A GENRE ANALYSIS OF SALES PROMOTION LETTERS AND COMPANY PROFILES IN AN INDONESIAN BATIK INDUSTRY

This study explored company profiles and sales promotion letters of batik from two big batik companies in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. Data of the research are of two types, the primary and secondary data. The former refers to words, phrases, and clauses taken from the company profiles and sales promotion letters of batik written in Bahasa Indonesia. The latter refers to transcribed data obtained from in-depth interviews with the text producers and buyers. Two batik company profiles and three sales promotion letters were analyzed. Two informants from each batik company representing the text production side were interviewed; they were the marketing and promotion managers from the two batik industries. Likewise, one buyer from each batik company representing the text consumption side was also interviewed. The research employed theories of genre analysis proposed by Swales (1990) which focused on patterns of rhetorical organization and genre-specific language features. In terms of data collection, the present study also draws on ethno-methodological tradition within the communication framework in an institutionalized socio-cultural context (Lillis, 2008). Ethnographical research primarily uncovers and describes beliefs, values, and attitudes that structure the behavior of a group (Baumgartner & Hensley, 2006). In terms of data analysis, this study employed the multi-perspective model of analysis advocated by Bhatia (2004) wihich focuses on textual and socio-cognitive aspects of the texts. The textual aspect explicates the use of text-internal features in embodying values in the context of rhetorical moves, discourse strategies, regularities of organisation, intertextuality and some aspects of interdiscursivity. The socio-cognitive aspect refers to participants’ relationship and their contributions to the process of genre construction, interpretation, use and exploitation in the context of professional practices and constraints. This study has arrived at some conclusions. First, although the most important intention of any kind of business is making a profit, the strong influence of Javanese culture has made the genuine intention of getting the profit to be less explicitly stated. In fact, the profit making notion is transformed into a more social and cultural preservation in orientation. Secondly, writers of batik company profiles seemed to acknowledge the function of these specific business documents as one of the primary image-building components in their promoting efforts. This study also found some varieties in terms of function between the established and less established image- building promotional tool. However, the textual analysis and the in-depth interviews with the text producers supported the view that company profiles of batik had been ideally used to create a potitive and favorable image upon the company through the employment of moral and cultural commitment to batik making, history, vision and mission, new technology in the production processes, organizational structure, and lists of achievements and awards. Thirdly, the most distinctive feature that differentiated establishing credentials in English and that of the Indonesian, especially in the batik business context, had been the use of moral obligation to preserve the native culture and family relation with the national heroes. Writers of the English sales promotion letters, on the contrary, highlighted the needs of future buyers and claimed that their companies were the best to fulfill the needs. Likewise, due to cultural constraints, the sales promotion letters of batik in question did not include the moves of offering incentives and using pressure tactics. The writers rather used the move of eliciting response which is less persuasive and less direct compared to that of the English sales promotion letters. Fourth, the chemistry between writers and readers of sales promotion letters and company profiles of batik constructed a strong ground for mutual understanding and thus paved the way to purchase. Finally, this study had shown very clearly how the wider culture and the culture of the discourse community contributed to the framing and formatting of sales promotion letters and company profiles of batik in terms of lexico-grammar, cognitive structuring, intertextuality and interdiscursivity. In the past, studies done in Bahasa Indonesia to business texts were more oriented to below sentence level phenomena (Kusrianti, 2008; Purnanto, 2002). Thus, the present study contributes to the study of above sentence level phenomena, especially the features and convensions of sales promotion letters and company profiles of batik. Additionally, the present study provides input to writers of sales promotion letters and company profiles to have a direct, persuasive, clear, and systematic promotional text especially for export purposes. Last but not least, the present study has provided a perspective into the written business communication of batik industries drawn from an empirical study

Designing Familiar Open Surfaces

While participatory design makes end-users part of the design process, we might also want the resulting system to be open for interpretation, appropriation and change over time to reflect its usage. But how can we design for appropriation? We need to strike a good balance between making the user an active co-constructor of system functionality versus making a too strong, interpretative design that does it all for the user thereby inhibiting their own creative use of the system. Through revisiting five systems in which appropriation has happened both within and outside the intended use, we are going to show how it can be possible to design with open surfaces. These open surfaces have to be such that users can fill them with their own interpretation and content, they should be familiar to the user, resonating with their real world practice and understanding, thereby shaping its use

Social Information Processing in Social News Aggregation

The rise of the social media sites, such as blogs, wikis, Digg and Flickr among others, underscores the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are collaboratively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The innovations introduced by social media has lead to a new paradigm for interacting with information, what we call 'social information processing'. In this paper, we study how social news aggregator Digg exploits social information processing to solve the problems of document recommendation and rating. First, we show, by tracking stories over time, that social networks play an important role in document recommendation. The second contribution of this paper consists of two mathematical models. The first model describes how collaborative rating and promotion of stories emerges from the independent decisions made by many users. The second model describes how a user's influence, the number of promoted stories and the user's social network, changes in time. We find qualitative agreement between predictions of the model and user data gathered from Digg.Comment: Extended version of the paper submitted to IEEE Internet Computing's special issue on Social Searc

The effects of cheating on deception detection during a social dilemma

Research by social psychologists and others consistently finds that people are poor at detecting attempted deception by others. However, Tooby and Cosmides (cognitive psychologists who favor evolutionary analyses of behavior) have argued and shown that humans have evolved a special “cognitive module” for detecting cheaters. Their research suggests that people are good at detecting cheating by group members. These two literatures seem to be at odds with one another. The hypothesis of this research was that when participants are told a lie by a fellow group member whose attempted deception involves cheating on a task that affects their outcomes, they will be good at detecting deception. In this experiment, participants played blackjack in groups using a social dilemma paradigm. Participants’ outcomes were either interdependent or independent with a confederate’s outcomes. It was predicted that participants whose outcomes were interdependent with the confederate would be better at detecting deception by the confederate than those participants whose outcomes were independent from the confederate’s outcomes. Results indicate that when judging other participants’ lies interdependent players were more successful at deception detection than independent players but were not more sensitive to the lies. This effect may be driven by the truth bias, people assume that their interaction partners are truthful which would explain why sensitivity measures (which remove response biases) did not show the hypothesized effect. Independent players were not more successful or sensitive when judging the confederate’s lies. The failure to find the hypothesized effect may be due to methodological factors. Both participants heard may have had their cheating detection modules activated when hearing the instructions for the experiment which implied that cheating could occur. Overall success rates support this idea because they were significantly higher than success rates reached by most deception detection research (50%) which may be indicative that both participants cheating detection modules were active. Results also indicate that as the number of lies told increases overall success decreases but success at detecting lies and sensitivity increase. Thus the more lies that are told the better people are at catching them

Pengaruh Komitmen Terhadap Disiplin Kerja Karyawan Pada Hotel Alam Sutra Palembang

The purpose of this study to examine the effect of commitment on working discipline on Alam Sutra Hotel in Palembang. The data were obtained by distributing questionnaire and interview for 130 respondents. The population of this study were all employees of Alam Sutra Hotel in Palembang. The result showed that commitment has significanly effect on working discipline on Alam Sutra Hotel in Palembang (0.000<0.5) for 81.2%

Affective Sustainability. Is this what timelessness really means?

Sustainability is always about regard to the environment: an intelligent use of resources and not returning to nature what it cannot degrade without long-term damage. Politics, business and thus research have been predominantly concerned with the direct impact on the environment of the diverse human activities in our society. There is of course awareness about all the indirect effects caused by these activities but as these effects are more complicated to identify and calculate, it could reasonably be suggested that these have not got the same attention and hence have not been thoroughly explored. Important resources are required for the production of objects, which subsequently turn out neither to meet humans’ needs nor to fulfil their desires. This issue involves not just the misuse of resources but also the addition to waste problems. Needs and desires are not unrelated to material and function but reach mostly beyond the physicality of the object as argued by Krippendorf (2006), among others. Timelessness is unrelated to physicality and is most likely the ultimate example of sustaining. However, this phenomenon does not easily allow interpretation as it is basically philosophical, which also would complicate its transition into other domains. The deconstruction of timelessness in an earlier work (Borjesson, 2006) resulted in the phenomenon being conceptualised as affective sustainability. Four notions were identified as mainly informing timelessness: time, tradition, aesthetics and perception. When subsequently studied in several disciplines, these notions produced indicators on how to understand better what makes objects retain their significance in a changing human context. These indicators are not to be categorised as a set of tools or even less as a model to be applied in the design process: they are directional rather than normative. Moreover, they are best understood as support and inspiration to develop design thinking and have been the subject for further analysis as part of continued research. This has increased the clarity of the directions not only in relation to design thinking but also where to continue research. Keywords: Sustainability, Human ways of living, Human ways of being, Lived and Learned experience, Emotion, Affect, Feeling, Cognition.</p

Emergentism revisited

The “explanatory gap” is proposed to be the “hard problem” of\ud consciousness research and has generated a great deal of recent\ud debate.\ud Arguments brought forward to reveal this gap include the\ud conceivability of zombies or the “super-neuroscientist” Mary. These\ud are supposed to show that the facts of consciousness are not a priori\ud entailed by the microphysical facts.\ud Similar arguments were already proposed by emergence theories in\ud the context of the debate between mechanism and vitalism.\ud According to synchronic emergentism, the property of a system is\ud emergent, when it cannot - in principle - be deduced from a complete\ud description of the system’s components.\ud Here, I argue that apart from phenomenal properties there are many\ud other properties that, even though they are clearly physical, are not\ud reductively explainable either. The explanatory gap of consciousness\ud is therefore only a part of a much more general problem