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The purpose of this paper is to share findings from empirically driven conceptual research into the implications for English teachers of understanding generative AI as a “tool” for writing.

The paper reports early findings from an Australian National Survey of English teachers and interrogates the notion of the AI writer as “tool” through intersectional feminist discursive-material analysis of the metaphorical entailments of the term.

Through this work, the authors have developed the concept of “coloniser tool-thinking” and juxtaposed it with First Nations and feminist understandings of “tools” and “objects” to demonstrate risks to the pursuit of social and planetary justice through understanding generative AI as a tool for English teachers and students.

Bringing together white and First Nations English researchers in dialogue, the paper contributes a unique perspective to challenge widespread and common-sense use of “tool” for generative AI services.

In the Web 2.0 era, more and more digital immigrants actively participate in blogging, video sharing, online rating, and micro blogging, etc. However, some may be more skilled in producing and generating online content while others still meet some barriers in doing so. Thus, it is interesting to investigate the online generative capability of digital immigrants in Web 2.0 context. This paper seeks to address this issue.

The authors selected Shanghai as their target province in this study for its large scale of internet users. An in-depth semi-structured interview was used as their research method. They selected several community clubs as the interview settings. In addition, age was adopted as a threshold to define the Chinese digital immigrants for its convenience in sampling.

Chinese digital immigrants are playing an important role in content generating, and have a great potential in the future contribution, and a number of digital immigrants regard the content generating as a pretty easy work while some others felt difficulties, even frustrated and exhausted when generating content. About the content type, digital immigrants prefer to generate that content with low granularity. About the motivation, the intrinsic motivation and the extrinsic motivation with an internalized focus play a dominant role. About the generating mode, digital immigrants prefer to generate content individually or collectively.

This paper develops the concept of online generative capability by adapting the notion of generativity from other disciplines to the characteristics of Web 2.0. Then an integrated conceptual framework is built and evaluated. Practically, the paper puts forward some implications for the designers, managers, and information service staff from different perspectives to facilitate the digital immigrant's online generative capability.

People reason, learn and persuade in two distinct modes – through stories (narration) and by numbers (calculation). In everyday life narration is privileged over calculation. We understand our lives through narratives, narrating experiences first to ourselves – to convince others – and then to others – to persuade them. However, within the research community, calculating dominates narrating for reasoning, learning and persuading. This is the case for research in both the natural sciences and the social sciences. Although, in the social sciences, narratives are accepted as research inputs (in the form of interview transcripts), less thought has been given to narratives as research outputs. This article looks at the construction of narratives in accounting and management research, where there is now a significant, albeit a minority, interest. Three main issues are discussed: first, the potential for narrative research that identifies forms of argument (or strategizing) in the field; second, the usefulness of aggregating these individual strategizing accounts to construct emergent projects at the organizational level; and, third, the evaluation of this strategizing by revealing how it coalesces in and around key management control processes and events. The research question is “How are narratives best understood, constructed and used as forms of explanation and rhetorical argument in accounting and management research?”

The purpose of this conceptual paper was to investigate the contribution of the “Pipeline”, as a metaphor for building theory about Women-on-Boards (WoB) in the Arab world.

Narratives about women's progress in Arab countries were collected from a range of sources and content was analysed to identify emergent themes about pipeline.

Themes were identified of the pipeline metaphor that explained phenomena and generated solutions to employ, retain and advance women to board directorships; from higher education (“bulging”/“bursting” pipeline) through employment (“leaking” pipeline) to boardroom (“blocked” pipeline).

Generalisation of these study results is limited by geographical context of this research. An implication is for further international studies on metaphor identification for women's progress.

Relevant metaphor-in-use required to generate company policy and praxis towards WoB in the Arab world.

The first academic study to investigate the value of metaphor for effect on women's progress in Arab countries. Novel metaphor identification is proposed to think and see women's experiences in cultural context.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute with knowledge concerning how to drive, generate and energize change and development in social systems. A potential key to meet this challenge is the strength-based change management approach called appreciative inquiry (AI). A central component of AI is the “AI interview”, which has evolved into a distinct activity that enables the past and the future to be used as a generative source for on-going learning about strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results. The AI interview has in previous studies shown an often surprisingly high ability to generate development and change in social systems. However, the understanding of the generative “mystery” of the AI interview, focusing on the value experienced by both the people conducting the interview and those being interviewed, is still in need of further exploration. Furthermore, the evident generativity of the AI interview has not yet been integrated to any large extent into quality management. The purpose of this paper is to change that.

The researchers have studied the customer experience of conducting an AI interview based on feedback from 97 AI students at Mid Sweden University.

Among the results, eight categories of value are identified.

The paper contributes with new knowledge concerning the values experienced during participation in an AI interview. The paper also highlights ideas on how the generativity of the AI interview could be increasingly integrated into quality management.

Metaphors are a powerful and human way of understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. In quality management (QM), several metaphors are used to describe and bring to life the often-abstract QM concepts and systems. These metaphors are of great importance for how QM is understood, communicated and practiced. However, the metaphors of QM have seldom been systematically screened or put in focus, neither the topic of a critical discussion. The purpose of this paper is hence to contribute with a screening of the metaphors currently used, within QM literature and in practice among QM leaders, and then elaborate on their potential for improvement and development.

The paper is based on a literature review combined with interviews of QM leaders.

The paper highlights that the current QM metaphors provide intuitive associations to properties such as stability, shelter, and structure, but not to the important dynamic properties of QM, such as learning, or to the critical role of people in QM. What can be seen as core properties of QM are communicated by texts or labels added on to metaphors with properties that often are in sharp contrast to them. The paper also provides suggestions for further improvements and development.

The paper highlights the area of metaphors within QM as an important area for future research. It also provides insights concerning the successful use and selection of metaphors in future QM practice.

Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.

Drawing on sometimes provocative offerings of others, and the seminal work of Grant, views are presented that problematise supervision, challenging its representation as something to be transparently understood, planned and managed. Sophisticated theories of supervision have been offered in literature to hold its inherent paradoxes while opening up its practice for inquiry. It is suggested that supervision is usefully understood as the development of praxis: challenging supervisor and student to understand their practice journey as one of interwoven, often tacit, dimensions of knowing, doing, being and becoming (that are personally and therefore distinctively resolved.

Generative metaphors drawn from other complex domains of human experience suggest useful ways of engaging with the intensity, individuality and murkiness of supervision. Such metaphors draw attention to the identities and authorities that are in play and offer markers that can be identified even through the fog.

Voice work is explored as a metaphor for supervision, suggesting reflective practices that ask supervisor and candidate to pay deep attention to the sounds of their voices as well as to the nuances of the dialogue they create together.

The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the paper focuses on how metaphors are used in the construction of the environment, a precondition for the creation of business opportunities.

This paper reports on a two‐day meeting between Light, a management consultancy firm, and Epsilon one of their clients. The data are drawn from a larger ethnographic study within Light. The consultants and their clients are followed in their daily work. The focus was on how metaphor use influenced their organisational practices.

Investigating the play of metaphors in Epsilon, it is shown how the firm's environment is created; a pre‐condition for understanding how entrepreneurial opportunities are created. It is shown how use of metaphor, understood as a mode of interpretation, is taking place over time, and how it is part of a relational, context‐dependent process.

The present study provides new ways of understanding the use of metaphor in the entrepreneurial process. It also indicates the need for a continued focus on language use in the entrepreneurial process. One limitation is that not all aspects of metaphor use are investigated.

This research can help to influence practitioners to pay more attention to the use of metaphors, not only as a tool for creative thinking or the questioning of embedded assumptions, but also as a mode for interpreting, structuring and producing images of the environment and the organisation.

This paper contributes to development of influences from the linguistic turn to entrepreneurship studies by exploring metaphor theory. One result of this focus on language is an increased sensitivity to metaphor use in the entrepreneurial process.

This paper aims to illustrate the extent to which metaphors help to understand operations management research topics.

This paper is based upon a review of the role of metaphors in organisational theory building and the use of metaphors in operations management theory building.

Metaphors can contribute to an understanding of the situations being addressed by operations management researchers, and can play a role in the preliminary steps of the development of a theory.

This paper develops a metaphorical approach to ISO 9000 implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to conceive “organizing” as an indeterminate process taking place in the interstices of intra-acting elements, beyond visible/rational/intentional organizing. The term intra-activity refers to relationships between multiple elements (human and more-than-human) that are understood not to have clear or distinct boundaries. The paper aims at reframing organizing, as the effect of multiple intra-acting elements, by introducing the metaphor of shadow organizing. It offers examples as diverse as knowledge spillover, evidence-based medicine and improvisation, and the mafia’s organizational rules.

The frame of reference is metaphorical theorization, based on the metaphor of shadow organizing, and is explored through three metonymies: the forest and its sheltered spaces in penumbra; the shadow as a grey zone between canonical and non-canonical practices; and secret societies, hidden in the shadow. The shadow is the symbol of what is “betwixt and between.”

Shadow organizing focuses on the way that situated elements (people, technologies, knowledge, infrastructures, society) intra-relate and acquire agency. Whilst organizing as the effect of intentional coordination, planning, and strategizing represents a well-established theorization, shadow organizing sheds light on what happen in the interstices of intentional and structured processes. The paper identifies the dimensions of shadow organizing as performativity, liminality, and secrecy.

The passage from elements in interaction to intra-acting relations that form elements is a challenge both for theory and methodology. To face this challenge, metaphorical thinking proves useful since it enhances scholars’ imaginations and emotional participation.