Abstract This article reports on the first results of the educational model piloted in EUTOPIA, a transnational university alliance established under the European University initiative. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings and core principles of our model which seeks to enable students, academics and societal partners to form Connected Learning Communities through enhancing existing learning activities and practices in teaching and learning. We elaborate on the value added of our model for developing a diverse portfolio of activities and a dynamic structure that has the potential to offer international learning opportunities to a large and diverse group of students, academic staff and societal partners. We close the article with recommendations for the results of European University Alliance pilots to reach their full innovation potential.

This article reports on the first results of the educational model piloted in EUTOPIA, a transnational university alliance established under the European University initiative. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings and core principles of our model which seeks to enable students, academics and societal partners to form Conactivities and practices in teaching and learning. We elaborate on the value added of our model for developing a diverse portfolio of activities and a dynamic structure that has the potential to offer international learning opportunities to a large and diverse group of students, academic staff and societal partners. We close the article with recommendations for the results of European University Alliance pilots to reach their full innovation potential.

This paper provides a first study into the complex setting of Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD), through a textual trajectory lens. We draw on ongoing research on risk negotiation in emergency decision making and we unpack the process by which texts are produced and co-produced in the daily practice of multiprofessional teams making time sensitive, high-stakes decisions. We introduce an Interactional Sociolinguistic (IS) model, P.A.T.H.S. (standing for: Participants, Artefacts, Transition Stages, Historicity, Setting) to contribute to the study of how complex text trajectories work in professional settings, and the ensuing implications for research methodology and design, using EMD as a case in point. The paper discusses textual trajectories and illustrates the EMD textual ecosystem through P.A.T.H.S. before turning to a case to illustrate the patterns in our data. We close the paper with implications and directions for future research.

This article is concerned with the in situ negotiation of epistemic authority through the mobilisation of summaries in the context of medical emergencies. It focuses on the use of the discourse marker so in prefacing summaries as a strategy for claiming epistemic primacy, with particular attention being paid to so's multimodal accomplishment. Taking an interactional sociolinguistic approach, we bring together simulated and real-life trauma emergencies and zoom in on the role of the institutionally defined team leader.Our findings illustrate that summarising in this context is almost exclusively reserved for team leaders, with so being an integral part in this process, consistently prefacing team leaders’ summaries. These summary acts, in turn, contribute to the summarisation process, which is part and parcel of role performance and doing leadership. We unpack the spatiotemporal dimensions of so, highlighting the systematicity of its use in the material space of the emergency room, and make a case for the need to capture discourse markers in the situated spatiolinguistic context.

Although there is a vast body of work on legitimacy, we still have a limited understanding of the discursive aspects of moral legitimation. This is surprising considering the increase in morally laden societal discussions, for example related to understanding gender, rights and regulations during a pandemic, political scandals and ethics of global business amongst others. In particular, from an organization studies perspective, we lack knowledge on how journalists negotiate moral legitimation of controversial organizational decisions such as closures or shutdown decisions related to global industrial restructuring. Therefore, drawing on the critical discourse studies tradition, we examine the media coverage of controversial shutdowns in Finland over the past 2 decades. Our analysis suggests three moral legitimation types: moral engaging, moral distancing and moral surrendering. These types involve specific discursive moralization practices and strategies, and they each paint a different picture of the moral options, responsibility, and inevitability in these decisions. These types can be found in the same texts supporting each other, but they also help us understand how legitimation may involve a pattern where the most explicit reflections (moral engagement) are followed by more indirect (moral distancing) and less apparent but very powerful (moral surrendering) forms of legitimation. By so doing, we also offer a heuristic that can, with due caution, be used for analyzing other texts on adverse effects of globalization or events that might include moral and ideological conflicts.

This article is concerned with the in situ negotiation of epistemic primacy in the context of medical emergencies. It investigates the mobilisation of questions and positioning in the material space as mechanisms for claiming control and for co-constructing epistemic authority. We bring together two high-risk, high-pressure emergency contexts – obstetrics and major trauma – and show the patterns that emerged from a bottom-up interactional sociolinguistic analysis of the data. We draw on a corpus of approximately 400 questions from a sample of ten teams; we zoom in on the role of the institutionally defined team leader, while special attention is also paid to the ways in which institutional power asymmetries are negotiated across the team in leadership enactment. We discuss the typology of questions that emerged from our data on a spectrum from a not knowing (K?) to a knowing (K+) status. Our analysis demonstrates consistent patterns in displays of epistemic primacy, with team leaders raising most of the questions indicating a K+ status across contexts. Further, we show that verbal claims of epistemic primacy are conditioned upon team leaders’ positioning at specific material zones of the emergency room as an integral part of doing their role.

The paper explores the in situ negotiation of in/exclusion in and through language in a multilingual professional setting, paying special attention to the relationship between language and space. We argue that multilingual practices and material space are co-constitutive; individuals enact group membership and professional roles spatiolinguistically and re/produce in/visible social and material boundaries. Despite the well-established literature on in/exclusion, the ways in which it is negotiated in asymmetrical, emplaced, workplace encounters is still underexplored. We introduce a topographies of practice framework and show how professional asymmetries are enacted in and through language choice and language use in the multilingual workplace. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic approach and report on the analysis of 23 h of interactional data and 42 h of ethnographic observations from a professional, multilingual kitchen in Finland. We show patterns that are un/marked in the data and constitute the norms in this particular workplace. We argue that topographies of practice are topographies of in/exclusion enacted in and through situated encounters; we pay special attention to the role of employees who are legitimised to cross visible and invisible boundaries and we close the paper with recommendations for future research.

Reflexivity is often described as one of the core components of qualitative research, yet language-sensitive management research has paid surprisingly little attention to the role of a researcher in the knowledge (re)production process. In this chapter, we suggest that the relationship between knowledge claims and a researcher's various positions should be made more explicit through greater engagement with reflexivity. Drawing on our own ethnographic work, we put forward three main ideas about reflexive practice. First, reflexivity should be treated as part of epistemological considerations throughout the research process, and not merely limited to methodological approach. Second, epistemic reflexivity enhances the critical reading of assumptions. Third, a reflexive approach can provide access to a multilevel analysis of language use in the workplace. By reflecting on different datasets from two workplace contexts, we seek to address the ways in which a researcher's subjectivities are part of the research outcomes.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of language ideologies in negotiating organisational relationships in a Korean multinational company (MNC). By adopting an interactional sociolinguistics (IS) approach, this paper illustrates how language becomes part of a mechanism of negotiating group membership and of perpetuating or challenging power asymmetries through social and ideological processes. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on interview data from an ethnographic case study of a Korean MNC to understand language ideologies in one working team. The interview data are analysed through an IS framework to connect the situated interaction to the broader social context. Findings This paper shows that participants’ discourse of linguistic differentiation becomes an interactional resource in challenging the organisational status quo. Linguistic superiority/inferiority is constructed through particular sequencing and the systematic production of a dichotomy between two groups – expatriate managers and local employees – at various levels of their company structure. Group membership is enacted temporarily in positioning the self and the others. Originality/value This paper offers a methodological contribution to international business language-sensitive research on language and power by conducting interactional analysis of interview talk. Through the lens of IS, it provides insights into how discourse becomes a primary site of negotiating power and status and a multi-level approach to the study of organisational power dynamics and the complex linguistic landscape of any workplace.

This paper reports on a model for participatory curriculum development that builds on a 'connected learning communities' (CLC) approach. We describe and analyse the trajectory of six CLC-cases using a framework informed by Social Practice Theory (SPT). The activities we report on took place during the first pilot year (2020-2021) of a transnational University Alliance involving six European universities. Data were drawn from document analysis, direct observations and ongoing dialogue with students and staff involved in the CLCs. Our findings illustrate the affordances of building on existing practice for curriculum development in international contexts and point out the importance of well-equipped collaborative environments that encourage critical analysis and active experimentation. We found that the CLC model and SPT framework are helpful contributions in the field of curriculum development and argue that connected curriculum-making approaches help shape versatile environments that can effectively transform and enhance educational provisions, experiences and outcomes.

Framework: Although participatory approaches highlight the expertise of the participants and assign them responsibilities over the research process, there is less systematic discussion about the participants’ actual involvement in practice especially in the analysis and interpretation of the data. Despite the claims of equal partnership, the participant is often still perceived as the subject revealing hidden yet simple inside knowledge (first order account) around which the researcher, as a neutral outsider, builds complex theories by drawing on his/her scientific expertise (second order account). Goal and method: Our goal is to investigate how first and second order accounts contribute to a multi-layered analysis of the interview encounter by challenging binary thinking. We also explore the way interactional sociolinguistic methodology can inform participatory research by analyzing the way first and second order accounts are negotiated between interviewer and participant. We present the analysis of a discourse-based interview extract from our ongoing and completed work on the discourse analysis of formality in workplace emails in multinational companies in Greece. Findings: The results illustrate iterative processes of negotiation of meaning in situ and in line with the participants’ temporary and social roles. They highlight the importance of collaborative framing of the interpretation of and theorization from data in which the participants are co-creators. Shifting from static and purely essentialistic or constructivist understandings of the interviewer and participant to a holistic approach, this paper frames the interview encounter as an interactional domain of activity that can better capture the complexity of the lived experience.

Child protection conferences are key meetings in the social work child protection process in England. They provide the context where decisions are made about how best to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and constitute an important opportunity for social work services to work in partnership with parents; yet there is little research about what happens interactionally in these meetings and particularly about parents' participation. Using interactional sociolinguistics, we analyse the data from three audio-recorded child protection conferences, focussing on sequences where concerns are raised and responded to, to illuminate how parent involvement is accomplished interactionally. We look specifically at the linguistic and discursive features of turns and the management of the floor, connecting the sequential nature of the account sequences to presence and participation. The analysis shows a contrast between professionals' participation versus parents' presence in this asymmetrical event, suggesting a marginalisation of parents' contributions and a mismatch between the principle of partnership working with parents and practice in this area of child protection social work.

Communication is associated with a significant percentage of errors or omissions in secondary healthcare across specialities; it is also the core process in and through which medical teams manage tasks, establish a rhythm and relationship between themselves and the patient, all of which are critical components of clinical practice. Despite this, however, communication is framed in medical training and the literature in either narrow terms or in a broad and fuzzy way, and it is indicative of the issue that teamwork and team communication are perceived and treated separately. In this paper, we draw on completed and ongoing interdisciplinary work to show how teams interact through illustrative examples from a large project on the management of obstetric emergencies. We provide a brief overview of the limitations in current tools and approaches, and we show how research under disciplines that have a long tradition in the analysis of interaction, and particularly healthcare sociolinguistics, can be translated and make a solid contribution to medical research and training.

This paper explores the role of narratives as resources for enacting group membership and community building in the case of one company, a Greek-Turkish partnership, SforSteel. We pay special attention to the function of iterative stories and specifically one that indexes the origin of the partnership. The analysis shows that the story, and its episodes, act as significant interactional resources for partners to claim a shared regional identity, that of people coming from the area of Trabzon in the Black Sea region. By negotiating a common origin, the partners simultaneously strengthen their long-term relationship and continuously reconnect the past to the present. The strong long-term relationship has a symbolic status and constitutes a condition for being accepted in this community. Through the analysis of this story our discussion addresses the importance of iterativity and the foundational relationship between community and trust.