386 research outputs found
How social media brand community development impacts consumer engagement and value formation; perspectives from the cosmetics industry
Social media and social media brand communities (SMBCs) are powerful tools for long-term consumer-brand relationship building. As a result, SMBCs are becoming significant marketing channels. Despite the wide use and adoption of SMBCs, further research is called for, as both practitioners and academics lack an understanding of the processes taking place within SMBCs. This study aims to contribute to knowledge of: (1) consumer engagement, (2) value formation in SMBCs, and (3) establishing the relationship between consumer engagement and value formation within the SMBC environment. This thesis adopts netnography, a method commonly employed to explore online communities in the social media environment.
Three cosmetics brands were selected for this study. The selection was driven by geographical location, posting frequency and user activity. Data were retrospectively collected from Facebook SMBCs between 1st December 2019 and 31st January 2020. The data analysis employed thematic analysis techniques and was further guided by netnographic procedural steps, encompassing 25 distinct data operations. In total, 87 conversation threads were examined, which included 6,401 consumer comments.
The findings present a typology of brand posts consisting of five overarching themes: presentation of offerings, belongingness building, engagement building, value-led, and educational. The research also identified a consumer comment typology consisting of four overarching themes brand-centred communication, cognitive-centred communication, conversation-centred communication, and personal experience-centred communication. Additionally, the thesis explores value formation processes within SMBCs, and the value types formed through consumer-to-consumer value formation interaction, brand-to-consumer value formation interaction, consumer-to-brand value formation interaction, as well as individual value formation processes, i.e., customer independent value formation and brand independent value facilitation.
Through the findings, thesis broadens knowledge of the implication of SMBC development on consumer engagement. Additionally, this study extends the scope of value formation beyond service marketing, providing valuable insights into how value is created and perceived in the context of SMBCs. This research is also of significance for practice as it offers guidance and insight into how different brand posts can facilitate SMBC development, and, in turn, consumer engagement and value formation.
The research provides a link between SMBC development and consumer engagement, highlighting the importance of SMBCs in the successful facilitation of consumer engagement. In particular, it provides evidence that the development of an SMBC has a significant impact on consumer engagement. The typology of brand posts that this study generates highlights the link between the types of posts published by the brand and SMBC development. In addition, the typology of consumer posts also suggests that there is a link between the types of comments published by consumers and the degree of SMBC development. As a result, the findings indicate significant growth in the variety of topics discussed within more developed SMBCs alongside a shift within the topics discussed. The study also investigates value formation within SMBCs, thereby enhancing the understanding of how SMBCs can facilitate value formation. By doing so, this research successfully extends the value formation lens predominantly applied in service marketing. In particular, the findings highlight the role of different actors in enabling the formation of different value types. Furthermore, the research emphasises the value of SMBCs as knowledge repositories as important virtual spaces for both brands and consumers. The findings facilitate understanding of the importance of SMBCs in value formation processes, contributing to advancing knowledge of the role of SMBCs in the development of consumer engagement and value formation.
The thesis presents a contextualised conceptual framework of value formation within SMBCs, that captures different interactions taking place in the SMBC environment but also draws attention to the different value types generated through interaction between different actors. Finally, the thesis offers a conceptual framework of SMBCs, consumer engagement and value formation, which captures the correlation between the three researched concepts
Analytical validation of innovative magneto-inertial outcomes: a controlled environment study.
peer reviewe
The Eruption of Disruption: The Manifestation of Disrupting whiteness in Secondary Social Studies in Appalachia
This phenomenological dissertation explores the lived experiences of secondary social studies educators situated in the Appalachian region. Hermeneutic phenomenology was used as a philosophical and methodological approach to gather insights into this phenomenon. Interviews were conducted with three educators to capture their experiences from their childhoods, to their teaching careers, and into their current personal lives. These experiences were analyzed using a Whole-Part-Whole process to understand how they came to disrupt whiteness, the ways they did so, and their understanding of the impact disrupting whiteness for creating learning environments, developing curriculum and making instructional decisions. The findings revealed how these educators came to recognize the importance of acknowledging differences and race, and how they faced and navigated instances of racism and racist structures within the education system. The use of physics as a metaphor highlighted how educators disrupted whiteness through spatial disruptions, curriculum design, advocacy and activism, and creating an environment for students to question their understanding of racism. The implications for social studies education suggest the importance of directly exposing racist foundations, providing educators with instructional tools to disrupt problematic ideologies, and utilizing important resources. As teacher education continues to evolve, a focus on tapping into students\u27 lived experiences can help students move closer to addressing the phenomenon in their future classrooms. Finally, an important part of growth could be seen within educators’ discomfort and reflection. White people can begin their journey toward dismantling white supremacy by examining their privilege and power
Universalité mineure : Penser l’humanité après l’universalisme occidental
The circulation and entanglements of human beings, data, and goods have not necessarily and by themselves generated a universalising consciousness. The "global" and the "universal", in other words, are not the same. The idea of a world-society remains highly contested. Our times are marked by the fragmentation of a double relativistic character: the inevitable critique of Western universalism on the one hand, and resurgent identitarian and neo-nationalistic claims to identity on the other. Sources of an argumentation for a strong universalism brought forward by Western traditions such as Christianity, Marxism, and Liberalism have largely lost their legitimation. All the while, manifold and situated narratives of a common world that re-address the universal are under way of being produced and gain significance. This volume tracks the development and relevance of such cultural and social practices that posit forms of what we call minor universality. It asks: Where and how do contemporary practices open up concrete settings so as to create experiences, reflections and agencies of a shared humanity?European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Gran
Geographic information extraction from texts
A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction
(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades
This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women.
This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel
The Hidden Role of Religiosity in Contemporary Public Education in the United States of America
The ‘separation of church and state’ is a fundamental precept of the United States, yet the phrase itself is not written in the Constitution and even Supreme Court justices disagree on how it should be defined. The ambiguity surrounding religious liberty is perhaps most felt in K-12 public education, where the fear of inflicting faith formation on impressionable students has inspired the vision of a secular, God-neutral, government-run school system. As such, federal and state laws dictate that public school educators who coerce students by promoting or inhibiting religious devotion risk losing their jobs. Yet, the reality is that the fabric of a school is woven by the people who work, learn, and play in it—and oftentimes those people and their religious faith are indivisible. In this circumstance, the religious faith of individuals becomes a stealth moderator of school-based decision-making and outcomes, and as such, the ‘separation of church and state’ in public education becomes a misnomer. This three-papers-on-a-theme dissertation interrogates the under-studied topic of the role that religiosity plays in K-12 public education. Employing both qualitative and quantitative methodology, I utilize a nationally representative survey on public school perceptions, criminal and civil court records from Milwaukee, and Twitter discourse about the firing of a praying football coach to explicate this often-controversial topic. As a result, this dissertation provides evidence of the statistically significant predictive power of religious faith on students, parents, and teachers. At the same time, this dissertation reveals the complexity and apprehension that everyday Americans have about religion in K-12 public schooling. In my first study, I challenge the stereotype of Evangelical Christians being adversarial toward public education due to their faith by using parent and teacher survey data to compete the factors of religion, race, and political ideology to determine which identity drives discontent with public schools. I find that the variable of religion carries no statistically significant effect. Instead, race and political ideology are the major drivers of perception on public schooling, with political ideology having the greatest influence. In my second study, I found that low-income students of color in Milwaukee who either attended religious services at least once a week in 8th or 9th grade or attended a private, mostly religious high school had fewer criminal convictions and paternity suits by their mid-20s compared to their matched counterparts in Milwaukee Public Schools who came from homes with low religiosity. My third and final study is a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of Twitter comments following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Kennedy v. Bremerton, which deemed it constitutional for a Christian public school football coach to pray mid-field with his players after a game. I discerned from the CDA that religious freedom was viewed in terms of winners and losers; that the public has opposite interpretations of what the phrase “separation of church and state” means; that people often interweave racism, abortion rights, and other social issues with their views on religious freedom; and that unfettered religious expression in public schools could have unintended consequences for Christians
Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century
Networks of Experience: Interactive Digital Art in the 21st Century considers interactivity in digital art practices. Emerging technologies advance so quickly that artworks using such technologies are not fully understood. Digital artworks are susceptible to unprecedented threats, including technology obsolescence, file incompatibility, and software updates that might considerably alter the artwork in a matter of months. However, immaterial characteristics such as interactivity are often overlooked in the panic of preserving physical technologies. Software and hardware do not always indicate how interactive a work should be, if it involves one or many participants at once, or how exhibition space should facilitate interaction. In this dissertation, I establish a framework to quantify and prioritize the many ways in which participants interact with artworks that make use of digital technologies. I propose a three-part typology – individual interactive experience, collective interactive experience, and distributed interactive experience – as illustrated with case studies including the VR artwork The Chalkroom (2017) by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, the immersive digital exhibition Continuity (2021-2022) by the Japanese “ultratechnologist” collective teamLab, and the social media performance Excellences & Perfections (2013) by Amalia Ulman. The project offers clarity to the nature of interactivity, with an eye to long-term preservation when digital artworks are on display, on loan, or acquired in museum collections
- …