Since its beginnings in the 19^th century, the liner shipping industry has shown specific peculiarities characterized by close collaboration between sea carriers. This cooperation has materialized through various types of inter-firm agreements that have been exempted from the key principles of competition law. Recently, strong criticism has emerged against strategic alliances and related agreements that rule a concentrated market where operators are strongly interrelated and increasingly integrated. However, the maritime management literature so far has given little attention to the concrete provisions of these agreements, which still appear as ‘black boxes.’ To fill this gap, we collected 61 enforced cooperative agreements registered with the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission from 1973 to 2020 using a three-way comparison through legal, linguistic, and business lenses of the differences between older and newer types of agreements. We underline the key temporal evolutions of these contracts and show how ocean carriers have incorporated new legal constraints and strategic needs driven by structural market changes toward greater logistics integration.

There is little linguistic research on the structure of judicial opinions from a discourse analysis perspective. There are, however, many professional resources about writing judicial opinions. This paper contributes to genre theory and linguistics of languages for specific purposes by proposing a role for professional writing advice. We also construct a typology of macrostructures proposed by professionals and compare them to the move structure of authentic judicial opinions. Our results show that, in terms of large discourse units, professional resources and move analysis seem to converge. Professional resources, however, do not describe the variation that may be observed in authentic documents. In this way, corpora of professional advice may contribute to a deeper understanding of how a discourse community represents its own genres.

Textual standardization is the expected route for documents in specific disciplinary fields, particularly for legal documents (Gotti 2012). Yet organizations in these fields need common conventions that allow for innovation and flexibility as they face complex professional contexts (Bhatia 2012). Our qualitative data concerning the maritime shipping industry’s use of the legal instruments known as “Cooperative Working Agreements” give evidence that variability allows communities to attain latent professional goals. Genre in language for special purposes, even in legal language, should be seen a double-edged sword, allowing professional communities to legitimately accomplish goals through both standardization and variability.

This paper aims to explore the conceptual potential of the Deleuzian notion of the encounter in order to better understand the genealogy of opportunities. We adopt a processual perspective of opportunities. In order to translate this notion to the domain of entrepreneurship, we analysed and interpreted Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. This film follows the creation of the first club in the United States that illegally allowed HIV-positive people to supply themselves with foreign antiretroviral drugs from Mexico or Japan. The article highlights encounters in this process that disturb the entrepreneur’s belief systems and allow him or her to be open to potential opportunity. It finally explores how the encounter may improve our understanding of the political becoming of opportunities within the entrepreneurial process.

L’article s’intéresse aux nouvelles formes d’agriculture, concept issu essentiellement de la presse généraliste et qui correspond à des formes innovantes ou réinventées d’agriculture comme la permaculture, l’aquaponie, la culture sur toits, dans les parkings ou dans des fermes verticales. Il se demande s’il s’agit d’un nouveau modèle agricole au sens où l’entend la littérature. En se basant sur le corpus théorique des logiques institutionnelles et en s’appuyant sur une double analyse textométrique et bibliométrique de la presse, il montre que les nouvelles formes d’agriculture sont une grappe de modèles dont les contours sont évolutifs. L’article contribue ainsi à la recherche sur la coexistence des modèles agricoles et met en évidence le rôle de la presse dans la fabrique des modèles.

In the era of Big Textual Data, Applied Foreign Languages (LEA) programs have a clear niche to occupy in the set of degree programs offering both business and language courses. LEA’s combined emphasis on humanities, social sciences, and business courses has the potential to allow students to gain a better understanding of the institutional processes in which discourse participates in organizational contexts. In addition, the appearance of textometric software, such as Iramuteq (Ratinaud 2014), provides a relatively user-friendly method for applying discourse analysis to large amounts of organizational discourse. This paper argues that discourse analysis through textometry can be used to enhance LEA students’ analysis of organizational culture though a data-driven learning approach. We present an exploratory study of textometry used in an LEA course.