Search results

The role of everyday citizens in the production of knowledge has become central to the study of media sociology. This interest is fueled by the growth of information communication technologies that have made it easier for amateurs to produce and disseminate content. The world of book reviewing – an exemplar of a field transformed by digitalization – concerns about the rise of amateurs manifests in the grievance that, “Nowadays, everyone’s a critic.” This chapter empirically investigates this idea by asking: Who is qualified to be a reviewer? The chapter draws on in-depth interviews with review editors, critics, and bloggers who have successfully crossed over to publish in some of the most important outlets in the English-publishing field. Analysis reveals that openness is central to ideas of what qualifies someone to be a book reviewer and how reviewers subsequently get work. Openness, however, is an example of noncertifiable skills, which are ascertained primarily through informal methods such as turning toward one’s personal and professional networks for recommendations from peers or relying on personal face-to-face encounters. A practical consequence of this selection criterion is that only reviewers who are known to book review editors in this specific way (i.e., their tastes and esthetic openness) are eligible candidates for professional review assignments. In this way, the commitment to openness as a professional value among book reviewers actually operates as a mechanism of closing their occupational boundaries.

Television critics play a central role in the interpretation of cultural forms, objects, and productions. In contrast to critics in elite art worlds, the role and status of television critics are less institutionalized and less well understood. One indicator of the degree and status of the institutionalization of critics’ roles is the codification of evaluative criteria and critical practices. Our research examines whether critics in television draw upon a recognizable set of evaluation criteria, and if so, whether that repertoire of aesthetic concepts increasingly parallels criteria employed by critics in elite art worlds. Using multidimensional scaling to delineate television criticism over the last two decades, a period of considerable transformation in the industry, we find that television criticism attends to a core set of conventional criteria. These include appraisal of formal aesthetic elements, signaling increased attention to television as an art form, while retaining consideration of factors such as entertainment value that are of interest to audiences and business constituencies alike.

Group criticism plays an important role in intergroup relations and conflicts, but few studies have related group criticism to intercultural communication contexts. This study aims to explore two cultural groups’ (Chinese international students in the USA and American domestic students) collective face concern as a unique experience in intercultural communication and other psychological responses while encountering group criticism targeting their country image.

A laboratory experiment was conducted assessing Chinese international students (n = 115) and American domestic students’ (n = 100) responses to a research-confederate critic (whose group membership was manipulated) criticizing participants’ country image such as blaming China and the USA for air pollution or using drugs in the Olympics. analysis of covariance, correlational analysis and regression analysis were adopted to analyze the data.

Chinese international students reported higher collective face concerns and lower liking toward the critic compared with American students. When criticism specifically targeted participants’ country image, Chinese international students reported more discomfort feelings than American students; and while responding to the critic who identified as participants’ ingroup member, Chinese international students’ discomfort feelings were more susceptible to their collective face than American students in the same condition.

This study illustrates cultural differences in collective face concerns and psychological reactions in responding to criticism targeting a country image in intercultural communication contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sales impact of different types of online word-of-mouth based on their source (user vs critic) and form (structured vs unstructured).

The paper proposed a model by adopting the heuristic-systematic perspective of information processing and tested it using online movie reviews collected from Rotten Tomatoes. A unique dataset was constructed, which matched critic reviews and user reviews with metadata such as box-office sales and advertisement spending for 90 movies. Sentiment information from the textual contents of both user and critic reviews were text-mined and extracted. Data analyses were used to compare the box-office responsiveness of four types of reviews: user numeric ratings, user text reviews, critic numeric ratings and critic text reviews.

Critic reviews and user reviews influence sales through different forms: while user reviews impact sales through their aggregate numeric ratings, critic reviews exert their impact through textual narratives.

This study provides managerial implications to businesses on how to allocate their resources on different social media-related marketing strategies to maximize the economic value of online user-generated information.

The major contribution of this study is to extend the current understanding of the sales impact of online reviews to their textual aspect, as well as investigate how these textual narratives play different roles when offered by critics and users.

The purpose of the current study is to profile Orlando and Florida culinary fans and compare them to culinary critics on several factors, including sociodemographics, psychographics, and travel behavior characteristics, and to identify potential factors that explain visitors' tendency to promote or criticize the cuisine of a destination. The study also seeks to identify the image attributes that explain the likelihood to visit for culinary fans and critics.

Online survey responses from 4,082 participants were analyzed using Qualtrics for survey design and Amazon's Mechanical Turk for data collection.

Demographic differences between culinary fans and critics were identified and significant relationships between perceptions of a destination's cuisine and various elements of the visitor experience were found.

The current study extends the literature on the characteristics of culinary tourists by showing a significant relationship between perceptions of a destination's cuisine and various elements of the visitor experience, such as destination image, satisfaction, number of past trips, and revisit intentions. Future studies should look at a greater number of distinct and geographically diverse destinations to test the generalizability of the current study's findings.

The results of this study provide implication for destination marketers in general and for those of Orlando and Florida in particular, especially in using cuisine as a potential core offering rather than a peripheral tourism product.

This study is believed to be the first to compare culinary fans and culinary critics, thereby extending the literature and demonstrating several differences between the two groups.

In Ghana, the practice of landlords demanding that renters pay rent advance (RA) of between six months and five years is well noted. Surprisingly, renters appear divided into the benefits and drawbacks of the rent advance payment. Ahead of the 2020 general elections, the two leading political parties in Ghana promised to establish a rent assistance scheme to help renters working in the formal and informal sectors and earning regular incomes to pay their RA. This paper aims to scrutinize the differences in the demographic, employment and housing characteristics between the critics and non-critics of the RA payment in Ghana and the factors that predict the likelihood of being a critic of the RA system.

The study is exploratory and draws empirical data from surveys administered to 327 graduate renters from 13 regions in Ghana. It uses non-parametric and parametric tests, namely, Chi-square goodness-of-fit and T-test to explore these differences between both critics and non-critics of the RA.

There are statistically significant differences between critics and non-critics in terms of the association between their educational attainment on the one hand and their marital status, employment status and employment sector on the other hand. The research also reveals that monthly expenditures, number of bedrooms and RA period significantly predict the likelihood of being a critic of the RA payment or otherwise.

The study provides evidence which policymakers can draw upon to inform housing policy.

The study is the first to study the housing characteristics of graduate renters and to quantitatively distinguish between critics and non-critics of RA payment in Ghana.

Mastering aesthetics is a precious source of competitive advantage in creative industries. In fashion, innovation is reflected by how and how much styles change. Elite designers claim to be the only endogenous force shaping fashion innovation season by season. Yet, each season, fashion critics vet the new collections these designers introduce, assessing what is original as opposed to reworked and uninspired, in this way playing a fundamental role as gatekeepers in setting taste within the industry. In this research, we document how stylistic innovation, vis-à-vis the styles premier design houses introduced each season, is impacted, among the others, by the specific exogenous force of critics' assessments of designers' past work. Our data, which include 61 measures detailing the styles introduced by 38 prestigious Italian and French design houses over a nine-year period, suggest designers move further away from styles reviewed less favourably while adhering more closely to styles reviewed more positively. Additionally, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on critical assessments of competing designers' styles, revealing how design houses attend to each other's work. This work documents the strong correlation between style dynamics and critics' feedback. It also has important implications for any company trying to find a balance between independence and conformity in setting its own unique positioning into the market.

Previous research suggests that women receive less critical attention and acclaim in popular music. The authors expect that gender differences in the amount and content of media discourse about popular musicians occur because music critics draw on the cultural frame of gender as a primary tool for critical evaluation. In order to explore the role of gender as a frame through which aesthetic content is evaluated, the authors conduct detailed content analyses of 53 critical reviews of two versions of the popular album 1989 – the original released by Taylor Swift in 2014 and a cover version released by Ryan Adams less than a year later. Despite Swift’s greater popularity and prominence, the authors find that reviews of her version of the album are more likely to focus on her gender and sexuality; less likely to describe her as emotionally authentic; and more likely to use popular aesthetic criteria in evaluating her music. By contrast, Ryan Adams was more likely to be seen by critics as emotionally authentic and to be described using high art aesthetic criteria and intellectualizing discourse. The authors address the implications of the findings for persistent gender gaps in many artistic fields.

This paper aims to investigate the characteristics and differences in sentiment expression in movie review documents from four online opinion genres – blog postings, discussion board threads, user reviews, and critic reviews.

A collection of movie review documents was harvested from the four types of web sources, and a sample of 520 movie reviews were analysed to compare the content and textual characteristics across the four genres. The analysis focused on document and sentence length, part‐of‐speech distribution, vocabulary, aspects of movies discussed, star ratings used and multimedia content in the reviews. The study also identified frequently occurring positive and negative terms in the different genres, as well as the pattern of responses in discussion threads.

Critic reviews and blog postings are longer than user reviews and discussion threads, and contain longer sentences. Critic reviews and blogs contain more nouns and prepositions, whereas discussion board and user reviews have more verbs and adverbs. Critic reviews have the largest vocabulary and also the highest proportion of unique terms not found in the other genres. The most informative sentiment words in each genre are provided in the paper. With regard to content, critic reviews are more comprehensive in coverage, and discuss the movie director much more often than the other genres. User reviews discuss the scene aspects (including action and visual effects) more often than the other genres, while blogs tend to talk about the cast, and discuss the music and sound slightly more often.

The study only analysed movie review documents. Similar content and text analysis studies can be carried out in other domains, such as commercial product reviews, celebrity reviews, company reviews and political opinions to compare the results.

The main contribution of the study is the sentiment content analysis results across genres, which show the similarities and differences in content and textual characteristics in the four online opinion genres. The insights will be useful in designing automatic sentiment summarisation methods for multiple online genres.

As far as lasting of the great Bordeaux wines is concerned, each critic needs to identify his specificity if he is to maintain or increase market share. History shows, however, that each new critic has had to position himself in relation to the market leader, namely the American wine critic Robert Parker. The question of whether or not the differences in evaluation are real or simply part of the critics’ grading strategy can thus be raised. To illustrate this we shall examine the results of Dubourdieu and Parker's evaluation.