The Purpose and Types of Organizational Gossip

Gossip, one of the core human activities, enforces cooperation, and influences reputation. It is safe to assume that it is a more complex phenomenon than just having a cooperation-building function. Gossip can be linked to a wide variety of mechanisms that are relevant in small groups such as workplaces. The social structure behind gossip is a complex one where individual motivations; relationships between the sender, the receiver, and the target of the gossip; and organizational norms and contexts also play a role in its formation. The current dissertation conducts a thorough, mixed-method analysis of gossip on multiple analytical levels using novel, unique data sources. The questions of the analysis were the following: What are the motivations of the sender for gossiping? Is there a personal or financially driven envy as an explanation for negative gossip? Is perceived fairness and cooperation influencing gossip dynamics within an organization? Does gossip only circulate between the sender and receiver when they have a trusting relationship? What set of relationships between the sender, receiver, and target facilitate the sharing of gossip? How do these different sets of relationships lead to different social functions of gossip? How do gossip texts look structurally? How are the gossip triad members represented in a gossip speech, and what does that tell us about the gossip's intended purpose? What are the organizational determinants of gossip? How does perceived fairness and cohesiveness contribute to gossip in an organization? In the dissertation, we relied on two main datasets. The primary one was an online survey conducted with employees from multiple organizations, from 9 workgroups operating in different sectors, recording employee opinions and networks. Our second dataset was a unique, spontaneous speech corpus based on about 550 hours of audio recordings captured during a Hungarian entertainment program, transcribed, annotated, and validated by manual transcribers. The analysis uses quantitative methods such as descriptive statistics, probability theory; classification methods such as decision trees, hierarchical clustering; part-of-speech (POS) tagging; and social network analysis methods such as Exponential Random Graph Model or Triadic Relation Models. We also used qualitative methods as semi-structured interviews and gossip speech interpretation

Case studies on corruption involving journalists: Hungary

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of media and journalists in uncovering of corruption cases in Hungary. How does the Hungarian media deal with corruption cases and how do the structure of political polarization and ownership structure of Hungarian media influence this special activity of journalists? The paper consists of two parts describing the relation between the corruption and media in Hungary from two perspectives. In the first section we present four particular Hungarian corruption cases by briefly describing their background and analysing thoroughly the role of media in the outbreak of these scandals. The cases were selected in order to be able to explain the function of the Hungarian press, especially its investigative departments. The second part of the study focuses on the general nature of the Hungarian press with special emphasis on investigative journalism. The aim of this chapter is to provide insights into the Hungarian media market and its influencing factors. The cases of the first section are often quoted to make the findings more illustrative. At the end of the paper we summarize the main lessons from this analysis. The study is based on eight semi-structured interviews with leading investigative journalists and one with a media expert in Hungary. The results of the fieldwork were processed anonymously; the conversations were not recorded. We subsequently analysed the articles and documents using the Google and other applications and databases3 related to the topic. The findings related to people, organizations or news outlets that are based on publicly available sources are indicated in the footnotes

Human Assisted Content Analysis of the print press coverage of corruption in Hungary

Coverage of corruption in the Hungarian media was analysed for four online news portals, Magyar Nemzet Online (short name: MNO, web: mno.hu), Népszava (web: nepszava.hu) and Heti Világgazdaság (web: hvg.hu) and Origo (web: origo.hu). The first three have both online and printed versions. MNO is considered a centre-right elite/general portal, HVG may be considered a center-left, economics-focused newspaper, while Népszava is a centre-left elite/general medium. Origo does not have a precise political affiliation; it is considered here a neutral, tabloid-like portal due to its variety of entertainment-focused content, but it has a more professional journalistic style than most tabloids, especially in the case of political (domestic and international) articles. In the following section we describe the news portals separately, but refer to the typologies by political affiliation and by media typology

Computer Assisted Content Analysis of the print press coverarge of corruption in Hungary

Coverage of corruption in the Hungarian media was analyzed using four online news portals. Three of them, Magyar Nemzet Online (short name: MNO, web: mno.hu), Népszava (web: nepszava.hu) and Heti Világgazdaság (web: hvg.hu) are also available as newspapers but the content of these papers is different from the online form to a certain extent. The news portal Origo (web: origo.hu) has no print version