Varied Perspectives: An Inquest of Four Organizational and Ethical Issues

This thesis presents my responses to questions posed by four professors with whom I studied while completing my coursework in the Organizational Dynamics Master’s Degree Program at the University of Pennsylvania. My thesis represents a composite of the theoretical and practical knowledge I gained through my coursework and interactions with my peers and professors in the MSOD program. My project focuses on organizational culture, ethics, leadership coaching, and strategy to formulate an overview of my learning and applying that learning to answer the questions presented to me by some of the professors with whom I studied. Dr. Elijah Anderson asked me to conduct a literature review and write a proposal for an ethnographic study of an important aspect of the organization. Professor Andrew Lamas presented me with two essays, one from Walter Benjamin, and one from Eben Moglen, asked me to analyze them, and to relate them to an important 21st-century topic. Dr. Rod Napier required me to distinguish executive coaching from the field from therapy, and to build a case for the skill requirements an executive coach needs to help clients successfully. Finally, Professor Eric van Merkensteijn requested that I analyze the Ford Motor Company and develop a strategic plan to return the company to solvency

Employees on social media: A multi-spokespeople model of CSR communication

Increasing societal and stakeholder expectations, along with easy access to information through social media, means corporations are asked for more information. The traditional approach to CSR communication, with corporations controlling what and how much to share with stakeholders has been restructured by social media, with stakeholders taking control. As legitimacy on social media is created through the positive and negative judgements of stakeholders, corporations must plan how to meet stakeholder demands for information effectively and legitimately, and this includes choosing appropriate spokespeople. Corporations in India have now turned towards their employees as CSR spokespeople. By encouraging employee activity on social media, these corporations are attempting to meet stakeholder demands and generate legitimacy through spokespeople whom stakeholders perceive as equals. This article examines that strategy and discusses its viability of using employees as spokespeople for CSR communication and engagement with stakeholder

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption

Playermaking: the institutional production of digital game players

This thesis investigates how the digital games industry conceptualises its audiences in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing upon research focused on other media industries, it argues in favour of a constructionist view of the audience that emphasises its discursive form and institutional uses. The term “player” is institutionally constructed in the same way, not referring to the actual people playing games, but to an imagined entity utilised to guide industrial decisions. Using both desk research and information gathered from expert interviews with digital game development professionals, this thesis looks at how ideas about players are formed and held by individual workers, transformed to become relevant for game production, and embedded into broader institutional conceptions that are shared and negotiated across a variety of institutional stakeholders. Adapting the term “audiencemaking” from mass communication research, this thesis identifies three key phases of the “playermaking” process in the digital games industry. First, information about players is gathered through both informal means and highly technologised audience measurement systems. Institutional stakeholders then translate this information into player, product and platform images that can be utilised during production. The remainder of the thesis looks at the more broad third phase in which these images are negotiated amongst a variety of institutional stakeholders as determined by power relations. These negotiations happen between individual workers who hold differing views of the player during development, companies and organisations struggling over position and value across the production chain, and the actual people playing games who strive to gain more influence over the creation of the images meant to represent their interests. These negotiations also reflect national policy contexts within a highly competitive global production network, visible in the comparison between the US neoliberal definition of both the industry and players as primarily market entities and the UK creative industries approach struggling to balance cultural concerns while safeguarding domestic production and inward investment. Ultimately, this thesis argues that conceptions of players are a central force structuring the shape and operation of a digital games industry in the midst of rapid technological, industrial, political and sociocultural change

The impact of ex-auditors' employment with audit clients of perceptions of auditor independence

This study examined whether the practice of ex-auditors’ employment with audit clients affects perceptions of auditor independence from the perspective of financial statement users in Malaysia. It has been argued that the main problem with employment with an audit client is the ability of current auditors to remain independent when dealing with top managers who were previously their fellow auditors. The collapse of Enron in 2001 in the United States, along with other infamous financial scandals like Global Crossing and Waste Management revealed that in each of these companies, the senior accounting and finance officers were hired directly from their external auditors. The results of the study showed that financial statement users are concerned about the practice of ex-auditors seeking employment with audit clients. However, the cooling-off period of 2 years that audit firms must observe before an audit partner joins a client company (otherwise, the firms have to resign from the audit engagement) was perceived as sufficient to safeguard auditor independence. As the majority of respondents seemed to support the current policy, a reduction or an extension of the existing cooling-off period is deemed not necessary

La Salle University Undergraduate Catalog 2004-2005

https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1179/thumbnail.jp

The Real Economy

This collection highlights a key metaphor in contemporary discourse about economy and society. The contributors explore how references to reality and the real economy are linked both to the utopias of collective well-being, supported by real monies and good economies, and the dystopias of financial bubbles and busts, in which people’s own lives “crash” along with the reality of their economies. An ambitious anthropology of economy, this volume questions how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the economy are linked to ideas of truth and moral value; how these multiple and shifting realities become present and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the concept of the “real” in the governance of economies engage with the experiential lives of ordinary people