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To date, the vast majority of existing research on unethical leadership has focused on top leaders’ actions and behaviors as the primary catalyst for the permeation of unethical behaviors in organizations. In this chapter, we shift the focus to middle and junior managers and argue that they too have an active role in contributing to the permeation of top-level unethical leadership. More specifically, we adopt a meaning-making lens to investigate how junior and middle-level managers perceive and interpret top-level unethical leadership and how such meaning-making affects their (un)ethical legitimacy. Understanding the role played by lower-level managers becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture of the permeation of unethical leadership. Findings from 30 in-depth interviews with top, middle, and junior managers reveal variables such as survival, group membership, and strain as buttressing meaning-making by lower-level managers. Findings also revealed two contrasting aspects, that is, “interactions” within organizational members as well as “silence” by top-level managers playing into individuals’ information processing and attribution capacities during ethical dilemmas. Real cases experienced by participants pertaining to the flow of unethical leadership illustrate how the central bearings play out in managerial practice.

With a focus on core concepts such as coming as guest, being present, story, innate dignity and the value of difference, students in a Boys High School spent 6 months volunteering on a hospitality van with the homeless. Over that period the students engaged in varying levels of meaning making linked to their reflection of the experience. While some students remained at a surface level of meaning making, the majority progressed to deeper meaning making and some to the level of existential change. Analysis of the associated case studies would indicate that deepening levels of meaning making are linked to direct engagement with the clients of the service, the active presence of mentors, a longer service engagement, reflection upon experience, critical analysis and the deliberate engagement with the core concepts. This process, along with the development of a supportive inclusive school culture, will provide a platform for the Service-Learning program to enhance inclusivity as a lived and owned value within the participants’ lives.

This chapter explains how the idea of this book occurred, and introduces readers to Tierney's multidimensional framework for global meaning making. It describes the organization and structure of the book and the contents of each chapter and calls on readers to transform international language and literacy research through global meaning making.

As an interruption to existing nationalistic and neoliberal frames, teachers are beginning to embrace cosmopolitanism to ground literacy instruction. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the possibilities and tensions of using a cosmopolitan approach to literacy instruction. This chapter presents a qualitative study of interviews with 24 educators from the United States, Belize, and China to examine curricular and instructional choices educators report using to promote students' global meaning-making and cosmopolitan worldviews. Findings include three themes: situated relevance, glocal connections, and intercultural collaboration. Participants reported that creating a welcoming environment and promoting equality in the local classroom is foundational to teaching students at the local or global level. Teaching global literacies included teaching about similarities and differences locally and internationally and making local–global connections on issues of importance to the students. Also, participants reported that for students to engage in global meaning-making, they needed to dialogue and collaborate with people from different countries. While the findings present possibilities, the discussion approaches the data through the lens of potential challenges. Some participants reported first helping students move beyond ethnocentric thinking and stereotypes through reflexive exercises so that students could constructively interact with peers cross-culturally. However, not all participants taught reflexivity or with a critical lens. This study may bring awareness to educators as to curricular choices and instructional processes that hold promise for promoting students' global meaning-making.

Narrative inquirers come to understand experience through story. In this way, the narrative is the primary unit of analysis rather than breaking down stories into its constituent parts, parsing particular words, ideas, or codes in the process of analysing and interpreting experience. This chapter adds complexity to understandings of the ways that narrative inquirers make meaning of experience with participants. My work with Olivia, a research participant, serves as a guide for this chapter as I further explore my process of meaning-making as a narrative inquirer. Beginning with recorded research conversations and transcriptions, the process moves to the use of word images as interim research texts. Word images are collections of participant responses, words and phrases, brought together to form storylines. The composition of word images allows for complex understandings of experience, with multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives emerging from the participants’ words. As Maxine Greene suggested, meaning-making includes a going beyond the text that allows readers to connect with the words in new and interesting ways. Similarly, meaning-making in narrative inquiry moves beyond traditional qualitative data analysis that allows researchers and readers to think with the stories of participants, engaging with the participants’ experience(s) in new ways as the researcher and reader brings their own stories of experience to bear in the text; making meaning and imagining experience from new perspectives.