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This paper investigates the change talk (CT) strategies of the motivational interviewing (MI) technique and their relevance in achieving change goals within communities of practice (CoP), focusing on addressing real-world problems in today's complex world.

We employ a literature review and conceptual analysis to study the interactions and potential areas of complement between CT, MI and CoP theories.

This paper combines CT, MI and CoP theories to develop an integrated model called Facilitative Change Talk Leadership (FCTL).

This paper provides an innovative model (FCTL) to inform leadership educators about facilitating communities of practice. We provide a hypothetical case study to suggest how FCTL might foster collaborative inquiry and resilience amidst complex challenges. This case study illustrates a practical pathway for leadership educators and community practitioners to use this model in their own contexts.

The article aims to investigate how washing practices focused on appeasing sceptics of diversity work in for-profit organizations play out in corporate online communication of diversity and inclusion efforts, and how these enable communication to a wide audience that includes social equity advocates.

Online corporate communication data of diversity and inclusion themes were compiled from the websites of eight Swedish-based multinational corporations. The data included content from the companies’ official websites and annual reports and sustainability reports as well as diversity and inclusion-themed blog posts. A thematic analysis was conducted on the website content.

The study showcases how tensions between conflicting external demands are navigated by keeping the communication open to several interpretations and thereby achieving multivocality. In the studied corporate texts on diversity and inclusion, this is achieved by alternating between elements catering to a business case audience and those that appeal to a social justice audience, with some procedures managing to appease both audiences at the same time.

The article complements previously described forms of washing by introducing an additional type of washing – business case washing – an articulation of the business case rhetoric that characterizes the diversity management discourse. While much has been written about washing to satisfy advocates of social change and equity, washing to appease shareholders and boardroom members, who are focused on profit and economic growth, has received less attention. The article suggests that online corporate communication on diversity and inclusion, by appeasing diverse audiences, can be seen as aspirational talk.

This study focused on unpacking the instructional coaching process, addressing key questions about what happens during a coaching session and what coaching elements predict teacher outcomes.

Using coaching observational data, the research examined critical coaching processes described in the literature: coaching practices (observation, feedback, reflective discussion and planning), the coach–teacher relationship, coaching strategies and coaching duration. The study also developed a path model documenting how coaching behaviors predicted teacher instruction.

Results showed that the coach talked more than the teacher and that most coaching time was spent in reflective discussion. The coach–teacher relationship was promoted by building rapport and reciprocal trust, with use of “we” language demonstrating that coach and teacher were working as a partnership. Most common coaching strategies were clarifying and the coach prompting the teacher to attend to teacher or student behaviors. Path model analysis showed that (a) the coach–teacher relationship quality predicted the level of teacher engagement in coaching and their instructional reflection and (b) the quality of coaching strategies predicted the overall quality of the classroom instruction.

The study provides empirical evidence about the active ingredients of coaching – those underlying processes that impact and improve teacher practice.

Innovation is a process that enables organizations to sustain and prosper in a competitive business environment. This study aims to understand the key drivers of innovation within organizations from the lens of employees.

This study uses a grounded theory approach based on semi-structured in-depth interviews of 20 professionals working in information technology (IT) firms. Judgmental sampling was adopted to select the respondents. Open coding, inductive analysis was conducted on the interview transcripts to generate relevant themes.

Emerging themes indicate that innovation within organizations can be triggered as a response to client requirements or the employees’ inherent urge to innovate. Certain factors such as user engagement, formal organizational processes and practices, informal collaborative practices, the role played by experts and leaders and upskilling were seen to enable innovative outcomes within organizations.

Findings from this study will allow leaders to activate the identified drivers by designing suitable organizational processes and strategies to nurture a successful innovation culture within their teams.

This grounded theory-based study looks at drivers of innovation within IT organizations from the perspective of employees.

This study explores how street-level professionals translate and implement a co-production strategy, formulated by top management, in their professional practices, focusing on conflicts that arise during this process and the effectiveness of the coping strategies employed by these professionals to manage them.

This paper is based on a lower-level inquiry into three care services in Denmark. It adopted the translation perspective in organizational research to analyze the consequences of street-level professionals' translation choices. Data were collected through interviews and observations.

This study found that street-level professionals' translation choices contribute to conflicts of varying forms and extents. The finding suggests that the way conflicts are managed makes the difference between the actual organizational change and the more symbolic acceptance of co-production.

This study contributes to discourses on challenges in co-production implementation by deepening knowledge about the role of coping behavior and translation in sustainable implementation of co-production.

The climate crisis presents a global threat. Research shows the necessity of joint communication efforts across different arenas—media, politics, business, academia and protest—to address this threat. However, communication about social change in response to the climate crisis comes with challenges. These challenges manifest, among others, in public accusations of inconsistency in terms of hypocrisy and incapability against self-declared change agents in different arenas. This increasingly turns public climate communication into a “blame game”.

Strategic communication scholarship has started to engage in this debate, thereby acknowledging climate communication as an arena-spanning, necessarily contested issue. Still, a systematic overview of specific inconsistency accusations in different public arenas is lacking. This conceptual article provides an overview based on a macro-focused public arena approach and decoupling scholarship.

Drawing on a systematic literature review of climate-related strategic communication scholarship and key debates from climate communication research in neighboring domains, the authors develop a framework mapping how inconsistency accusations of hypocrisy and incapacity, that is, policy–practice and means–ends decoupling, manifest in different climate communication arenas.

This framework creates awareness for the shared challenge of decoupling accusations across different climate communication arenas, underscoring the necessity of an arena-spanning strategic communication agenda. This agenda requires a communicative shift from downplaying to embracing decoupling accusations, from mutual blaming to approval of accountable ways of working through accusations and from confrontation to cooperation of agents across arenas.

This chapter will focus on the use of reflective dialogues (RDs) to explore pedagogical practice in higher education. RDs allow researchers and participants to reflect on observed phenomena together, engaging in collaborative reflection that may allow both the researcher and the researched to gain from the interaction, throwing into focus different aspects of practice and a different perspective on the situation, and blurring the boundaries of research and researched into a more reciprocal relationship. Drawing on research which investigated the relationship between critical pedagogical theory and practice with 10 self-identifying critical pedagogues across eight English universities, I will explore the benefits and tensions of using a reflective dialogue approach, and the impact this methodology can have on researchers and participants. This chapter will make a case for RDs as both a practice for educators and as a methodology and explore how to do it, supported by relevant methodological literature, as well as the benefits and challenges of using RDs in social research, concluding with a discussion on how RDs might be used in other contexts to aid professional learning and reflection.

With the rising concern for employment equity, accompanied by the potential for social media backlash and boycotts of company brands, products, and services, organisations are focussing on equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the workplace. They develop programmes and initiatives and allocate resources to these efforts. While there has been some progress, companies have also faced challenges that stymied the effectiveness of those programmes and the intended outcomes for their organisations. Based on in-depth interviews with 28 employees of organisations in various industries, this chapter identifies challenges at three levels based on employee perceptions. The findings categorise these challenges at the individual employee (micro) level, the organisational (meso) level and the national (macro) level. Furthermore, the findings suggest steps to remove some of those challenges, or at least minimise their negative impact on organisational EDI policies and practices.

In Denmark, there has been, over decades, an intensified political focus on how humanities research and doctoral education contribute to society. In this vein, the notion of impact has become a central part of the academic language, often associated with terms like use, effects and outputs, stemming from neoliberal ideologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how humanities academics are living with the impact agenda, as both experienced researchers and as doctoral supervisors educating the next generation of researchers in this post-pandemic era. Specifically, the authors are interested in the supervisor-researcher relationship, that is, the relationship between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda as researchers and then the way they tell their doctoral students to do likewise.

The authors have studied how the impact agenda is accommodated by humanities academics through a series of qualitative interviews with humanities researchers and humanities PhD supervisors, encompassing questions of how they are living with the expectation of impact and how it is embedded in their university and departmental context.

The study shows that there is no link between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda in relation to their own research work and then the way they tell their doctoral students to approach it. Within the space of their own research, the supervisors engage in resistance practices towards the impact agenda in terms of minimal compliance, rejection or resignation, whereas in the space of supervision, the impact agenda is re-inscribed to embody other understandings. The supervisors want to protect their students from this agenda, especially in the knowledge that many of them are not going to stay in academia due to limited researcher career possibilities. Furthermore, the paper reveals a new understanding of the impact agenda as having a relational quality, and in two ways. One is through a positional struggle, the reshaping of power relations, between universities (or academics) and society (or the state and the market); the other is as a phenomenon very much lived among academics themselves, including between supervisors and their doctoral students within the institutional context.

This study opens up the impact agenda, showing what it means to be a humanities academic living with the effects of the impact agenda and trying to navigate this. The study is mapping and tracking out the many different meanings and variations of impact in all its volatility for academics concerned about it. In current, post-pandemic times, when manifold expectations are directed towards research and doctoral education, it is important to know more about how these expectations affect and are dealt with by those who are expected to commit to them.

Worldwide, schools implement social-emotional learning programs to enhance students' social-emotional skills. Although parents play an essential role in teaching these skills, knowledge about their perspectives on social-emotional learning is limited. In providing insight into the perspectives of parents from adolescent students this paper adds to this knowledge.

An explorative qualitative study was conducted to gain insight into parents' perspectives (N = 32) on adolescent social-emotional learning. A broadly used professional framework for social emotional learning was used as a frame of reference in interviews with parents from diverse backgrounds. Within and across case analyses were applied to analyze the interviews.

A conceptual model of four social-emotional skills constructs considered crucial learning by parents emerged from the data: respectful behavior, cooperation, self-knowledge and self-reliance. Parents' language, interpretations and orderings of skills indicate that the model underlying these constructs differs from skills embedded in the professional framework.

Participants were small in number and mainly female. Therefore, more research is necessary to test the model in other parent populations.

The social-emotional skills students in prevocational secondary education learn at home differ from those targeted in SEL programs. Engaging students’ parents in SEL program implementation is indicated to align the skills taught at home and school. Preparing teachers to implement such programs requires training them on engaging parents from diverse backgrounds.

The study is one of the first providing insight into parents’ perspectives on SEL, the social-emotional skills deemed crucial to master for adolescents, and the roles they view for themselves and school on teaching these skills.