Clarifying Working Capital vs. Change in Working Capital

Hi all, I've been having some confusion over differentiating between Working Capital and Change in Working Capital as it relates to the Cash Flow statement. I understand that Working Capital is defined as Current Assets subtracted by Current Liabilities, but what's rather less clear to me is whether I should do Change in Working Capital = Current WC - Previous WC or = Previous WC - Current WC.

My current understanding is that, if we have a standard retail company and a standard tech company, then the retail company will likely have a positive/large Working Capital because they need to have a lot of inventory, and the tech company will have a small/negative Working Capital. Here's my questions that I'm hoping for some clarification with:

1) Was my interpretation for Working Capital itself correct?

Let's say for example, the tech company sells a subscription-based service and the retail company has to constantly buy new inventory.

3) For the Change in Working Capital, which one is likely to be positive, and which one is likely to be negative? Does it matter which formula I use?

4) This is partly the reason why I emphasized Change: Is there a scenario where a company, in normal operation, consistently has a negative working capital but positive change in working capital, and vice versa? Or should the signs for working capital and change in working capital typically be the same?

5) How would each scenario (i.e., the tech company selling another subscription and the retail company buying some more inventory) impact the Cash Flow statement? Are things such as deferred revenue relevant to the tech company?

Thanks so much for all the help! This has been a source of some confusion for me (primarily because of the two different formulas there), so I'm hoping to just get a consistent way to think about it.