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Previous studies show that the implementation of gender equality encounters resistance in military organizations, but it is often invisible or seen as confined to anonymous structures or troubled individuals. This paper aims to show how the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) use organizational principles to resist implementing gender equality measures.

The study is a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies in the SAF’s 2013–2018 annual reports to government.

The organizing principles of instrumentality and distance, while existing in parallel with gender equality efforts, actually pursue logics that prevents the SAF from implementing gender equality. The principle of instrumentality in this context means that gender equality in the SAF is of secondary interest to organizational members. The principle of distancing from the problem includes strategies that alienate female from male officers.

The contribution of this paper is the finding that the use of organizing principles represents conscious organizational resistance to gender equality efforts. This kind of use needs to be revealed and criticized to change military organizations.

The study aims to explain the communicative basis of conflicts in which actors stand in opposition in defining a negotiated situation and to deepen knowledge of environmental conflict development, in particular on how frames are (re)shaped through discursive choices in interaction.

This study adopts an interactional approach to framing and 1) identifies the frames shaped and reshaped in four environmental debates and 2) analyzes how framing activities affect the course of the debates.

This study contributes to understanding 1) the interactive nature of conflicts; 2) how the reception and interpretation of issue framing depends on the surrounding identity and characterization framing and 3) how framing activities, like identity work, emotional alignment and reframing, can affect the course of environmental debates toward polarizing or bridging.

On a methodological level, this study contributes to communication research by applying methodologies for investigating framing processes on a micro-level. This study investigates interactional framing, considering the perspectives of frame strategists engaging in issue arenas. The study provides an in-depth discourse analysis of the debates but lacks an overview on the entire issue arena regarding this conflict.

Skilled actors span boundaries by articulating issue frames that accommodate opponents' concerns and values while demonstrating the added value of the new frame, adjusting identity work in favor of relations with opponents. Furthermore, calibrating emotional intensity offers opportunities to mobilize support.

This research investigates which communicative competences are essential to act adequately in environmental conflicts, given their intractable nature, and suggests opportunities for cocreation by making discursive choices. This approach helps to uncover the micro-processes that escalate and de-escalate a conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate inhabitants of Finland and their continuing efforts to narrate a national identity within the constraints imposed by discursive meanings of Finnish culture through the experience of sauna.

Data collection comprised semi-structured interviews with Finnish local residents and entrepreneurs; these were supplemented with secondary data including books, articles, advertisements and documents referencing sauna in the context of Finland.

The analysis and interpretation by the authors show that the symbolic resource of sauna constitutes the legitimation of Finnish nation branding discourses at three levels: regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive; we label these sauna governance, communal identity creation and mythmaking, respectively.

The research contribution reveals that nation branding discourses are also forms of legitimation work. Finnish nation branding discourses are interwoven with sauna as the symbolic resource of “Finnishness” and become conduits for the expression of discursive meanings. This demonstrates that institutional legitimacy is an intrinsic aspect of the ways place branding discourses can be used as a mode of governance (i.e. a policy instrument).

This paper examines the contested value of healthy life and wellbeing in a context of severe austerity, exploring how the value of “Public Health” is constructed through and with material-discursive practices and accounting representations. It seeks to explore the political and ethical implications of constructing the valuable through a shared consensus over the “facts” when addressing complex, multi-agency problems with long time horizons and outcomes that are not always easily quantifiable.

The theorisation, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) scholars and Karen Barad's (2007) agential realism, opens up the analysis to the performativity of both material and discursive practices in the period following a major re-organisation of activity. The study investigates two case authorities in England and the national regulator through interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

The paper demonstrates the deeply ethical and political entanglements of accounting representations as objectivity, consensus and collective action are constructed and resisted in practice. It goes on to demonstrate the practical challenges of constructing “alternative accounts” and “intelligent accountabilities” through times of austerity towards a shared sense of public value and suggests austerity measures make such aims both more challenging and all the more essential.

Few studies in the accounting literature have explored the full complexity of valuation practices in non-market settings, particularly in a public sector context; this paper, therefore, extends familiar conceptual vocabulary of STS inspired research to further explore how value(s), ethics and identity all play a crucial role in making things valuable.

This study aims to analyze the use of discourse to solve issues related to coordination between advocacy coalitions in processes of gradual and transformative institutional change related to public policies.

Theoretical background is based on the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), new discursive institutionalism and critical discourse analysis theories. The research examines shorthand notes of public hearings held in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate between 1999 and 2012, carrying out a case study on Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant. The speech extracts were categorized according to the modes of operation of ideology and typical strategies of symbolic construction proposed by Thompson (1995).

The results suggest that the discourse can be an instrument of internal coordination and between coalitions that share beliefs about a policy, as in the case of Belo Monte. Potentially existing coalitions define their identities and set positions on controversial issues, aligning interests and expectations. In the case studied, the modes of operation of ideology verified as instruments of the coalitions were dissimulation, reification, fragmentation, unification and legitimation.

The paper represents a unique analysis of the modes of operation of ideology (Thompson, 1999) in the case of Belo Monte. In addition, the paper aims to contribute to the New Discursive Institutionalism and to the ACF when it uses the critical discourse analysis to articulate a method to analyze the use of the Discourse by the coalitions. In fact, such an approach integrating the ACF, the New Discursive Institutionalism and the critical discourse analysis is something original. Finally, it also addresses a gap in ACF: issues related to advocacy coalition coordination.

Attentive readers linked to organizations working on infrastructure and environmental policies can benefit from the results by envisaging the deliberate manipulation of typical symbolic construction strategies and general modes of operation of ideology.

The study sheds light on the daily and behind-the-scenes disputes among stakeholders who are interested in a certain public policy. It may draw attention to the access and professional use of the shorthand notes of the hearings held at the National Congress.

This paper aims to fill a gap pointed out by Jenkins-Smith et al. (2014) regarding problems of coordination of advocacy coalitions. In addition, it innovates by using critical discourse analysis as a methodological reference in ACF empirical studies. In addition, this work continues a trajectory of two other previously published studies dealing with the same phenomenon: a theoretical essay and a case study.

This study aims to investigate how highly ranked business schools portray ideal students in terms of their attributes and their agency. Understanding how these higher education institutions (HEIs) discursively construct their present and prospective students also shed light on the institutions’ self-representation, the portrayal of the student–institution relationship and eventually the discursive construction of higher education’s (HE) role.

To understand this dynamic interrelationship, this study uses mixed methodological textual analysis first quantitatively identifying different modes of language use and then qualitatively analysing them.

With this approach, this study identified six language use groups. While the portrayal of the business schools and that of the students are always co-constructed, these groups differ in the extent of student and organisational agency displayed as well as the role and purpose of the institution. Business schools are always active agents in these discourses, but their roles and the students’ agency vary greatly across these six groups.

These findings can help practitioners determine how students are currently portrayed in their organisational texts, how their peers and competitors talk and where they want to position themselves in relation to them.

Previous studies discussed the ideal HE students from the perspective of the students or their educators. Other analyses on HE discourse focused on HEIs’ discursive construction and social role This study, however, unveils how the highly ranked business schools in their external organisational communication discursively construct their ideals and expectations for both their students and the general public.

The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between organizational performance and the pattern of strategic decisions formalized in the planning of a Brazilian heavy construction company between 2006 and 2014. In this period, the company experienced a recurrent pattern of maintaining strategic decisions, despite the systematic decrease in performance and investments in the formal strategic planning (SP) and monitoring of results. The research focus is on strategic inertia and the influence of social determinants on the relationship between performance and the strategic actions negotiated in formal planning.

This is a single-case study. The exploratory-descriptive research comprises data collection on performance and strategic decisions from the period between 2006 and 2014. The analysis was guided through documentary material and data collected from 16 interviews conducted with members of the middle to top management concerning performance, goals, and strategic initiatives. The interviewees’ statements were used to apprehend the interpreted dimension of SP expressed in the meanings attributed to this process. The analysis adopts a sociological base, and strategic inertia is the underlying phenomenon that guides this analysis.

The results show the interactive effect caused by political, cognitive, discursive, and ceremonial mechanisms obstruct the company’s strategic decisions. This case study illustrates that the conditions for the phenomenon of path dependence were created, reinforcing the strategic inertia observed in the maintenance of a reproduced pattern of strategic initiatives and goals, even though the performance was recurrently unsatisfactory. In this case, strategic inertia showed a complex relationship between the interpreted performance and strategic actions negotiated in formal planning, conditioned by mechanisms of trajectory reinforcement that interfered with the conditions for strategic change.

Strategic inertia demonstrates a complex relationship between the interpreted performance and strategic actions negotiated in formal planning, conditioned by mechanisms of trajectory reinforcement that interfere with the conditions for strategic change. Future research on social mechanisms from the perspective of strategy-as-practice could be developed to capture the tacit components, language, power games, and other relevant categories in the social interaction of strategy development at the organizational level. In addition, future research could focus on investigating the extent to which path dependence is contingent, assuming that it is a temporary and, therefore, reversible process.

This work contributes to the view of SP from the social perspective and shows that the relationship between performance and strategy has biases that can compromise performance. The work highlights implications for maintaining strategic initiative patterns, which shape a path whose function is less associated with its effects on performance and more associated with the commitment to instrumental results, due to the social nature of organizations.

This work deals with social mechanisms that influence strategic decisions. Since organizational performance depends on strategic decisions, the social nature of strategic inertia has causal implications to economic and social impact of organizations.

This work argues in favor of the influence of self-reinforcing mechanisms of path dependence in the relationship between performance and strategic decisions. The results extended the predominantly structural approach of path dependence by considering interpretive aspects related to the political, discursive, cognitive, and ceremonial dimensions of strategic inertia.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

The paper traces different foundational conceptions of performativity and then articulates and substantiates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. It advances one of these conceptions by producing a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.

Seven conceptions of performative accountings are articulated: accounting as a (counter)performative illocution; accounting as a performative perlocution; accounting as a self-fulfilling prophecy; accounting as an overflowing frame; accounting as a controlled relational agency; accounting as a mediator; and accounting as an exclusionary practice. It is argued how a posthumanist understanding of accounting as an exclusionary practice turns accounting from a world-knowing practice into a world-making practice. As such, it should be called to account.

Posthumanist qualitative accounting research that conceives of accounting as an exclusionary practice focuses on how accounting is a material-discursive practice that intra-acts with other practices, and on how there is a power-performativity in the intra-actions that locally and temporarily (re)produces meaningful positions for subjects and objects and the boundaries between them.

A posthumanist understanding teaches practitioners to be attentive to and accountable for the exclusions that come with accounting or, more generally, with measurement. Accounting raises ethical concerns.

This paper articulates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity and makes the case for empirical non-anthropocentric examinations of accounting as an exclusionary practice.

The purpose of this paper is to formulate an analytical framework for the information concept based on the semiotic theory.

The paper is motivated by the apparent controversy that still surrounds the information concept. Information, being a key concept within LIS, suffers from being anchored in various incompatible theories. The paper suggests that information is signs, and it demonstrates how the concept of information can be understood within C.S. Peirce’s phenomenologically rooted semiotic. Hence, from there, certain ontological conditions as well epistemological consequences of the information concept can be deduced.

The paper argues that an understanding of information, as either objective or subjective/discursive, leads to either objective reductionism and signal processing, that fails to explain how information becomes meaningful at all, or conversely, information is understood only relative to subjective/discursive intentions, agendas, etc. To overcome the limitations of defining information as either objective or subjective/discursive, a semiotic analysis shows that information understood as signs is consistently sensitive to both objective and subjective/discursive features of information. It is consequently argued that information as concept should be defined in relation to ontological conditions having certain epistemological consequences.

The paper presents an analytical framework, derived from semiotics, that adds to the developments of the philosophical dimensions of information within LIS.