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The current paper is part of a larger scoping review project investigating the intersection of leader(ship) identity development and meaning-making. In this review, we analyzed 100 articles to determine the current extent of literature that covers the intersection of leader(ship) identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

A review of the extant literature is included, and a conceptual model is suggested for further exploration into this critical and under-researched domain.

More research is needed at the intersection of leadership identity development, meaning-making and marginalized social identities.

As this area of study has expanded, scholars have noted an absence of research on the effect of multiple social identities, especially marginalized identities, on meaning-making and leadership identity construction.

The purpose of the current innovative practice paper is to introduce a technique to explore leader identity development and meaning-making that builds on the narrative pedagogical tradition. In this paper, we recommend a process for combining turning-point graphing and responsive (semi-structured) interviews to co-explore leadership identity development and meaning-making with college students.

The paper provides student feedback data on the effectiveness of the technique in improving understanding of leader identity and transforming meaning-making.

We hope practitioners can utilize this approach to build leadership identity development and meaning-making capacity in college students.

Knowledge sharing is increasingly important in today’s information age and extant literature considers knowledge hoarding as an undesirable form of knowledge-withholding behavior. As knowledge hoarding is a generic, nonintentional behavior, specific attitudes and organizational processes are unlikely to curb it. Hence, the study postulates that reflection, awareness and group identification are necessary to combat innate tendencies toward knowledge hoarding. To test these hypotheses, this study aims to explore the role of mindfulness and relational systems in reducing employees’ knowledge hoarding by increasing their meaning-making through work.

The study results are based on a cross-sectional survey of 203 employees in India working for different organizations. Standardized scales were used for capturing data, and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for analysis.

Mindfulness and team cohesion were positively related to an increase in meaning-making through work. Supervisor support improved perceptions of team cohesion. However, contrary to expectations, team cohesion and meaning-making through work were positively, rather than negatively, related to knowledge hoarding.

The cross-sectional nature of the study prevents strong inference of causal relationships. Future studies may use a longitudinal design to test the relationships.

It highlights the role of meditation sessions and supervisory support in improving employees’ perceptions of meaning-making through work. It exhorts managers to systematically assess the impact and societal perceptions regarding knowledge hoarding rather than automatically assume a negative attitude.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the impact of mindfulness, team cohesiveness and meaning-making through work on employees’ knowledge hoarding behaviors. The study results suggest that knowledge hoarding may be perceived positively in certain cultures. It highlights the inconsistencies in the conceptualization and operationalization of knowledge hoarding and suggests the need for better construct delineation and empirical studies related to knowledge hoarding.

The purpose of this paper is to examine meaning in life as an important resource during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper summarized key research establishing links between meaning in life and mental health and well-being variables, reviewed the literature on meaning as a protective factor and meaning-making as a coping mechanism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as provided focal points in cultivating meaning in life.

Studies strongly support the notion that meaning in life is essential for health and well-being. Research also suggests that meaning protects against worsening mental health, and that engaging in meaning-making is a coping process that ultimately leads to improved adjustment despite the stressors of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight themes are also identified in cultivating skills to build meaning during adverse times.

Integrating what research has found about meaning, resilience and coping can help individuals develop practical strategies to cultivate meaning in their lives to support themselves and their communities during stressful times.

Understanding the ways in which meaning can support individuals’ health and well-being is critical during a global upheaval such as that of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing on conservation of resources (CoR) and speech act theories, the authors tested the relationship between managers’ motivating language (ML) and employee service quality and psychological relatedness and competence as mediating variables between their associations.

Using a convenient sampling technique, the authors collected 366 hotel employees’ opinions in Malaysia and analysed them in partial least squares-structural equation modelling.

Three forms of ML, psychological competence and relatedness correlate with employees’ service quality. Although direction-giving language is correlated with competence, empathetic and meaning-making language are not; thus, competence only mediates the relationship between direction-giving language and service quality. Three types (direction-giving, empathetic and meaning-making) of managers’ communication are correlated with relatedness; thus, relatedness mediates the association between the three types of language and service quality.

Hospitality managers are encouraged to enhance psychological relatedness and competence by practising an appropriate ML. Psychological relatedness and competence are significant mechanisms that enlighten the effects of supervisory communicant on service quality, indicating employees’ need satisfaction should be improved.

Our study contributes to speech act and CoR theories by explaining the relationship between ML, psychological relatedness, competence and service quality.

This study aims to explore the management learning during a long-term crisis like a pandemic. The paper addresses both what health-care managers have learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the management learning is characterized.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic at two different public hospitals in Sweden. The study, conducted with semi-structured interviews, applies a combination of within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. The data were analyzed using thematic deductive analysis with the themes, i.e. sensemaking, decision-making and meaning-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by uncertainty and a need for continuous learning among the managers at the case hospitals. The learning process that arose was circular in nature, wherein trust played a crucial role in facilitating the flow of information and enabling the managers to get a good sense of the situation. This, in turn, allowed the managers to make decisions meaningful for the organization, which improved the trust for the managers. This circular process was iterated with higher frequency than usual and was a prerequisite for the managers’ learning. The practical implications are that a combined management with hierarchical and distributed management that uses the normal decision routes seems to be the most successful management method in a prolonged crisis as a pandemic.

The gained knowledge can benefit hospital organizations, be used in crisis education and to develop regional contingency plans for pandemics.

This study has explored learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and found a circular process, “the management learning wheel,” which supports management learning in prolonged crises.

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 explore teacher candidates’ response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character’s body. This paper explores how readers’ meaning making was influenced when reading prose versus comics. This paper adds to a corpus of scholarship about the relationships between young adult literature, comics, bodies and reader response theory.

At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in a teacher education program at a Midwestern University, meeting monthly for a voluntary book club dedicated to reading and discussing young adult literature. To examine readers’ responses to comics and prose featuring fat-identified protagonists, the author used descriptive qualitative methodologies to conduct a thematic analysis of meeting transcripts, written participant reflections and researcher memos. Analysis was grounded in theories of reader response, critical fat studies and multimodality.

Analyses indicated many readers reject textual clues indicating a character’s body size and weight were different from their own. Readers read their bodies into the stories, regarding them as self-help narratives instead of radical counternarratives. Some readers were not able to read against their assumptions of thinness (and whiteness) until prompted by the researcher and other participants.

Although many reader response scholars have demonstrated readers’ tendencies toward personal identification in the face of racial and class differences, there is less research regarding classroom practices around the entanglement of physical bodies, body image and texts. Analyzing reader’s responses to the constructions of fat bodies in prose versus comics may help English Language Arts (ELA) educators and students identify and deconstruct ideologies of thin-thinking and fatphobia. This study, which demonstrates thin readers’ tendencies to overidentify with protagonists, suggests ELA classrooms might encourage readers to engage in critical literacies that support them in reading both with and against their identities.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

This paper aims to explore the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyzes how educators use play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning.

The authors used a keyword search in relevant academic databases to identify articles within specified search parameters. This was followed by bibliographic branching to identify additional articles. Following the identification of 30 articles, two rounds of open coding were used to identify themes for analysis.

The literature revealed five types of playful pedagogical practices: single-player gameplay, turn-taking gameplay, multiplayer play, play-as-design and little or no gameplay. Discussion of these findings suggests that classroom play was a highly social activity across case studies. Furthermore, boundaries between types of play and their contributions to learning were blurred and often disrupted normative approaches to curriculum and teaching.

Given the novelty of replacing traditional texts with digital games in English classrooms, this study represents an important moment to pause and review the literature to date on a particular, understudied aspect of digital games in English curricula: their playfulness. This is especially important given the innovative ways in which digital play can shift thinking about meaning-making and narrative, two historically dominant concerns within the discipline of English.