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The purpose of this paper is to explore the social and cultural aspects of the context that frames service exchange to better understand how value and experience are evaluated.

The authors apply a conceptual approach to develop and propose a framework for deepening the understanding of the context of market-related experiences. The authors integrate two growing streams of research – consumer culture theory and service-dominant logic – that focus on phenomenological and experiential views on value and extend the context of experience with a culturally rich, service-ecosystems view of markets.

The authors broaden the context of experience by applying a service-ecosystems perspective and identify four social and cultural factors that influence experience from this extended context – sign systems and service ecosystems; multiplicity of structure and institutions; value-in-cultural-context; and co-construction of context. Based on this, the authors point toward directions for future research.

The proposed framework points researchers and managers toward an extended context that is reproduced through the co-creation of value and influences evaluations of experience. Empirical research is needed to provide evidence of the proposed framework and further extend the understanding of dynamic social and cultural contexts.

The findings of this study provide a broader scope of context and identify additional social and cultural factors for managers to consider in their efforts to enhance customer experiences.

Traditional views of markets limit the context of experience to firm-customer encounters or consumer-centric practices and processes. This paper extends the context of experience to consider the practices and perspectives of multiple actors and various views on value.

Large corporate policy changes usually take the form of a top-down approach based on a clearly envisioned routine and an implementation plan. Yet, the authors report on a study of a bottom-up approach in which key members of a service company created a new hiring routine that supported a company-wide new human resource management (HRM) hiring policy without any prior envisioned plan. We pay particularly close attention to the perspectives of this company’s HRM professionals, line managers, and middle-level managers. The authors used the literature on routine dynamics to examine in detail which actions were taken by key members in this organization to create the new hiring routine. Through in-depth interviews, the authors found that line managers, HRM professionals, and middle-level managers significantly differed in their points of view regarding their role in the new hiring routine, and how it should work best. As a result of these different points of view, the actors took different actions that nonetheless contributed to building the new routine including creating new internal and external connections, supplying expertise, and ensuring oversight of the new way of hiring. The authors also observed that the creation of this new routine also implied conflicts as a result of different points of view and actions. Nonetheless, the end result was the establishment of a new company-wide accepted hiring routine that even surpassed the expectations of top management. With this study, the authors contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by demonstrating the generative potential of multiple points of view and conflicts in creating new routines involved in large corporate policy change by showing how misalignments between the actors’ perspectives do not need to hamper the creation of new action patterns but rather support it.

To provide a view of Rob Kling's contribution to socio‐technical studies of work.

The five “big ideas” discussed are signature themes in Kling's own work in the informatics domain, and of his intellectual legacy.

This paper conveys something of Kling's presence in social informatics (SI) thinking by focusing on a number of “big” ideas – “multiple points of view”, “social choices”, “the production lattice” (and its corollary, the problematization of the user), “socio‐technical interaction networks”, and “institutional truth regimes”.

A growing research community has demonstrated the power of SI techniques. It is essential that this body of work is sustained and developed, demonstrating how to undertake investigation and observation, that is not driven by instrumentalism but is informed by and leads to “technological realism”.

The SI corpus, exposing the dangers of naïve instrumentalism as an approach to information systems design and management, can guide practitioners on how to unpack the history of what is in view. This may be a specific technology, a social formation, or a sociotechnical circumstance. Practitioners may draw on the concepts presented, not as a prescriptive toolkit, but rather as a sensitizing frame to assist those who wish to re‐vision the workplace.

Central to the successful utilisation of computers in work, we argue, is the continuing development of a portfolio of interpretive concepts (such as STINs, regimes of truth, production lattices) that can consolidate Rob Kling's “big” ideas that are the core of this paper.

The aim of this paper is to better understand the concept of communication in organizations through the comparison of definitions given by scholars from different business-related communication disciplines: marketing, public relations, organizational communication and corporate communication.

A review of prevalent definitions in the four mentioned disciplines; discussion of communication aims, communication categorizations, theoretical background and innovations in each of these disciplines; and finally analysis of convergences and differences.

All the disciplines considered in this study converge in looking at the entire communication of a business, adopting a relational perspective, valuing some intangible resources as outcomes of communication. They highlight also some nuanced differences.

Higher value should be attached to research results in the communication field that come from considering multiple points of view, because each discipline contributes specific connotations to the comprehension of communication.

The paper compares some business-related communication disciplines and considers each as independent while benefiting from cross-fertilization. The multiple points of view allow a multidisciplinary approach and the awareness of the polysemic nature of communication.

Using a dialogic approach to narrative analysis through the lens of fairytale, this paper explores the shared construction of corporate environmental stories. The analysis provided aims to reveal the narrative messaging which is implicit in corporate reporting, to contrast corporate and stakeholder narratives and to bring attention to the ubiquity of storytelling in corporate communications.

This paper examines a series of events in which a single case company plays the central role. The environmental section of the case company's sustainability report is examined through the lens of fairytale analysis. Next, two counter accounts are constructed which foreground multiple stakeholder accounts and retold as fairytales.

The dialogic nature of accounts plays a critical role in how stakeholders understand the environmental impacts of a company. Storytelling mechanisms have been used to shape the perspective and sympathies of the report reader in favour of the company. We use these same mechanisms to create two collective counter accounts which display different sympathies.

This research reveals how the narrative nature of corporate reports may be used to fabricate a particular perspective through storytelling. By doing so, it challenges the authority of the version of events provided by the company and gives voice to collective counter accounts which are shared by and can be disseminated to other stakeholders.

This paper provides a unique perspective to understanding corporate environmental reporting and the stories shared by and with external stakeholders by drawing from a novel link between fairytale, storytelling and counter accounting.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adequacy of the common individual creativity vs organizatonal innovation dichotomy in a complex real-life context.

The paper is based on a retrospective case study of a R&D project in a large industrial company.

The paper shows that understanding the relationship between creativity and innovation as a matter of individual creativity followed by subsequent collective innovation, fails to account for the inherent collective, and improvisational nature of innovation projects. To deal with this weakness, the paper proposes a reconceptualization of the relationship in terms of a capacity/activity distinction which views creativity as an individual and collective integral part of the complex innovation activity.

This paper does not discuss challenges regarding collaboration between people representing a variety of expertise, interests, and organizational belongings.

The paper points out that continuous collective creativity is more important than initial individual creativity in complex real-life projects. The paper provides specific examples of work forms and approaches encouraging the collective creativity of researchers and practitioners in an innovation project. The work forms and approaches show how people continually deal with complexity, uncertainty and “the unexpected.” As such, the paper may be valuable to managers of complex real life-projects involving people with a great variety of expertise.

The paper contributes to a reconceptualization of the relationship between creativity and innovation which forms a contrast to the most common ways to distinquish between the phenomena. The capacity/activity distinction reflects the common assumption of a close relationship between creativity and innovation, but does not restrict creativity to the individual level or initial stage of innovation projects only. As such, the reconceptualization of the relationship between creativity and innovation can form the basis for practice-based theories in project management.

Over the past three decades ecological economics has emerged as a coherent transdisciplinary approach to environmental problem solving. However, its evolution has been quite dissimilar in different parts of the world. In the US and UK, ecological economics evolved as a critique of and alternative to a comparatively strict application of economic theory to environmental decision making. In particular, the narrow application of benefit–cost analysis often reduced environmental decisions to one metric within a single value system (the market economy). The attractiveness of these traditional economic approaches to environmental policy has always been their “one size fits all” approach. No matter what the problem faced, the same methods were applied with a primary goal of cost effectiveness. But it has become increasingly clear that the ease of application of a strict economic approach is outweighed by its failure to capture the social and environmental contexts and realities of specific environmental problems. In contrast, ecological economics has been more problem-oriented, incorporating multiple stakeholder and disciplinary perspectives in specific contexts to shape the methods that define policy choices. Furthermore, ecological economic approaches involve multiple metrics, multiple points of view, and evolutionary and flexible policy recommendations.

The 1998 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) document “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR) has inspired a family of models that view bibliographic resources in terms of multiple entities differentiated with regard to meaning, expression, and physicality. The purpose of this paper is to compare how three FRBR and FRBR-like models have been expressed as Semantic Web vocabularies based on Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper focusses on IFLA’s own vocabulary for FRBR; RDF vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA), an emergent FRBR-based standard for library cataloging; and BIBFRAME, an emergent FRBR-like, native-RDF standard for bibliographic data.

Simple test records using the RDF vocabularies were analyzed using software that supports inferencing.

In some cases, what the data actually means appears to differ from what the vocabulary developers presumably intended to mean. Data based on the FRBR vocabulary appears particularly difficult to integrate with data based on different models.

Some of the RDF vocabularies reviewed in the paper could usefully be simplified, enabling libraries to integrate their data more easily into the wider information ecosystem on the Web. Requirements for data consistency and quality control could be met by emergent standards of the World Wide Web Consortium for validating RDF data according to integrity constraints.

There are few such comparisons of the RDF expressions of these models, which are widely assumed to represent the future of library cataloging.

I present the findings of a study with course developers, principals, teachers, and community members in British Columbia (BC), Canada, regarding their views of the course Social Justice 12. Introduced in 2008, the senior, elective course involves students in exploring a number of contemporary issues in society and aims to develop citizens who actively work to address social injustices. The course includes some potentially controversial content, such as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) materials, which has been actively opposed by some community members. This negative reaction has had some damaging effects on teachers who teach the course. After describing the course and the study’s research methodology, the findings are presented. These findings include a review of the relations between course implementation and school contexts and a discussion of the complexity of issues-based instruction in relation to varied ideological positionings between teachers, principals, and community members. I conclude with recommendations that aim to strengthen education in and for a democracy.