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The reliance on teams in today’s work environment underscores the importance of understanding how teams function. To better understand teams, one must be able to measure team dynamics or interaction. The purpose of this chapter is to outline an unobtrusive approach to measuring team dynamics from verbal communications.

The basic premise of this approach is that the words we use provide insight into how we feel and think at any given time. The methodology described in this chapter employs a lexical analytic approach to examining team dynamics. To best accomplish this, we first identify the principal features or dimensions of teamwork and then we propose lexical measures that may map to these processes.

This approach can be employed to track team functioning over time “at a distance” without interrupting task performance.

This chapter describes an approach to measuring relevant teamwork dimensions through verbal content. This approach has the potential to give us direct, unobtrusive insight into the emotional and cognitive states of teams. It is original in its examination of how team dynamics can be indexed in speech.

This chapter discusses the use of qualitative content analysis in the field of hospitality and tourism. The primary objective of this chapter is to draw attention to the use of a content analysis approach for the treatment of data. As a further objective, the chapter contributes to current knowledge by underscoring a qualitative content analysis approach that would be of benefit to hospitality and tourism scholars. Overall, the chapter serves to inform hospitality and tourism scholars of how to increase the trustworthiness of qualitative content analysis approaches, which is seen as one of the most crucial impediments to its use.

Considering the significant increase of studies in the hospitality and tourism field that use content analysis as a research method, this chapter aims to describe the research process when the methodology of qualitative content analysis is utilized. Particular attention is placed on the operational procedures of this method—from the initial planning and preparation to presentation of findings and evaluation of the process, as this is often omitted by hospitality and tourism researchers. Four distinct stages are described in this chapter: preparation, data collection and analysis, reporting findings, and evaluation of the process. The discussion in this chapter helps to clarify how qualitative content analysis should be undertaken in a systematic manner, which would be of particular benefit to hospitality and tourism researchers. Advantages and disadvantages of the qualitative content analysis and its contribution to hospitality and tourism studies are also discussed.

Purpose – The paper presents a content analysis of the 2009 Exposure Draft of Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants in China. It aims to investigate how equivalently the Chinese Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CICPA) adopts the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) Code with certain adjustments due to specific national circumstances. The investigation is intended to highlight the principles-based conceptual framework approach to settlement of ethical standards and regulation for professional conduct.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Regarding the codes of ethics for professional accountants as a genre of discourse text, this paper applies a content analysis method to the investigation of how the newly revised Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants in China adopts the IFAC Code of the same type. Both semantic content and presentation format are considered in the content analysis.

Findings – This study puts forward the argument that even though CICPA claims to have equivalently adopted the principles-based conceptual framework of the IFAC ethical codification, the rigid legalistic presentation format might, however, deviate from the newly revised codification of CICPA from ethical principles to regulatory rules. Our findings prove a practical and nation-specific form of combining direct import and legal enhancement at a time when the Chinese accounting profession is on its way to converging with the IFAC Code of Ethics.

Research limitations/Implications – One limitation of the current study is the lack of information about the motivation of CICPA in adopting the principles-based conceptual framework approach to ethical codification, besides the pragmatic needs of global economic and business environments. Also, the current study focuses its comparison on IFAC and CICPA, without limited consideration of differences in cultural traits.

Practical implications – Content analysis results and conclusions of the study might render pragmatic the implications for future adoptions of the IFAC Code by various national or regional professional bodies.

Originality/Value – This paper proposes a content analysis, in terms of semantic units and legislative formats in ethical codification documents, to identify the principles-based conceptual framework approach in the IFAC and CICPA codes of ethics.

In small group settings, is it the position in social networks or the content of communication that constitutes a leader? Studies focussing on the content suggest that leadership consists in creating and promoting meanings, whereas studies focussing on the connections stress that it is the network position that ‘makes a leader’. These two dimensions of leadership communication style have not been compared yet. To fill this gap, this chapter applies an emerging approach – socio-semantic network analysis – to jointly consider the content of, and the connections, in leaders' communication. Using a multisource dataset, we empirically study the social network positions (social network analysis) and the content of communication (semantic network analysis) of three leaders in a creative collective. Our findings reveal that different styles of leadership make diverse use of the content and the connections in a small group. The academic and practical implications are outlined.

Content analysis is a family of systematic, rule-guided techniques used to analyze the informational contents of textual data (Mayring, 2000). It is used frequently in nursing research, and is rapidly becoming more prominent in the medical and bioethics literature. There are several types of content analysis including quantitative and qualitative methods all sharing the central feature of systematically categorizing textual data in order to make sense of it (Miles & Huberman, 1994). They differ, however, in the ways they generate categories and apply them to the data, and how they analyze the resulting data. In this chapter, we describe a type of qualitative content analysis in which categories are largely derived from the data, applied to the data through close reading, and analyzed solely qualitatively. The generation and application of categories that we describe can also be used in studies that include quantitative analysis.

Purpose – This chapter examines how sentiment analysis and web-crawling technology can be used to conduct large-scale data analyses of extremist content online.

Methods/approach – The authors describe a customized web-crawler that was developed for the purpose of collecting, classifying, and interpreting extremist content online and on a large scale, followed by an overview of a relatively novel machine learning tool, sentiment analysis, which has sparked the interest of some researchers in the field of terrorism and extremism studies. The authors conclude with a discussion of what they believe is the future applicability of sentiment analysis within the online political violence research domain.

Findings – In order to gain a broader understanding of online extremism, or to improve the means by which researchers and practitioners “search for a needle in a haystack,” the authors recommend that social scientists continue to collaborate with computer scientists, combining sentiment analysis software with other classification tools and research methods, as well as validate sentiment analysis programs and adapt sentiment analysis software to new and evolving radical online spaces.

Originality/value – This chapter provides researchers and practitioners who are faced with new challenges in detecting extremist content online with insights regarding the applicability of a specific set of machine learning techniques and research methods to conduct large-scale data analyses in the field of terrorism and extremism studies.

This chapter aims to understand the communication practices of CSR in technological environments, specifically corporate websites. It is important to know what are the dimensions of CSR most valued in online communication, what content is more widespread, and if there is dialogic communication between organizations and different stakeholders. It was used a quantitative method of analysis, using the expanded web content analysis. It was based on the study results of the 1,000 largest Portuguese companies published by the Economic Journal in 2014. The chapter includes the analysis of the best companies from 24 sectors of activity of Portugal. Portuguese organizations use their websites to communicate about CSR practices. A large majority of companies dedicate to these subjects a higher number of pages. The findings indicate that the issues disseminated are various, but the predominance content is related to environmental dimension. Results suggest a low level of dialogic dimension adoption. It is proposed a theoretical framework of online communication of CSR that integrates a set of indicators from three interlinked dimensions: the technical dimension, the informational dimension and dialogical dimension, considering the different kind of publics and the different practice areas inherent to CSR. This framework is a contribution to the deepening of knowledge and understanding of online communication of CSR practices, on the perspective of public relations theory. It has practical implications to communication, because it proposes guidelines that should be considered in an effective online communication of CSR in organizations of various sectors of activity in Portugal. It is proposed a theoretical framework of an effective online communication of CSR that integrates a set of indicators from three interlinked dimensions that are part of the dialogical capacity of organizations.