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Serious leisure can have a positive impact on wellbeing, defined by six attributes: perseverance, significant personal effort, career, durable benefits, strong identity, and unique ethos. There are hundreds of airshows organized annually, yet the pilots are under-researched in event tourism research. This study examines pilots’ activity through content (online reviews, videos) and semiotic (photos) analyses. Findings show pilots demonstrate the six attributes of serious leisure. Because flying is a highly invested and specialized leisure pursuit, and requires ongoing commitment marked by distinct levels of accomplishment, pilots’ sense of identity, networks, wellbeing, and quality of life are all enhanced through flying. The study establishes a foundation for future studies on pilots as serious leisure travelers at airshows, and generates useful implications for marketing airshows to pilots. It also discusses the context of contemporary discourses that advance the serious leisure paradigm.

The threshold concepts approach to student learning and curriculum design now informs an empirical research base comprising over 170 disciplinary and professional contexts. It draws extensively on the notion of troublesomeness in a 'liminal' space of learning. The latter is a transformative state in the process of learning in which there is a reformulation of the learner's meaning frame and an accompanying shift in the learner's ontology or subjectivity. Within the extensive literature on threshold concepts, however, the notion of liminal space has remained relatively ill-defined. This paper explores this spatial metaphor to help clarify the difficulties that some teachers observe in the classroom in regard to their students' understanding. It employs a novel and distinctive approach drawn from semiotic theory to to provide some explanatory insight into learning within the liminal space and render it more open to analysis. The paper develops its argument through four distinct phases. Firstly it explores the spatial metaphor of liminality to gain further purchase on the nature of this transformative space. The second section introduces semiotic theory and indicates how this will be used through a series of graphical and visual devices to render the liminal space more open to analysis. The third section then employs semiotic analysis to nine dimensions of pedagogical content knowledge to gain further insight into what may characterise student conceptual difficulty within the liminal state. The fourth and concluding section emphasises the role of context in conceptual discrimination before advocating a transactional curriculum inquiry approach to future research in this field. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

In this paper, we consider gestures as part of the resources activated in the mathematics classroom: speech, inscriptions, artifacts, etc. As such, gestures are seen as one of the semiotic tools used by students and teacher in mathematics teaching-learning. To analyze them, we introduce a suitable model, the semiotic bundle. It allows focusing on the relationships of gestures with the other semiotic resources within a multimodal approach. It also enables framing the mediating action of the teacher in the classroom: in this respect, we introduce the notion of semiotic game where gestures are one of the major ingredients.

The aim of this article is to carry out a work of networking theories which combines two perspectives on the mathematical activity involved in a modelling process, in order to answer the following question: To what extent does the application of the onto-semiotic tools complement the analysis from a cognitive perspective of a mathematical modelling process? To this end, we considered two theoretical frameworks: on the one hand, the onto-semiotic approach, which provides tools for the analysis of any mathematical activity and which here we applied to the activity of modelling; on the other hand, the modelling cycle from a cognitive perspective, which is a reflection on the specific mathematical activity of modelling. Then, we took a modelling problem that we applied to prospective mathematics teachers (at undergraduate and postgraduate level), and we analysed it from the perspective of both frameworks, in order to identify concordances and complementarities between these two ways of analysing the mathematical activity involved in the modelling process. The main conclusion is that both frameworks complement each other for a more detailed analysis of the mathematical activity that underlies the modelling process. Specifically, the analysis with the tools provided by the onto-semiotic approach reveals the phases or transitions of the modelling cycle as a conglomerate of mathematical practices, processes, and the primary objects activated in these practices.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate how firms disclose the presentation and content of business model (BM) information in corporate reports to manage their legitimacy in response to European Directive 2014/95.Design/methodology/approachLegitimacy theory is used to identify disclosure strategies pursued by firms in reaction to the new regulation. To understand how firms adopt these strategic responses, semiotic analysis is applied to a sample of European companies’ reports through Crowther’s (2012) framework, which is based on a mechanism of binary oppositions.FindingsHalf of the sample strategically choose to comply with the European Union (EU) Directive regarding BM information through the use of non-accounting language, figures, and diagrams. Other firms did not disclose any substantive information but managed the impression of compliance with the regulation, while the remainder of the sample dismissed the regulation altogether.Research limitations/implicationsThis study demonstrates how organisations use the disclosure of BM information in their corporate reports to control their legitimacy. The results support the idea that firms can acquire legitimacy by complying with the law or giving the impression of compliance with the regulation. This study provides evidence on the first-time adoption of the EU Directive, and therefore, future research can enlarge the sample and conduct the analysis over a broader time frame.Practical implicationsA more precise indication of the EU Directive regarding “where” firms should report BM information, “how” the description of a BM should refer to the environmental, social, governance (ESG) factors, and a set of performance measures to track the evolution of a company’s BM overtime is needed.Originality/valueWhile there has been a notable amount of research that has applied content analysis methodologies to investigate the thematic and syntactic aspects of BM disclosure in corporate reports, only a few studies have investigated BM disclosures in relation to the EU Directive. Furthermore, the application of semiotic analysis extends beyond traditional content analysis methodologies because it considers the structure of the story at many levels, thus developing a more complete textual picture of how BMs are described, allowing an analysis of the reasons behind the disclosure strategies pursued by firms.

Indeterminacy in music, a well known neo-avant-garde approach of composing sound where some features of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter’s free choice, became noticeable among some American music composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff in the mid 20th century. Simultaneously, a group of artists from the West created “abstract expressionism” in visual arts, which showed a strong resemblance with this “indeterminate music”, both using two kinds of abstract languages. The commonality among these two art forms is the free improvisation of creative activity. The correspondence between the indeterminate music induced emotions and the depicted emotional contents in paintings is a relevant area which is still scientifically unexplored. To investigate the same, we conducted a case study where a visual artist listened to four music clips composed by the above mentioned musicians and created four paintings. The visual artist is strongly inspired by the abstract expressionist methods and these methods lend well to inspirational work based on listening to indeterminate music.To understand the nature of intermediality, if any, that exists between “indeterminate music” and “evoked abstraction” in paintings, the artist’s phenomenological interpretations of the process was compared with detailed semiotic analysis of specific musical and visual elements and the nature of their relatedness. Fractal analysis in the form of Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) was also done on both the acoustic waveforms of the chosen music clips and the corresponding paintings to explore possible correlations. Some unique findings yielded from the analysis, which hint toward strong correlation between the prominent musical features of indeterminate music and the prominent visual features of the paintings inspired by them. This novel study has the potential to offer both new methodology as well as better understanding the features of intermediality between “indeterminate music” and visual art.

Purpose Drawing from multiple historical sources, this study aims to analyze the social, political and ideological values of Beijing Opera Costumes (henceforth Jingju costumes), a special stage costume, in pre-1949 China. Design/methodology/approach The Critical Historical Research Method (CHRM) and visual social semiotic analysis yielded a critical analysis of Jingju costumes’ profound historicity (that is, their sociohistorically embedded styles, multiple marketing functions, connotations and consumptions). Findings Relying on CHRM and visual social semiotic analysis, this study examines the multifaceted sociopolitical connotations and multilateral marketing functions of Jingju costumes in pre-1949 China. Research limitations/implications This study extends the discussion around stage costumes, informs cultural or entertainment marketing research and deepens a theoretical understanding of the relationship between consuming objects and consumers, and the embedding context that hosts such a relationship. Practical implications This study helps to broaden the understanding of fashion and stage costume industries. Social implications It helps to understand how stage costumes can be used to express political, social and culture values. Originality/value To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of the sociopolitical multiplicity of Jingju costumes, an innovative cultural product marketed and consumed in pre-1949 China. In addition to elaborating on the theatrical and artistic functions of Jingju costumes, this study examines how specific designs and styles of Jingju costumes helped to market the Jingju (Beijing Opera), multiple political values and Chineseness in pre-1949 China.

This paper investigates the sound design of robots in films and their potential influence on the field of social robotics. Cinematic robot portrayals have inspired researchers and practitioners in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). While the non-verbal sounds of iconic film robots like R2-D2 and Wall-E have been explored, this study takes a more comprehensive approach. We explore a broader selection of 15 films featuring humanoid robots across decades through a semiotic analysis of their non-verbal communication sounds, including those related to movements and internal mechanisms . Informed by Bateman and Schmidt’s multimodal film analysis framework, which draws on Saussure’s organization of signs through paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, our analysis interprets the paradigmatic axis as an examination of the sound and the syntagmatic axis as an exploration of the events surrounding the sound. The findings uncover two primary film robot sound materials: mechanical and synthetic. Furthermore, the analysis revealed several narrative themes, categorized into two groups based on the syntagmatic focus: sounds associated with the robots’ visual appearances and sounds linked to the broader elements within the scene. The discussion section explores the implications of these findings for social robotics, including the importance of sound materials, the role of movement sounds in communication and emotional expression, and the significance of narrative and context in human-robot interaction. The paper also acknowledges the challenges in translating film sound design into practical applications in social robotics. This study provides valuable insights for HRI researchers, practitioners, and sound designers seeking to enhance non-verbal auditory expressions in social robots.

Audio description (AD) is a type of accessible translation consisting of a process of intersemiotic translations from images into words. Its objective is, mainly, allowing people with visual disabilities to create a mental image of the things they cannot perceive visually. In this study, we will address a type of AD that has not been explored in academic and professional contexts: church AD, where the source text is the church, understood to be the architectonic structure used for Christian worship. Our aim is to provide a basis for the study and practice of church AD. To this end, we propose three approaches: functional and contextual, semiotic and normative. The first approach describes the different ways in which churches are used today and the context in which the audio described text is produced. The second helps to identify the visual keys that form the church's meaning and to guide the audio describer in selecting translatable information. The last one provides AD guidelines or strategies that can be applied to the submodality of AD analyzed.