Exploring the roles of Australian communication practitioners in organizational value setting: agents of conscience, control, and/or compliance?

This study examined whether Australian public relations and communication practitioners enact an organizational conscience role through their involvement in the organizational value-setting process. Thirty communication practitioners from 26 large organizations in Melbourne and Sydney were interviewed between May 2004 and May 2005 to ascertain and discuss their involvement in organizational value setting. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews to gather data and then applying a multiple perspective approach in its thematic data analysis, the research found that most respondents were involved in organizational value setting albeit at different stages of the process. In analysing the nature of the respondent’s involvement in the process along with individual and organizational factors, three roles emerged namely, the agent of critical conscience, the agent of concertive control, and the agent of corporate compliance. However the results suggest that most respondents enacted primarily the concertive control and corporate compliance agency roles. The study also found that the predominant managerial/functionalist perspective constrains practitioners from enacting the conscience leadership role. In exploring the practitioners’ ability to influence organizational members, findings support recent studies that membership in the dominant coalition does not necessarily give public relations/communication practitioners power and influence. Rather, direct access to the CEO, expertise, performance and personality were found to be the key ingredients to the individual communication practitioners’ organizational influence. Findings also reveal that public relations/communication practitioners preferred to participate but not drive the organizational value-setting process. In using a multiple perspective approach to study public relations roles, this study provides empirical basis for identifying potential leadership roles for public relations/communication practitioners and for suggesting an extension of the manager-technician role typology. The study calls for public relations/communication practitioners to enact a critical conscience agent role as part of finding a meaningful, ethical and socially responsible practice. This study proposes that critical thought and dialectical inquiry be embedded within the public relations/communication practitioner’s role and public relations education

Application of linear prediction and rapid acquisition to nuclear magnetic resonance

In pulse nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, data are obtained by perturbing the nucleus from its equilibrium position and acquiring the transient response. Fourier transformation is the preferred mode used in data processing of the signals due to its ability to compute the NMR spectrum rapidly. To obtain good signal-to-noise ratio, it is common practice to average many transients. To obtain good resolution, lengthier acquisition times are favored. For insensitive nuclei, where thousands of collected transients are necessary, this is a time-consuming procedure; especially if the nuclear relaxation time constant is in the order of seconds or minutes. A faster acquisition method is proposed. Using a modified NMR pulse sequence, the proposed method acquires signals more rapidly than by conventional acquisition methods; however, the signals are truncated. In processing truncated data; the shortcomings of the Fourier transform must be overcome by alternative spectral estimation methods. An alternative processing method - linear prediction (LP) - is used to reconstruct the spectrum from the incomplete time-domain magnetic resonance data. The LP method\u27s application to truncated, fast acquisition of data is discussed in detail. This combination of methods is a novel way of acquiring and processing NMR spectroscopic data