Consumer Perceptions of CSR communication: An experimental investigation

This research aims to find out the most effective Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) message approaches that will contribute to favourable consumer CSR beliefs and attitude toward the company. Three message approaches: the use of narrative, invitational rhetoric and message ambiguity will be investigated. It is expected that consumer support for CSR and consumer scepticism will have moderating effects and consumer attribution of company motives will mediate the relationship between message approach and attitude toward the company. A series of laboratory experiments will be conducted with consumers as the participants. Quantitative data collected through the experiment will be analyzed and a research model will be tested. It is anticipated that the findings from this research will allow public relations and corporate communication practitioners to better identify effective CSR communication message approaches which lead to positive consumer CSR beliefs and attitude toward the company

Avoidance-Avoidance Conflict, Situational Formality, and Personality as Causes of Interpersonal Equivocation.

This study explores the causes of a widespread and important communication phenomenon, interpersonal equivocation. Literature is reviewed which shows clearly that a sufficient cause of interpersonal equivocation is situational avoidance-avoidance conflict, but also which suggests the possibility of additional situational (formality of social setting) and trait (self-monitoring) precursors of equivocation. Using a questionnaire technique, participants were asked to imagine themselves in three different interpersonal situations, which were manipulated to vary the level of situational formality. In addition, in each situation, they were asked to respond to a question from their hypothetical conversational partner. These questions were designed to manipulate the other key situational variable, presence or absence of avoidance-avoidance conflict. Participants\u27 responses, consisting of how likely they were to use each of several possible answers previously scaled for degree of equivocation, resulted in equivocation scores for each situation and an overall score. Participants also completed the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale. As expected, results supported a strong role for avoidance-avoidance conflict as an influence upon equivocation, and also suggested that formality level and avoidance-avoidance conflict interact to influence the degree of equivocation. However, none of the hypothesized interactions between self-monitoring and the other independent variables were significant, probably due to the intrusive nature of avoidance- avoidance conflict as an element of social situations. A surprising discovery was that higher self-monitoring results in less equivocation, a finding that is explained by the likelihood that higher self-monitors are more aware of the importance of Grice\u27s Cooperative Principle to the smooth functioning of human interactions. In addition, several post hoc findings regarding gender are discussed, especially in terms of future research possibilities. This research has demonstrated that, while avoidance-avoidance conflict is certainly a sufficient cause, there are other situational and dispositional factors that contribute to our understanding of interpersonal equivocation

Content-aware : investigating tools, character & user behavior

Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor. Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation and curation of visual experience, I expose and challenge a capitalist image infrastructure. I create, collect, and process images using smartphone cameras, screen recordings, and applications such as Shrub and Photoshop. These devices and programs, which have the capacity to produce visual smoothness and polish, also inherently engender repetition and fragmentation. The same set of tools used to perfect images is easily reoriented towards visual destabilization. Projects presented here are not meant to serve as literal translations, but rather as symbols or variables in experimental graphic communication strategies. Employing these strategies, I reveal the frames and tools through which we view the world. By exploring and exploiting the limitations of manmade technologies, I reveal the breadth of our human relationships with them, including those of creators, directors, users, and recipients

Consumer Perceptions of CSR Communication: An Experimental Investigation

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication has always faced challenges posed by consumer scepticism and the attribution of CSR motives. This experimental study focuses on empirically testing informational, narrative, ambiguous and invitational CSR message approaches. The results show that except for the ambiguous approach, the various approaches are equally effective in leading to positive CSR beliefs and attitudes towards the company. CSR communication is found to play a crucial role in leading to positive consumer perceptions

English Composition as a Happening

From the Introduction: Contemporary Composition is still inflected by the epistemic turn taken in the 1980s, convincing me that we need to remember what we\u27ve forgotten—namely, how impassioned resolves and thrilling discoveries were abandoned and why. I\u27d like to retrace the road not taken in Composition Studies, to salvage what can still be recovered... I want to inspect the wreckage, in order to show what was the promise of the Happenings for Composition, as well as the huge gray longueur of its pale replacement, Eighties Composition. In so doing, I hope to begin a reconfiguration of our field\u27s pre- and after history. What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer\u27s 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer\u27s inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1133/thumbnail.jp

Intertextuality in institutional talks – A corpus--assisted study of interactions between spokespersons and journalists

This thesis uses corpus tools and methods to explore how the enunciations of White House spokespersons are intertextually informed by the enunciations (including their questions at White House press meetings) journalists under institutional constraints, by studying a corpus consisting of texts created by both spokespersons (transcripts of White House press conferences) and journalists (newspaper editorials/articles downloaded from New York Times online version). It sheds light on an important reason behind the lack of corpus studies in exploring intertextuality—there is no clear material connexion between corpus linguistics and intertextuality—based on the observation in the literature that intertextuality involves a mental process (e.g.: Kristeva 1980) while corpus linguistics is based on concrete language samples (e.g.: Sinclair 1991; Tognini- Bonelli 2001). It thus introduces the notion of intertext (a collection of text segments which refer to / indicate the same conceptual area(s)) as the material connection between the corpus approach and intertextuality and exemplifies how this notion and its features contribute to the exploration of intertextuality, by the analysis of two words used as prominent examples, namely, timetable and troops. It also highlights the claim for institutional talks that participants have different preferences in selecting the words they use (Heritage 1997), pointing out that participants within an institutional talk make their lexical choices under the impact of both institutional constraints and their interlocutors’ intertextual influence. Finally, it challenges the traditional idea of institutional interaction between spokespersons and journalists, showing that this interaction does not stop immediately when a press conference ends; rather, there are subsequent indirect interactions between them via newspaper articles/editorials

Bridging the Gap

The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”, becoming a response to both the causes and effects of ongoing global challenges. As it strongly stresses cities’ transformative potential, resilience’s final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events and improve communities’ environmental and social quality. Although the resilience theory has been investigated in depth, several methodological challenges remain, mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty of meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. This will arguably be one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience. The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading, and it seeks to synthesise state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. The Special Issue collected 11 papers that address the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? What are the existing methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to have? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?

Interfaces with the Ineffable

In recent years, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) designers and researchers have shifted focus from a primary concern with procedural, generic, and task based applications to applications that address messy, personal, and aesthetic experiences. These difficult to formalize experiences, such as feelings of intimacy, spirituality, or a sense of place, are conceptualized as experiences of the ineffable. In this work, I use a reflective design practice to look at two primary approaches to designing interfaces with the ineffable, one emphasizes reduction and the other openness to interpretation. I discuss issues of control and reification that result from the reduction approach and develop the interpretation approach as a viable alternative requiring a re-thinking design and evaluation strategies and criteria. These issues and approaches are explored in detail through the development of two case studies. Case study one addresses the ineffable experience of art and presents a series of applications for interfacing with the ineffable in the art museum. Case study two details the ineffable experience of affect and presents a system designed for augmenting affective presence in an office environment. To further this work, I examine new thinking in both HCI and Communication for understanding every day interpretive acts and the implications for design. In addition, I advance reflective design as a new process based practice for the field of Communication

Towards Collaboration: A Comparative, Longitudinal, Conversation Analysis of Change in Talk-in-Interaction in Psychotherapy

The study utilizes conversation analysis to describe changes at the level of talk-in-interaction across four points of time (beginning, middle, late, and ending sessions) in four different psychotherapies: two “successful” psychotherapies and two “unsuccessful” ones, with the author of this study conducting the psychotherapies in each case. The analytic domains, practices, and sequence types of interest were not pre-defined at the outset, though the analysis showed alignment to be of principal interest. Patients whose therapies were “successful” progressively aligned with therapeutic activities over time, with a difference revealed in how quickly this alignment occurred according to the ‘type’ of activity in question: requests for confirmation, formulations, and other activities that proposed understandings that partially modified patients’ talk were regularly aligned with by the mid-point of the trajectory of the patient’s overall psychotherapies; interpretations, reinterpretations, and other proposals of understanding that were displayed as coming from the therapist’s own perspective were modestly aligned with at the “late” period of the patients’ psychotherapies, though the patients continued to display “complex resistance” in response to these actions. Patients whose therapies were “unsuccessful,” in contrast, showed high disalignment throughout their treatments, and the study demonstrates that the therapist—myself—was also implicated in disaligning with the patient’s actions (e.g., storytellings)