This study provides insight into lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Participant metaphors of the pandemic were collected by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews ( N = 44). Participants were asked to compare the pandemic with an animal and with a color, and to provide contextual sensemaking about their metaphors. A metaphor analysis revealed four convergent mental models of participants’ pandemic experiences (i.e., uncertainty, danger, grotesque, and misery) as well as four primary emotions associated with those mental models (i.e., grief, disgust, anger, and fear). Through metaphor, participants were able to articulate deeply felt, implicit emotions about their pandemic experiences that were otherwise obscured and undiscussable. Theoretical and practical implications of these collective mental models and associated collective emotions related to the unprecedented collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

Athlete safety and concussion injury have garnered considerable attention recently, and appropriate evaluation of athletes following head impacts depends, in part, on athletes’ self-reporting of the symptoms. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has focused primarily on concussion injury education to encourage self-reporting; however, such efforts have not been especially effective and many potential injuries continue to go unreported. This research investigates cultural narratives, derived from sports media and popular culture, and how their narrative logics contribute to the context in which student-athletes make head injury reporting decisions and how these narratives offer templates for understanding potential consequences. We argue that performance-oriented narratives are more prevalent and showcase pathways to more immediate satisfaction of desires or goals. Ultimately, we argue that not only does analysis of prevailing cultural narratives illuminate the context in which athletes make reporting decisions but also that such understanding could inform narrative-based interventions in order to emphasize and model recommended behaviors, such as injury reporting, and values, such as long-term brain health and player wellness.

This message-production experiment demonstrates that supervisors can mitigate the workplace moral mum effect and encourage upward ethical dissent by talking about ethics with subordinates (i.e., moral talk contagion). Working adults (N = 324) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical request by their supervisor in one of five scenarios that varied by supervisor talk type and trust-in-supervisor or a baseline-control condition. Content and contingency table analyses revealed participants were twice as likely to invoke explicitly moralized upward dissent to an unethical business request from a supervisor when the supervisor was known for describing work situations in ethical terms. In addition, the V-shaped relationship between trust-in-supervisor and upward ethical dissent indicated that participants in the high-and low-trust conditions were twice as likely to engage in upward ethical dissent as those in the baseline-control condition. Implications for theory and practice conclude the essay.

This ethnographic study describes how authority figures may unwittingly invite and co-create a team's collective resistance in response to their actions. The study documents two pivotal organizational communication episodes experienced by two separate teams within a Collegiate Division I Athletic Department. A positioning analysis of the episodes revealed how a specific speech act (what we label "managerial inquisition") partially facilitated athletes' collective resistance to coaching staff. Our analysis suggested that coaches' directives implicated team members' identity needs and moral obligations to one another, which either encouraged or discouraged collective resistance to emerge within the unfolding discourse. This essay contributes to the team and organizational resistance literature by documenting how resistance can be co-created by management during control attempts.

The literature suggests that the patient-perspective approach (i.e., eliciting and responding to patients' perspectives, including beliefs, preferences, values, and attitudes) to patient-centered care (PCC) is not a reliable predictor of positive outcomes; however, little is known about why the patient-perspective approach does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes. By using discourse analysis to examine 44 segments of oncologist-patient interactions, we found that providers' use of patient-perspective contextualization can affect the quality of care through (a) constructing the meanings of patient conditions, (b) controlling interpreting frames for patient conditions, and (c) manipulating patient preferences through strategic information sharing. We concluded that providers' use of patient-perspective contextualization is an insufficient indicator of PCC because these discursive strategies can be used to control and manipulate patient preferences and perspectives. At times, providers' patient-perspective contextualization can silence patients' voice and appear discriminatory.