Search results

Recent trends in Western civics education have attempted to secure democratic institutions from perceived threats. This paper investigates how political securitisation historically operated within civics textbooks in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. It further evaluates how Māori, Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples were variably incorporated or marginalised in these educational discourses.

This discourse analysis evaluates a sample of civics textbooks circulated in Australia and New Zealand between 1880 and 1920. These historical sources are interpreted through theories of decoloniality and securitisation.

The sample of textbooks asserted to students that their self-governing colonies required the military protection of the British Empire against undemocratic “threats”. They argued that self-governing colonies strengthened the empire by raising subjects who were loyal to British military interests and ideological values. The authors pedagogically encouraged a governmentality within students that was complementary to military, imperial and democratic service. The hypocritical denial of self-government for many Indigenous peoples was rationalised as a measure of “security” against “native rule” and imperial rivals.

Under a lens of securitisation, the discursive links between imperialism, military service and democratic diligence have not yet been examined in civics textbooks from the historical contexts of Australia and New Zealand. This investigation provides conceptual and pedagogical insights for contemporary civics education in both nations.

A major part of knowledge management for knowledge-intensive firms such as professional service firms is the increasing focus on thought leadership. Despite being a well-known term, it is poorly defined and analysed in the academic and practitioner literature. The aim of this article is to answer three questions. First, what is thought leadership? Second, what tensions exist when seeking to create thought leadership in knowledge-based organisations? Third, what further research is needed about thought leadership? The authors call for cross-disciplinary and academic–practitioner approaches to understanding the field of thought leadership.

The authors review the academic and practitioner literature on thought leadership to provide a rich oversight of how it is defined and can be understood by separating inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors also draw on qualitative data from 12 in-depth interviews with senior leaders of professional service firms.

Through analysing and building on previous understandings of the concept, the authors redefine thought leadership as follows: “Knowledge from a trusted, eminent and authoritative source that is actionable and provides valuable solutions for stakeholders”. The authors find and explore nine tensions that developing thought leadership creates and propose a framework for understanding how to engage with thought leadership at the industry/macro, organisational/meso and individual/micro levels. The authors propose a research agenda based on testing propositions derived from new theories to explain thought leadership, including leadership, reducing risk, signalling quality and managing social networks, as well as examining the suggested ways to resolve different tensions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, they are the first to separate out thought leadership from its inputs, creation processes and outcomes. The authors show new organisational paradoxes within thought leadership and show how they can play out at different levels of analysis when implementing a thought leadership strategy. This work on thought leadership is set in a relatively under-explored context for knowledge management researchers, namely, knowledge-intensive professional service firms.

The link between social interaction and entrepreneurial activity has attracted considerable attention in the entrepreneurship literature. In this study, we focus on individual cultural values, shaped by interactions in the social space, as they relate to opportunity evaluation, a cornerstone of the entrepreneurial process. We test our predictions in India, a non-Western society that has sustained one of the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Our findings suggest that value orientation of high power distance is negatively associated with opportunity evaluation whereas uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and femininity are positively associated with opportunity evaluation.

Diversity management is gaining attention in the organizations. This study aims to theorize and test a model linking efforts to support diversity and organizational value of diversity with job satisfaction and organizational identification and to propose that these relationships are mediated by an organization’s diversity climate.

Employee survey was used to collect data from employees at an Australian manufacturing organization. Structural equation modelling in AMOS was performed for the proposed model, controlling for age and gender.

The mediating role of diversity climate in the relationship of organizational value of diversity and outcomes (job satisfaction and organizational identification) is significant. The authors discuss theoretical, research and practical contributions.

The present study extends the literature by testing a mediation model derived from the signalling and social exchange theories.

Digital platform users not only consume but also produce communication related to their experiences. Although service research has explored users' motivations to communicate and focused on outcomes such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), it remains largely unexplored how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts and potentially create value for themselves, other users and service providers. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to introduce communicative affordances as a framework to advance user-created communication (UCC) in service.

Drawing from the literature in communication, service research and interactive marketing, an affordance perspective on UCC in service is introduced.

Three UCC affordances for the service context are presented – interactivity, visibility and anonymity – opportunities and challenges for service providers associated with these affordances are discussed and, finally, affordance-specific research questions and general recommendations for future research are offered.

By conceptualizing UCC in service from an affordances perspective, this paper moves beyond the traditional sender–receiver communication framework and emphasizes opportunities and challenges for service research and practice.

Instead of focusing separately on specific technologies or user behaviors, it is recommended that service managers adopt a holistic perspective of user goals and motivations, use experiences and platform design.

By conceptualizing UCC as an augmenting, dialogical process concerning users’ experiences, and by introducing communicative affordances as a framework to advance UCC in service, an in-depth understanding of the diverse and ever-evolving landscape of communication in service is offered.

Privilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and silence for relatively privileged professionals in high-intensity knowledge businesses (KIBs).

This paper draws on 112 interviews in two rounds of interviews using the collaborative interactive action research method. The analysis focuses on processes of recruitment, careers and negotiation of boundaries between work and nonwork in these KIBs. The authors study how relative privilege within social inequalities connects with silences in multiple ways, and how the invisibility of privilege operates at different levels: individual identities and interpersonal actions of privilege (micro), as organizational level phenomena (meso) or as societally constructed (macro).

At each level, privilege is reproduced in part through silence. The authors also examine how processes connecting silence, privilege and social inequalities operate differently in relation to both disadvantage and the disadvantaged, and privilege and the privileged.

This study is relevant for organization studies, especially in the kinds of “multi-privileged” contexts where inequalities, disadvantages and subordination may remain hidden and silenced, and, thus, are continuously reproduced.

While most marketing research on organic products refers to the premium price levels of organic products, little research exists on consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions or discounts of organic products. The present study aims to fill this research gap.

To develop alternative hypotheses about consumers’ behavioural responses to price promotions of organic fast-moving consumer good (FMCG) products, the authors used the researcher-introspection method in a pre-study. To test the hypotheses developed based on the pre-study, the authors conducted a field experiment on online advertising of an FMCG sold in drugstores. In the field experiment, the authors exposed consumers to an online ad featuring either a price promotion (−20%) or the regular price of the product. The ads also varied in terms of whether they contained explicit organic claims or not, and whether they included implicit organic cues or not.

The price promotion increased the clickthrough rate of the ad both when combined with an explicit organic claim and when combined with the implicit cue of green product pack. The results suggest that consumers do not have significant suspicions about price promotions of organic products, but rather presume that the price promotion of an organic FMCG product is a periodical promotional action, similar to the price promotions for conventional, non-organic products. Also, consumers seem to assume that the regular prices of organic FMCG products are so high that the retailer/manufacturer can well afford periodic price discounts.

The present research shifts the focus of organic marketing research from the premium price levels to the effectiveness of price promotions and discounts. Further, the present results contrast with certain earlier studies that have questioned the effectiveness of price promotions for organic products.

The results have different implications for marketing managers of brands not yet providing organic product versions in the market, of brands producing non-organic products, which cannot easily be rendered organic, and of brands offering organic products in the market.

This is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first empirical study and field experiment on price promotions of organic products, including explicit organic claims.