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This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.

This paper examines the circumstantial state of mediated work to develop a conceptual framework exemplifying the determinants of voice of workers in triangular employment relationships. These workers are in work context involving two or more firms – agency/platform and clients/client firms.

Paralleling employee voice research in the triangular employment relationship context, the authors theorised the influencing forces at four levels to propose 12 distinct antecedents of triangular workers' voice. External level (2) – legal employer ambiguity and legal regulation and protection; employment context level (3) – availability and presence, assignment duration and autonomy; firm level (3) – institutional complexity, cost and control and governance structure conflicts; individual level (4) – perceived relative equity, voice skill, self-identity and transition opportunity.

The triangular workers' voice determinants framework provides a comprehensive outlook on how the external, employment context, firm and individual forces influence voice of workers in triangular employment relationships.

Emanating from the framework are propositions that can be empirically tested for validation. Hence, as with conceptual papers, this paper is limited by non-empirical testing.

Managers of workers in these employment relationships should be cognizant of the different levels of forces that can influence their voice.

This paper contributes to the employee voice literature by presenting a four-level framework that demonstrate a holistic view of how triangular workers' voice is influenced.

Voice assistant technology represents one of the most radical artificial intelligence innovations. Drawing on the processing fluency theory and consumer learning literature, this study aims to explore how consumer acceptance of new products is influenced by voice assistant function (VAF), along with the impacts of role clarity and learning modality.

Four between-subjects experimental studies were conducted. Study 1 tested the main effect of VAF on consumer acceptance. Study 2 included role clarity as a mediator between VAF and consumer acceptance. Study 3 examined the moderation effect of learning modality and contrasted the effectiveness of experiential and verbal learning in helping increase consumer acceptance. Study 4, as a post hoc study, tested serial mediations to validate whether processing fluency was indeed the mechanism explaining the indirect relationship between VAF and consumer acceptance via role clarity.

The negative impact of VAF on consumer acceptance was demonstrated in all four studies. Studies 2 and 3 showed VAF decreased role clarity which further influenced consumer acceptance. Moreover, Study 3 evidenced that experiential learning was more effective than verbal learning in increasing consumer acceptance of voice-assisted products via role clarity. Study 4 demonstrated that VAF decreased role clarity, which in turn decreased processing fluency, leading to lower consumer acceptance.

This research views the usage of voice-assisted products as a coproduction process between consumers and the VAF. Accordingly, findings provide novel insights into processing fluency of tasks assisted by VAF through the lens of role clarity and learning modality, which enriches the understanding of potential barriers and opportunities for consumers to accept voice-assisted products.

This study of job advertisements for internal communication practitioners aims to investigate the signals that organisations are sending the profession about what is required of these roles. The concept of corporate voice – the “voice” of the organisation – is problematised to explore tensions in vocality. The aim is to support communication practitioners to navigate multi-vocality in the evolving professional context of digital communication technologies and changes in the workplace.

This qualitative study considers the role of voice in corporate communication practices and offers insights into “digital disruption” and the discursive pressure of employers' priorities on the profession and its practices. Job advertisements for internal communication practitioners were examined during 6-month periods in 2018, 2020 and 2022, which was a significant time of change for the profession with the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Qualitative content analysis of 514 internal communication job advertisements identifies that control and consistency are valorised, and continue to dominate descriptions of internal communication skills and responsibilities. The digital affordances that communication practitioners rely on has not changed significantly and a preference for “broadcasting” is evident.

This study provides insights into how Australian organisations shape and sustain univocal corporate communication practices, and the incompatibility of narrow configurations of voice with emerging organisational challenges such as social connectedness.

In a complex, ever-changing, and turbulent business world, encouraging employees to express their improvement-oriented novel ideas through voice behavior is crucial for organizations to survive and thrive. Understanding how to foster employee promotive voice at work is a significant issue for both researchers and managers. This study explores how to foster employee promotive voice through specific HRM practices and positive employee attitudes. It also examines the effect of employee promotive voice on perceived organizational performance.

This study employed a time-lagged multisource survey design. Data were collected from 215 executives, 790 supervisors, and 1,004 employees in 113 firms, and analyzed utilizing a multilevel moderated serial mediation model.

The findings of this study revealed that promotive voice was significantly related to perceived organizational performance. Innovation-enhancing HRM was positively associated with employee promotive voice. The HRM-voice relationship was partially mediated by employee job satisfaction. Power distance orientation was found to significantly moderate the relationship between innovation-enhancing HRM and employee job satisfaction at the firm level. Our findings showed that innovation-enhancing HRM policies may fail to foster promotive voice if they do not enhance employee job satisfaction.

This study challenges some taken-for-granted assumptions in the literature such as any high performance HRM bundles (e.g. HPWS) can foster employee promotive voice, and the effects of HRM are direct and even unconditional on organizational outcomes. It emphasizes the need to avoid potential unintended effects of HRM on employee voice and the importance of contextualizing voice research.

There is no innovation without ideas. More than ever before, these ideas are increasingly difficult to express in a changing environment ripe with emotions. Today's organizations need to understand why their employees may or may not develop, voice and implement innovative ideas in the face of this emotional tension. Current literature focuses on external factors that empower employees to innovate. This research attempts to shift the focus to the individual by investigating the relationship between emotional intelligence, openness to experience and innovation voicing behavior.

This study employs a quantitative survey among 288 US-based workers to test a mediated model of emotional intelligence, openness to experience and innovation-focused promotive voice. The authors assessed both the measurement and structural models through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), while controlling for a range of variables with the potential to confound construct measurements.

The findings validated the positive effect of emotional intelligence on openness to experience, while also finding a significant impact of openness to experience on innovation-focused promotive voice. More importantly, evidence suggests that openness to experience mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and innovation focused promotive voice.

These findings shed new light on why employees might start the innovation process by developing and, ultimately, voicing innovative ideas. Further, this new insight focuses on the impact of intrapersonal factors as it relates to innovation and attempts to fill a gap in what is known about innovative behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of anthropomorphism and identify factors related to adopting voice shopping on smart speakers.

Progress in partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach is used to test the proposed research framework regarding anthropomorphism and user perceptions on voice shopping via smart speakers. Individuals' responses to questions about attitude and intention to use voice shopping via smart speakers were collected and analyzed.

The results showed that anthropomorphism had a positive influence on satisfaction, which, in turn, had a positive impact on intention to adopt voice shopping, and customers had positive opinions regarding smart speakers.

This study only reflects a younger perspective on smart speaker voice shopping. This study identified the characteristics of smart speakers that increase customers' intention to purchase, which can be used to formulate sales strategies and management guidelines.

This research provided a new perspective to enable practitioners to promote smart speakers for voice shopping. Smart speaker manufacturers can utilize the findings of this research to improve the system design of smart speakers to further facilitate voice shopping.

Unlike previous studies, which focused on product attributes of smart speakers or voice shopping experiences, this study provided a clear picture of how the anthropomorphic feature of smart speakers affects customers' intention to adopt voice shopping.

Purpose of This Chapter: This chapter aims to clarify how employee voice (EV) is conceptualized in the extant literature. Then, the present chapter develops a model of EV based on previous studies from 1970 to 2022.

Design / Methodology / Approach: In all, 53 articles were investigated in this study – the focus was on articles in the field of management. The target articles were limited to those which were written in English and were indexed by the Web of Science (WOS).

Findings: The concepts related to EV have been presented in five main dimensions. The content analysis results revealed a theoretical agreement over the central elements reflecting an integrated description of EV.

Research Limitations: The study was limited to the sources published in the WOS database, which could affect the scope of findings.

Research Implications: The conclusion showed that EV is a multi-dimensional, emerging field that has been undergoing a definitional debate in the literature. This concept indicates an ongoing responsibility for the public’s benefit, welcomes different financial activities to supply market forces’ requirements, and investigates society’s existing demands.

Originality: It represents the first attempt to conduct an EV systematic literature review based on the definition of key factors and the complex relations in a typical EV process. Also, according to the review of selected articles from 1970 to 2022, there has been no coherent conceptualization of employees’ voices.

This paper aims to illustrate, by means of a content analysis of 278 weekly School Meeting minutes, the ways in which student voice is actualized in one democratic free school in Germany.

This paper uses a qualitative content analysis methodology of 278 weekly School Meetings minutes.

This paper uses Fielding’s (2012) patterns of partnership typology to illustrate what counts as student voice and participation in a democratic free school.

Limitations included being reliant on translations of German texts, some missing minutes from the entire set, the lack of a single author for the minutes (and thus degree of detail differs) and the fact that the School Meeting minutes make reference to other meetings for various sub-committees for which no minutes exist, and thus, findings on the degree of student voice may be limited. And because this is a study of one school, generalizability may be difficult. Future research into these sub-committee meetings would prove helpful as well as content analyses of other democratic free schools’ meeting minutes.

This study can help people more deeply understand what goes on in democratic free schools and what student voice and participation can mean within this context.