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The purpose of this paper is to explore US students’ experience in for-credit, unpaid internships overseas with particular reference to their personal development, how they mobilised their knowledge across contexts, their learning as acquisition and as participation, and what they contributed. Students were thought likely to encounter three forms of cultural differences: national, workplace and academic.

In total, 17 students in communication, marketing or related fields from the USA were placed in four-week internships in Wellington, New Zealand. Outcomes for them were assessed first, via weekly discussions in which they described what they had encountered that week, second, via the presentations they gave at the end of the course to internship hosts and university staff on the subject of what they had found challenging and what they had learned and contributed, and third, through assessment of students’ formal written assignments to discover what they said they had learned and what they had contributed.

Students were surprised at how proactive their internship hosts expected them to be and at how little overt direction they received. While they valued their opportunity to make a contribution to their workplace, they found this challenging. Students gave instances of their learning both as individuals and in groups. No mention was made of academic cultural differences being an issue, but they often described the demanding nature of the national and workplace cultural differences that they encountered.

The study reports on only one cohort of students in one year, so a longitudinal study of further cohorts might provide different findings.

Insights are provided into how students saw themselves as changing from their involvement. Students described the challenges they faced, how they reacted to those challenges and their most important forms of learning.

This research explores two interconnected questions: (1) How do we approach stylistic features of multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters? (2) Do said artifacts designed for different purposes exhibit systematic stylistic differences? Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic categorization, this study develops a framework for examining concision, one of the primary stylistic considerations for multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters. This paper illustrates the use of this framework by exploring the correlation between rhetorical purpose and concision in posters created and disseminated before and during the 2011–2012 Québécois student movement. This study fine-tunes our existing knowledge on multimodality with style sensitivity, and demonstrates how an economy-of-sign based semiotic approach could enrich the empirical examination of multimodal rhetorical artifacts by generating more controlled interpretations.

This research aimed to obtain insights into how farmers on small and medium‐sized farms perceived the benefits of the information they receive from their interpersonal networks and other sources.

Farmers' information environments were explored using socio‐spatial knowledge networks, diaries and in‐depth interviews (to draw out participants' interpretations of significance). This enabled the perceived benefits of information to be interpreted within the context of participants' interpersonal networks.

Both on and off‐farm information sources were important. The benefit most valued was when farmers perceived they were enabled to challenge or reframe their thinking about professional and business issues.

The study of information benefits is still relatively new, but a fuller appreciation of how learners perceive benefits from incoming information may provide insights into how to present information in ways that foster useful outcomes. Possible gaps and limitations in farmers' information supply may also follow the identification of how benefits are perceived.

Farmers' access to information was mainly shaped by the particularities of the contexts within which they lived and worked. Yet they proactively kept up significant interpersonal connections even at a distance (by means such as by phone contact with former neighbours who now lived elsewhere). Farmers' sources of information were closely aligned to the information they already possessed, so that “what they know” was intimately configured within “who they are” as members of a family, a community, and as farmers.

This chapter focuses on learning networks. The authors describe the six facets of knowledge networks for learning contexts. The importance of three facets is called out, including geography, topology, and nodes. The authors provide four networks, including pedagogy networks – that is, teachers, certification and professional learning networks, school networks, and informal and collaborative learning networks.

Today, governance of food safety and quality as well as environmental aspects of food chains increasingly operates through public and private standards. This governance, as led by retail power, is often interpreted to undermine farmer’s agrarian independence by dictating detailed agricultural practices on the farm, thereby conditioning access into the food chain. Focusing on farmers’ discursive resources, agrarian writing implies an alternative social force, constructed here as farmer’s freedom. By analysing qualitative data from Finland along the theoretical axes of farmers’ interest in socio-economic achievement and willingness to comply with standards, a more nuanced understanding of farmers’ occupational freedom emerges. Freedom in economic interests and organic farming represents farmers as standard takers as standards supported values most important for them. Realizing freedom in economic creativity can be antagonistic to (public) standards and lead to contestations and negotiations for feasibility. Finally, freedom in self-sufficiency is antithetical to the commercial food chain; however, dissenting from standards displays a strong capacity to close the metabolic rift, along with organic farming. The evidence from the study suggests that farmers’ freedom has the character of a social force to modify food chains and to increase their socio-economic and environmental sustainability and to call for consumers’ freedom to join farmers’ efforts.

The purpose of this study is to identify the role of social media in implementing effective organizational change. The study illuminates how social media applications support the antecedents of organizational change in the workplace.

The study followed an interpretive approach based on qualitative design and grounded theory using 41 non-directive and semi-structured interviews with change leaders and change recipients. These respondents were chosen using purposive sampling and thematic analysis was then performed using NVivo 11-Plus software.

This research highlights how social media applications can be used to overcome the challenges of organizational change implementation. The findings of the study illuminate various emerging themes such as social media applications are beneficial for fostering knowledge sharing about change processes and enhancing effective communication during change formulation and implementation. It can increase the level of trust and participation in decision-making and decrease the level of resistance to change. Also, it can enhance the level of support for change acceptance in the workplace.

Social media application (SMAs) are helpful to foster informal, constructive and relevant discussion with respect to routines organizational tasks, employee concerns about new changes, information about job security and financial and non-financial benefits after change implementation. The effective and efficient use of SMAs helps organizations to foster knowledge amongst employees and they can address various critical issues i.e. employee uncertainties about change initiatives, social consensus on the solution of problems and interactive communication among social actors within a network.

The study represents an effort to explore seldom-researched aspects such as the role of social media in the context of change formulation and implementation at the workplace. Social media applications have become popular across the world and the speed of their usage is rising day by day, but their real contribution toward organizational change has not yet been fully understood.

Motivated by the need for research on the relationship between health app usage and health-related outcomes in the form of health status and life satisfaction, this study builds on self-regulation theory to construct a research model for elucidating how health app quality affects health information literacy, health app usage and physical activity.

To empirically validate the proposed research model, a large-scale questionnaire survey on health app usage was administered on a sample of 6,948 respondents recruited from a university in China. Structural equation modeling was employed for data analysis.

Empirical findings demonstrate that health app quality positively affects self-regulation with respect to health app usage, health information literacy and physical activity. Taken together, these self-regulated behaviors drive health-related outcomes for health status and life satisfaction.

This study advances extant literature on health app usage through the application of self-regulation theory to investigate the effects of technological interventions in healthcare. Findings offer practical implications for how health apps can be leveraged to realize positive health-related outcomes.