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The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodological demonstration of how written and visual language in narrative and small stories about older workers might be read in multiple ways as supporting and/or constraining recent policy reform.

Critical theory and critical discourse analysis, supported by narrative analysis and visual analysis, offer a robust methodology to problematize the manner in which textually mediated discourses impact social policy reform for recruiting, retraining and retaining older workers.

The results show that still in such an “age positive” social policy environment, negative stereotypes about older workers persist, threatening to constrain social change.

An exemplary analysis of two texts, representative of those related to Australian government initiatives to reform access to work for older citizens, provides an accessible means of (re)evaluating if and how such policies are more inclusive of older workers.

This paper contributes to an emerging trend in organization studies using a critical discourse analytic approach not only to written texts, but also to the less familiar visual narratives and stories.

During team meetings, expressing negativity about other team members’ ideas and contributions – that is, negative disagreements – can derail team processes and harm team productivity. If team members want to improve their meetings and reduce negativity, which aspects are relevant starting points? This chapter discusses the complexity of this question by considering the interplay of team attributes, individual characteristics, and verbal interaction dynamics that may evoke negative disagreements in meetings. To this end, this chapter relies on existing behavioral and survey data of 259 employees nested in 43 team meetings that were analyzed using statistical discourse analysis. The results of this analysis highlight several potential starting points for reducing negativity in workplace meetings. First, we discovered that team attributes matter, as teams with a lower overall level of job satisfaction were more likely to experience negative disagreements during their meetings. Second, at the individual level, we found a significant gender effect such that women were more likely than men to start negative disagreements. Third, individual team members reporting lower organizational trust were more likely to start negative disagreements. Finally, counter to previous work on interaction dynamics during meetings, we could not identify specific verbal behaviors that triggered negative disagreements. In terms of practical implications, we discuss how managers can increase organizational trust and job satisfaction (e.g., through ensuring justice and improving job design) in order to encourage more positive meeting interactions.

In order to deepen understanding of team processes in dynamic organizational contexts, we suggest that analyses employing techniques to identify and analyze team member interaction patterns and trajectories are necessary. After presenting a brief review of interaction data coding and reliability requirements, we first review examples of two approaches used in the identification and analysis of interaction patterns in teams: lag sequential analysis and T-pattern analysis. We then describe and discuss three statistical techniques used to analyze team interaction trajectories: random coefficient modeling, latent growth modeling, and discontinuous growth analysis. We close by suggesting several ways in which these techniques could be applied to data analysis in order to expand our knowledge of team interaction, processes, and outcomes in complex and dynamic settings.

Across different research fields, it is increasingly acknowledged that gender is not a binary variable and goes beyond the male–female dichotomy. At the same time, gender is a prominent social cue that affects evaluations and interactions among individuals. Thus, gender can impact social processes on many levels in complex ways. Meetings provide arenas where key social processes unfold that are relevant to the organization. Understanding which role gender takes in this context is therefore central to organizations as well as meeting research. This chapter provides a critical review of research to date on social influence in meetings, specifically zooming in on the role of gender. The authors conducted a multi-step systematic literature review and identified 43 studies across a wide area of disciplines (e.g., psychology, communication, and management). The authors put special emphasis on the methodologies employed across this work since a comprehensive understanding of the applied methods is core for a synthesis of research results. Through the analysis, the authors pinpoint six variables – individual gender, sex role orientation, gender composition, gender salience, contextual factors such as task type and organizational settings, and the construction of gender as a social concept – that are directly related to gender and which represent factors that are critical for the role of gender in the meeting context. Thereby, this chapter aims to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of gender during workplace meetings. The authors conclude by highlighting methodological and managerial recommendations and suggest avenues for future research.

E-commerce has become a key component of brand retail strategies since the advent of omni-channel distributions. Many researchers have investigated the strategic role of e-commerce, and some recent articles show the importance of exploring the impact of this distribution model on consumer behaviour. However, there is no study focusing on how visits to a website create expectations of the shop. Relying on the expectancy-value theory and the omni-channel literature, the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by focusing on how the digital channel can create expectations for the physical channel.

This study is based on 24 semi-directive interviews with consumers, and all interviews included a browsing session on a real website. The methodology consists of both a thematic analysis of the interviews and a lexicographic analysis of the verbatim.

The findings reveal that direct online experience on a website will create beliefs about the physical stores of the same brand. These beliefs will, in turn, influence consumer attitudes towards the store. The study is the first to highlight such a link between channels and to explain in detail how this relationship arises.

The main contribution of this work includes showing the existence of a strong link between web-based and physical retail. From a managerial perspective, the study suggests that, from an omni-channel perspective, the design of the website impacts expectations towards the physical store in terms of its atmosphere, its location, its merchandising and even its level of crowding.

Climate change has a direct impact on companies. Therefore, the scenario analysis is used to provide companies and stakeholders in this specific sector with forward-looking measures and narratives of the world's future state. This work aims to provide an independent, wide and rigorous literature review on the topics of scenario analysis and climate change, analyzing a large set of referred papers included in economic journals on the Web of Science Clarivate Analytics data source. This review, by means of a mixed approach, can help address new policy strategies and business models.

The work employs 416 abstracts and relative titles in the field of economics, employing data mining for qualitative variables and performing descriptive statistics and lexicometric measures, similarity analysis and clustering with Reinert's hierarchical method in order to extract knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative content analysis allows for the return of a comprehensive and complete universe of meaning, as well as the analysis of co-occurences.

Content analysis reveals three main classification clusters and four unknown patterns: model area, risks, emissions and energy and carbon pricing, indicating research directions and limitations through an overview with an extensive reference bibliography. In the research, the prevalent use of quantitative instruments and their limitations emerge, while qualitative instruments are residual for climate change assessment; they also highlight the centrality of transition risk over adaptation measures and the combination of different types of instruments with reference to carbon pricing.

Scenario analysis is a relatively new topic in economics and finance research, and it is under-investigated by the academy. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative research using text analytics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the statements by the chairman and CEO in BP plc’s Annual Report 2010 for linguistic evidence of reader positioning. This is based on the premise that reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have heightened the need for such positioning to repair the company’s legitimacy.

Applying Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc. This was informed by corpus analysis of these statements, of comparative statements from industry competitors and of two larger-scale corpora constructed from the chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies.

The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are likely to be shaped by the statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis hints that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc.

The analysis relies on the assumptions that the chairman and CEO are the writers of each piece. As with prior research, questions of intent on the part of the corporate authors and impact upon target readers remain unanswered.

This paper demonstrates and highlights the issue of reader positioning through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures.

This paper makes a contribution to the literature by demonstrating how reader positioning may be engineered through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. This paper further responds to a call from Sydserff and Weetman (1999, 2002) for interdisciplinary approaches to investigating corporate narrative reports involving linguistics, through foregrounding Halliday’s SFL framework as an analytical tool.

The health promoting school model is rarely implemented in relation to sexuality education. This paper reports on data collected as part of a five-year project designed to implement a health promoting and whole school approach to sexuality education in a five campus year 1-12 college in regional Victoria, Australia. Using a community engagement focus involving local and regional stakeholders and with a strong research into practice component, the project is primarily concerned with questions of capacity building, impact and sustainability as part of whole school change. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using an action research design, data were collected from parents, students, teachers and key community stakeholders using a mixed methods approach involving surveys, interviews, document analysis and participant observation.

Sexuality education has become a key school policy and has been implemented from years 1 to 9. Teachers and key support staff have engaged in professional learning, a mentor program has been set up, a community engagement/parent liaison position has been created, and parent forums have been conducted on all five campuses.

The translation of research into practice can be judged by the impact it has on teacher capacity and the students’ experience. Classroom observation and more longitudinal research would shed light on whether the espoused changes are happening in reality.

This paper reports on lessons learned and the key enabling factors that have built capacity to ensure that sexuality education within a health promoting, whole school approach will remain sustainable into the future. These findings will be relevant to others interested in building capacity in sexuality education and health promotion more generally.

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is widely used in different levels of education across disciplines and domains. Researchers in the field have proposed various conceptual frameworks toward a comprehensive understanding of CSCL. However, as the definition of CSCL is varied and contextualized, it is critical to develop a shared understanding of collaboration and common definitions for the metrics that are used. The purpose of this research is to present a synthesis that focuses explicitly on the types and features of coding schemes that are used as analytic tools for CSCL.

This research collected coding schemes from researchers with diverse backgrounds who participated in a series of workshops on collaborative learning and adaptive support in CSCL, as well as coding schemes from recent volumes of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative learning (ijCSCL). Each original coding scheme was reviewed to generate an empirically grounded framework that reflects collaborative learning models.

The analysis generated 13 categories, which were further classified into three domains: cognitive, social and integrated. Most coding schemes contained categories in the cognitive and integrated domains.

This synthesized coding scheme could be used as a toolkit for researchers to pay attention to the multiple and complex dimensions of collaborative learning and for developing a shared language of collaborative learning.

By analyzing a set of coding schemes, the authors highlight what CSCL researchers find important by making these implicit understandings of collaborative learning visible and by proposing a common language for researchers across disciplines to communicate by referencing a synthesized framework.

Teams in organizations have weekly – or even daily – meetings to exchange information, generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. Yet, many team meetings are described as ineffective by the participants, due to either their design or dysfunctional communication practices within the meeting. To gain new insights into addressing these issues, this chapter goes back deep in history and discusses the origins and functions of group meetings. Building upon evolutionary theories of human behavior, the authors examine the evolutionary significance of meetings and the ways in which they were adaptive for our human ancestors. Drawing from this evolutionary perspective, we then compare meetings in ancestral times with their modern-day counterparts. Using evidence from (a) ethnographic studies of small-scale societies that model ancestral group life and (b) organizational and team science, we contrast the typical workplace meeting with its ancient counterpart. In this review of ancient and modern meetings, we identify meeting characteristics that have been maintained through time as well as those that are unique/new in the modern time. In doing so, we inspect to what extent meeting practices in ancestral environments are aligned or at odds with meeting practices in contemporary organizations (the notion of mismatch). From these similarities and differences, we derive novel theoretical insights for the study of workplace meetings as well as suggestions for improving contemporary meeting practice. We also include a series of testable propositions that can inform future research on team meetings in organizations.