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This study presents evidence concerning the effects of affective and cognitive rhetoric on the underpricing of firms at the time of their initial public offering. It is suggested that firms that use less affective, and more cognitively oriented discourse in their IPO prospectus will experience better underpricing outcomes. We examine these assertions using a sample of young high-tech IPO firms where investors rely on prospectuses as accurate and informative firm communications. Results from a robust five-year time span observe initial support for the hypothesized effects. Moreover, the signaling of a higher degree of entrepreneurial orientation in the firm prospectus is found to worsen the negative effects of affective discourse

Studies show that discourses are important in legitimating emerging fields. However, we still lack understanding of how potential participants’ interpretations of discourses shape their involvement in emerging fields – particularly when the field’s definition is ambiguous. Drawing on an in-depth study of the emerging nanotechnology field we show that individuals’ affective responses to discourses play an important role in their decisions to participate. We find that discourse, expectations, affective responses, and participation in emerging fields are mutually constituted, and develop a model that shows these interconnections. Theoretically, our study expands understandings of discourse and field emergence by incorporating affect.

Since 2008, Greece has been spiralling down an economic and socio-political crisis. Over the past decade, it has endured massive riots, consecutive elections, a debilitating public debt, and endless rescue plans by the EU and other international bodies. The crisis sparked an intense interest in the Greek public discourse, which is often accused of being dominated by populist rhetoric. This interest appears to be accompanied predominantly by a certain leitmotif: instead of appreciating the assistance offered, the Greek people resent it and taking refuge in populist rhetoric, further undermining the country’s stability. This echoes the age-old argument that ‘the people are an irrational mob acting impulsively, a lamentable state that should be cured or disciplined.’ Could the shaming, the appeal to sober morality – branding all other discourses as populist and dangerous – be the fashionable response of a cosmopolitan elite, high-profile pundits and institutions to the problems of global capitalism? The debate raged in the public sphere and in the streets of Athens. On multiple occasions, the crisis was used as a trope in the European public sphere to justify socio-political changes, austerity measures and disciplinary actions. The emerging schema juxtaposed populist/anti-populist discourses, reducing discourses and identities to black and white. This chapter reads discursive constructions of the Greek crisis, by-stepping the populist/anti-populist divide. Using analysis based on affect theory and the philosophy of emotions, it investigates the various uses of resentment as part of affective engineering and as an instrument of collective identification, in an environment of multiple overlapping crises in Europe.

Purpose – To develop a broader understanding of sense-making as an embodied process of social construction.

Methodology/approach – Extended conversational interviews (Seidman, 1991) were undertaken with 35 prominent theatre professionals in Canada, Finland and the United Kingdom exploring the events and relationships that shaped their relationship with Shakespeare and his work. Inductive analysis was carried out inspired by a variety of theoretical lenses, including Dervin's Sense-Making and Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Findings – Participants’ sense-making was quintessentially social in that it was not only linked to their social connections and relationships with other members of the company but also a process of social construction drawing on a variety of disparate, and sometimes contradictory, established discourses. In contrast to prevailing approaches in information behaviour, the findings emphasise the importance of understanding sense-making in a more holistic way: as a process involving emotions as well as rationality, bodies as well as minds.

Research implications – Information researchers need to adopt a more holistic approach to understanding the relationship between people and information: to recognise that atomistic approaches focussing on the purposive information seeking of individuals reflect an implicit systems-centrism rather than people's lived experience.

Practical implications – Information researchers and practitioners need to consider the social affective and embodied nature of sense-making and consider, for example the ways in which online social networking sites build on centuries-old communal knowledge-sharing practices.

Originality/value of paper – The study extends our understanding of the importance of affect and embodiment for people's sense-making, while at the same time demonstrating that they, like language, are the products of social construction, both the object and generator of discourse.

This study aims to investigate how, through text-based classroom talk, youth collaboratively draw on and remix discourses and practices from multiple socially indexed traditions.

Drawing on data from a year-long social design experiment, this study uses qualitative coding and traces discoursal markers of indexicality.

The youth sustained, remixed and evaluated interpretive communities in their navigation across disciplinary and fandom discourses to construct a hybrid classroom interpretive community.

This research contributes to scholarship that supports using popular texts in classrooms as the focus of a scholarly inquiry by demonstrating how youth in one high school English classroom discursively index interpretive communities aligned with popular fandoms and literary scholarship. This study adds to understandings about the social nature of literary reading, interpretive whole-class text-based talk and literary literacies with multimodal texts in diverse, high school classrooms.

The purpose of this paper is to sketch out what one can see as the emerging “therapeutic turn” in a wide range of areas of contemporary social life including education, especially in relation to understandings of vulnerability and social justice, and then poses the question of what emotional regime has accompanied the emergence of this “therapization” movement, making emotional life in schools the “object-target” for specific technologies of power.

The psychologization of social problems has been very much in evidence in the development of educational policies and practices – an approach which not only pathologizes social problems as individual psychological deficiencies or traits, but also obscures the recognition of serious structural inequalities and ideological commitments that perpetuate social injustices through educational policy and practice. In the present paper, the author adopts a different perspective, that of the history, sociology and politics of emotions and affects to show how and why the therapization of social justice is part of the conditions for the birth of particular forms of biopower in schools.

There is an urgent need to expose how psychologized approaches that present social justice as an individualizing responsibility are essentially depoliticizing vulnerability by silencing the shared complicities. It is argued, then, that it is crucial to pay attention to the political and structural dimensions of vulnerability.

Attending to the emotional regime of therapization of social justice has important implications to counter forms of biopower that work through processes of normalization.

This paper examines the social and ideological significance of selfies as a manifestation of networked culture and individualism. The aim is to illustrate the meaning and affordances of selfies by investigating their potential for (post)feminist empowerment.

The analysis entails an exploration of the form, content, and context of (post)feminist selfies. This includes a review of popular expressions of selfie-empowerment as well as an in-depth ideological analysis of several revealing case studies.

As a result, this paper identifies a (dis)empowerment paradox marked by a divide between material and affective conceptions of empowerment. According to this paradox, self(ie)-expressions may feel empowering to the individual(s) controlling the camera while concurrently conforming to hegemonic norms – a trend which is particularly pertinent to many networked selfies shared via social media. Accordingly, the paper concludes by critiquing the discourse of selfie-empowerment and considering the significance of cultural context in shaping meaning and ideology.

By addressing these implications in light of broader shifts toward networked individualism and post-feminism, this paper critically examines the ideological significance of selfies and demonstrates a need to reconsider what sociological perspectives can contribute to the study of selfies within the context of networked cultures.

The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship.

A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities.

Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty.

An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving.

This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA.

Populism is one of the main symptoms of the contemporary crisis in Europe. How can the rise of populism best be understood? Whereas existing analyses predominantly utilise rationalist and behaviouralist approaches and focus on political, economic and cultural interests, this contribution proposes a different approach. The author focusses on affects and emotions. The author shows that where other parties or political movements opt for rational and dispassionate debates on merits of political programmes, populists instead offer, invoke and respond to strong emotions across multiple political settings. Emotions feed and propel populism in its bid for power by forming collective identities through the clustering of love for ‘us’ and hate for the ‘other’.

Ontological Security Theory (OST) is used here as a framework for understanding populist behaviour in the sphere of security perception, identification and community-building. In recent debates, OST has been used because it allows the motives for certain behaviours to be located in the need to maintain or recreate positive identity constructed via biographical narratives. OST suggests that any lack of narrative continuity regarding the shape of the self-images for both individual and collective identities will therefore constitute a source of ontological threat; the lack of a sense of security. In this contribution, the author uses the examples of populist policies and discourses in Hungary and Poland that illustrate this dynamic to analyse the past- and future-oriented collective identifications underpinning the recent rise of populism in Europe.