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The purpose of this paper is to enhance the knowledge of how leadership concepts are embraced by leadership actors and perceived to influence relationships between leaders and co-workers. Specifically, the authors aim to investigate how leaders and co-workers discursively construct the concept of “communicative leadership” and its practices and perceive that communicative leadership influences relationships, work processes, and agency.

The authors analyzed interviews with leaders and co-workers in two Swedish business organizations about their understandings and experiences of leadership.

Communicative processes that enhance co-worker agency, defined as a capacity to act; include: facilitating autonomy, sharing responsibility, and mutual participation. Relational and discursive leadership processes such as responsiveness and dialogue were seen to enhance mutual participation in both organizations. Broader Swedish cultural macro discourses shaped the leader/co-worker relationship, making agency a relational accomplishment rather than an individual phenomenon.

This study relies on data from individual and focus group interviews, rather than direct observation of leadership processes.

Findings suggest that organizations would benefit from making explicit their goals and expectations for communicative leadership in their respective social and cultural contexts.

The authors provide new theoretical and empirical knowledge of leaders’ and co-workers’ discursive construction of a leadership concept; leadership communication research in the Swedish context; empirical research on communicative leadership as an empowering form of leadership communication; and how leadership communication discourse on a micro level is connected to organizational and macro-social cultural levels.

The debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as shared value creation is trapped between management scholars and business ethics scholars, focusing merely on the distribution of values from an outcome-oriented perspective. The result is a juxtaposition of shared value from either a corporate or a societal perspective, providing only little attention to the actual communication processes supporting the creation of shared value. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize shared value creation from a communicative approach as an alternative to the current situation caught between the management and societal perspectives.

Building upon recent constitutive models of CSR communication, this conceptual paper explores the potentials and implications of re-conceptualizing shared value creation as an alternative approach that recognizes the tensional interaction processes related to shared value creation.

The paper suggests a new conceptualization of shared value creation, which is sensitive to and able to advance the understanding of the tensional and conflictual interaction processes in which the continuous negotiation of corporate and stakeholder interests, values and agendas may facilitate a new understanding of shared value creation.

In order to succeed with the shared purpose of creating shared value (CSV), the company and the multiple stakeholders should neither disregard nor idealize the interaction processes related to shared value creation; rather, they should acknowledge that processes filled with tensions and conflicts are prerequisites for CSV.

A re-conceptualization of shared value creation that provides an alternative approach that is sensitive toward the tensions and conflicts occurring between corporate voice and multiple stakeholder voices.

Complex decision-making is often supported not by single messages but by multichannel communication packages that need to be evaluated in their own right. The purpose of this paper is to present a new analytic approach to this package evaluation task combining textual analysis, functional analysis (FA) and media synchronicity theory.

The authors combine textual analysis, FA and media synchronicity and demonstrate this in a single case analysis of a multichannel communication package offering mortgage information.

When applied to a mortgage communication package for consumers, the evaluation reveals significant problems concerning the contents and timing of mortgage information and the channels chosen to convey it.

This paper outlines a new direction for evaluating multichannel consumer information, in that it does not focus on user channel preferences but on channel requirements stemming from the communicative task to be performed.

This paper enables designers to optimize the design of multichannel communication packages and its individual components to support customer’s decision-making processes with regards to complex products.

Improving information to guide complex decision-making processes leads to better informed consumers.

Research into effective multichannel communication within marketing is in its infancy. This paper offers a new perspective by focusing on channel requirements stemming from the communicative task rather than consumers’ channel preferences.

Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality, in which reason is construed in terms of the noncoercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition, provides a valid foundation on which the theory and practice of selves‐directed learning can be developed. In an increasingly individualized world a focus on learning networks allows a perspective transformation from the purely individualistic instrumental rationality of self‐directed‐learning towards communicative interaction via learning encounters and the possibility of satisfying the emancipatory conditions of communicative rationality within communities of selves‐directed‐learners in life and work. The orientation of communicative action to criticizable validity claims which are open to empirical investigation is the central core that makes this learning process both theoretically and practically possible.

This paper analyses what is seen as a crisis of authority in financial reporting. It considers the view that an element of authority may be restored to accounting through communicative reason. The paper argues that the justice‐oriented rationality of traditional, Habermasian, communicative ethics is incapable of providing a solid foundation for the re‐authorisation of financial reporting. The paper argues that a more adequate foundation might be found in an enlarged communicative ethics that allows space to the other of justice‐oriented reason. The inspiration for the enlargement is found in Ricoeur's analysis of narrative, his exploration of its role in the figuration of identity, and in his biblical hermeneutics which reveals the necessity of an active dialectic of love and justice.

Intellectual capital creation is theorised in this conceptual paper as a dynamic process of collective knowing that is capable of being leveraged into market value. The tacit, intangible and socially unconscious nature of substantive parts of this dynamic process presents some daunting theoretical challenges. Adopting a broadly social constructionist epistemology and a pluralist ontology, the point of departure introduced here is the set of symmetric and reciprocal relations presupposed in Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action. In this worldview, interaction, as distinct from individual action, becomes the germ‐cell or basic unit of theoretical analysis. The relations and validity claims built into the medium of communicative action, viewed here as the nexus of intellectual capital creation, are substantive and real phenomena; they are thus open to empirical investigation.

The aim of this paper is to systemize and improve the scientific status of studies on document abstracting. This is a diachronic, systematic study of document abstracting studies carried out from different perspectives and models (textual, psycholinguistic, social and communicative).

A review of the perspectives and analysis proposals which are of interest to the various theoreticians of abstracting is carried out using a variety of techniques and approaches (cognitive, linguistic, communicative‐social, didactic, etc.), each with different levels of theoretical and methodological abstraction and degrees of application. The most significant contributions of each are reviewed and highlighted, along with their limitations.

It is found that the great challenge in abstracting is the systemization of models and conceptual apparatus, which open up this type of research to semiotic and socio‐interactional perspectives. It is necessary to carry out suitable empirical research with operative designs and ad hoc measuring instruments which can measure the efficiency of the abstracting and the efficiency of a good abstract, while at the same time feeding back into the theoretical baggage of this type of study. Such research will have to explain and provide answers to all the elements and variables, which affect the realization and the reception of a quality abstract.

The paper provides a small map of the studies on document abstracting. This shows how the conceptual and methodological framework has extended at the same time as the Science of Documentation has been evolving. All the models analysed – the communicative and interactional approach – are integrated in a new systematic framework.

In the aftermath of the Eastern Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Sendai Framework for Action introduced a new task called ‘Build Back Better (B3)’. This study discusses this new task and proposes an extended framework which strategically includes a pre-disaster period. This extended framework is named ‘Build Back Better, even Before Disaster (B⁴)’. The following points are observed:

SMART Governance under Persistent Disruptive Stressors (PDS) proposed by Okada offers an effective new methodology for systematically studying B⁴ problems.

For the purpose of actual practice and social implementation, we need to set up, then foster and repeatedly activate a communicative place, where participants meet openly, plan and act together step by step.

The place can be very small in size, particularly at the start but needs to be adaptively designed and recreated though a communicative process.

Yonmenkaigi System Method (YSM) serves as a useful media and tool for place-making and process design for involving stakeholders in making collaborative action development towards win–win solutions.

Finally, we consider the Case of the Merapi Volcano region in Indonesia to establish the above points.

The chapter deals with a service-learning course based in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa. It provides a backdrop for the case study, describing the context in which the course is based and kind of intervention that it aims to make into this context. It then maps out the theoretical framework that informs the course, explaining how this is informed by the available spectrum of approaches to service-learning. It demonstrates how the course draws on the concept of a ‘communicative ecology’, to provide itself with a language in which to reflect on the social significance of communication. The chapter then reviews the first cycle of the course which took place in 2019, drawing on insights from participants (teachers, students and community partners). It deals, firstly, with the participants’ engagement with the concept of service-learning. Secondly, it describes their experience of service-learning as a communicative process. Finally, it describes their evaluation of this process as an intervention into the local communicative ecology. It is demonstrated that service-learning enables the school to respond strategically to the need for innovative communicative practices both in their immediate environment and within the broader South African context.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.