, they demonstrate the importance and opportunities for knowledge development available by combining institutional, field‐wide analysis with a detailed discursive study of individual interviews and texts.

To describe the various landscapes in which information literacy has been explored and to propose new ways of thinking about information literacy.

Draws on constructivist‐influenced grounded theory method employed during doctoral research into information literacy practices of firefighters.

Information‐literate people are more usefully described as being engaged, enabled, enriched and embodied. Information literacy is conceptualized through this research as a way of knowing. The revised and extended definition is a more appropriate one to underpin an emerging ontological perspective on information literacy and to foster an understanding of information literacy as a meta‐competency.

The research was limited to an in‐depth exploration of one professional group in one geographic location over 18 months.

The provision of a broader definition of the information literacy and the illustration of how information is perceived in a variety of concepts broadens librarians' and educators' understanding of information literacy. It offers librarians and educators a different way of thinking about information literacy.

This paper reports and expands upon original doctoral research of significance to information professionals and educators.