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Disasters bring about communities of focussed discourse. We show how a segment of one such community controlled the early stages of discourse during a financial crisis as a variety of professionals (bankers, analysts, editorial writers and academics) made multiple types of arguments (emotional and technical) to allay citizens’ concerns about an impending banking collapse. We examine the rapid rise of this segment by mapping and analysing the responses printed in Icelandic newspapers to a Danish bank’s warning of Icelandic banking instability. Using social network analysis, we illustrate the networks of public actors and their immediate public responses, showing how close-knit both networks became after just one week of commentary in the Icelandic press. We demonstrate the power that professionals of various kinds have over an uninformed citizenry through their rapid responses and closely connected networks and underscore the obstacles awaiting those who want to alter discourse during crisis.

The current study investigates perceptions of street harassment from a linguistic perspective. With regard to the theory of speech acts, some may deem street remarks as compliments instead of catcalls. There is a lack of linguistic research regarding the issue conducted with a Bruneian demographic. This study recognises the difference in the use of language by men and women and aims to find whether there is a difference in their perceptions of street remarks.

A method of triangulation between questionnaire surveys and focus group interviews was carried out to actualise these aims. Thirty-two female and thirty-two male respondents from the survey were used to conclude quantitative findings, whereas three male and three female participants were recruited for the focus group interview. Data were analysed through a t-test and discourse analysis consecutively.

Quantitative data (p = 0.398) reveal that both men and women perceive street remarks almost equally as a form of street harassment. However, qualitative data reveal that male language and behaviour portray a more positive and tolerant attitude.

This study provides evidence of the difference in perceptions between men and women towards street harassment.

This study explores a relatively unexplored area, that is investigating street remarks in a non-Western context, where the demographic could have different perceptions towards street remarks.

The dialogic nature of new organization development practices brought a dramatic shift in relation to the way OD has had been practiced in the past. However, contemporary literature indicates that OD still has to go a long way if it has to play a central role. The purpose of this paper is to speculate for the concerns being raised about OD practices and propose an interpretive approach to fill in the gaps.

This paper traces OD’s glorious journey, which began with egalitarian values. This section builds on the dynamics of power and politics which was integral to the OD movement and further reviews and critiques the contributions of new OD approaches that has its foundations in postmodernism and social constructionism. In the second part, the paper discusses the critical perspective and introduces the concept of subaltern to fill in the gaps in new OD approaches. Further, the paper finds a ground to integrate and redefine the boundaries of critical and subaltern studies.

The paper proposes an interpretive approach for designing and carrying out OD interventions and introduces the concept of critical-subaltern OD. This approach recognizes the importance to engage with the dialectics or contradictions present between (and within) OD interventions. Through this interpretive approach, the author positions critical-subaltern voices as an integral part of OD interventions and change management.

The interpretive approach gives an insight into the unacknowledged and unheard socially constructed realities of change and OD practices for sensemaking. The approach would also be instrumental in enhancing the levels of engagement and productivity in unacknowledged and non-dominant employees.

This paper is a departure from the modern literature of critical management studies and builds on the critical theory on OD. The paper proposes by roping in the benefits of subaltern studies into OD practices. The paper builds ways to include voices of those, who never gain a voice. In brief, toward the end of the paper, the author proposes an interpretive approach and moves toward critical-subaltern OD. Through this interpretive approach, the author positions critical-subaltern voices as an integral part of OD interventions and change management.

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well‐defined discourse‐level structure, which is revealed by lexical clues. Two methods of detecting the structure automatically are presented: (i) a Bayesian probabilistic analysis; and (ii) a neural network model. Both methods show promise in preliminary implementations. A study of users' oral problem statements indicates that they are not amenable to the same kind of processing. However, from in‐depth interviews with users and search intermediaries, the following conclusions are drawn: (i) the notion of a generic research script is meaningful to both users and intermediaries as a high‐level description of situation; (ii) a researcher's position in the script is a predictor of the relevance of documents; and (iii) currently, intermediaries can make very little use of situational information. The implications of these findings for system design are discussed, and a system structure presented to serve as a framework for future experimental work on the factors identified in this paper. The design calls for a dialogue with the user on his or her position in a research script and incorporates features permitting discourse‐level components of abstracts to be specified in search strategies.

Metadiscourse is an important dialogue technique used in productive knowledge building to help a group evaluate and advance their knowledge progress. Previous studies have identified and defined various types of metadiscourse. However, there is scant knowledge about how different metadiscourse types emerge among different groups or what implicit correlations lie between progressive discourse and metadiscourse. Moreover, research on how different types of metadiscourse influence groups' knowledge advancement and artifacts is still inadequate. Therefore, this study aims to further examine the roles that different types of metadiscourse play in the collaborative knowledge building community on both a fine-grained (i.e. progressive discourse) and coarse-grained (i.e. group knowledge advancement and group artifacts) level.

Data for this study are drawn from the behaviour of undergraduate students participating in a 12-week course at a key university in China. On the fine-grained level, epistemic network analysis (ENA) is applied to illustrate how metadiscourse promotes the development of progressive discourse. On the coarse-grained level, two different chi-square tests are conducted to examine the roles of different types of metadiscourse in groups' knowledge advancement and artifacts.

The analysis allowed several conclusions to be drawn. First, the types of metadiscourse that students most often adopted were reflecting on ideas development (RD) and commenting on ideas (CI); they less frequently adopted setting group goals (SG) and making group plans (MP). Second, most types of metadiscourse correlated with developments in progressive discourse, particularly RD and CI. Third, the metadiscourse types RD, CI and coordinating group efforts (CE) played essential roles in knowledge advancement. Fourth, higher-quality artifacts could be created by using the metadiscourse type reviewing the state of knowledge building progress (RP).

A more profound comprehension of the role that metadiscourse plays in the collaborative knowledge building community not only contributes to the literature in the knowledge building field but also carries a significant meaning in regulating community, promoting learner agency and sustained knowledge, and consequently improving collaborative learning performance.

The growth of online social network sites and their conceptualization as affinity spaces makes them well suited for exploring how individuals share knowledge and practices around specific interests or affinities. The purpose of this study is to extend what is known about highly active/key actors in online affinity spaces, especially the ways in which they sustain and contribute to knowledge sharing.

This study analyzed 514 discussion posts gathered from an online affinity space on disease management. This study used a variety of methods to answer the research questions: the authors used discourse analyses to examine the conversations in the online affinity space, social network analyses to identify the structure of participation in the space and association rule mining and sentiment analysis to identify co-occurrence of discourse codes and sentiment of the discussions.

The results indicate that the quality and type of discourse varies considerably between key and other actors. Key actors’ discourse in the network serves to elaborate on and explain ideas and concepts, whereas other actors provide a more supportive role and engage primarily in storytelling.

This work extends what is known about informal mentoring and the role of key actors within affinity spaces by identifying specific discourse types and types of knowledge sharing that are characteristic of key actors. Also, this study provides an example of the use of a combination of rule mining association and sentiment analysis to characterize the nature of the affinity space.

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices.

This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n = 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics.

The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, or verbs; and expression of certainty and obligation. The documents have a sociolinguistic and social semiotic component. In using a faculty genre, librarians assert solidarity with other faculty, while the prominent discourse of librarians as practitioners detracts from faculty solidarity.

This research is limited to librarians at US land grant institutions. It has implications for other research institutions and other models of librarian status.

This research can help academic librarians fulfill their obligations by understanding how values encoded in these documents reflect positive and negative approaches.

Higher education and academic librarianship are in a state of flux. Understanding the discourse of these documents can help librarians encode appropriate goals and values. Little has been written on the discourse of librarianship. This is a contribution to the understanding of librarians as a discourse community and of significant communicative events.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.