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1 – 10 of over 6000For readers' advisory librarians, genre literature can prove to be difficult collection management areas. The literature itself has rarely been defined in anything but the…
Abstract
For readers' advisory librarians, genre literature can prove to be difficult collection management areas. The literature itself has rarely been defined in anything but the negative (“not great literature,” “not of lasting quality”) and yet it makes up a good deal of the attraction for many patrons to the public library, and gives great circulation support to their collections. Percentage‐wise, it gets the least attention for the most benefits. Many budgets are based on circulation figures, and much of the commendable relationship with the public is based on readers who devour genre literature. Why is it that genre readers are given such short shrift for their loyalty and devotion? Some of the problem lies in the traditional view of genre literature and the rest in the new view of collection development.
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.
Design/methodology/approach
To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.
Findings
Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.
Practical implications
The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.
Originality/value
This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.
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Muatasim Ismaeel and Zarina Zakaria
This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.
Design/methodology/approach
Analysis of the features, content and language of CSR reports published by listed companies in the region, to classify the genres of these reports and infer results about ways of companies’ interaction with newly institutionalized genre.
Findings
Three distinct genres are identified: “sustainability reports genre,” “professional CSR report genre” and “light CSR report genre.” When companies interact with institutionally diffused genres, they either adopt them and re-enforce their distinctiveness, mix them with elements from other genres so their distinctiveness will be diluted, or produce the old and established genres under the new name so the new genre will lose its distinctiveness.
Originality/value
The proposed classification of CSR report genres and ways of companies’ interaction with new genres are original and open new horizons for research in social and environmental accounting and corporate communication fields.
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Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell'Orletta, Alessio Miaschi, Elena Prat and Giulia Venturi
The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.
Findings
The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.
Originality/value
The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.
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This study developed two presentation modes of scientific articles and evaluated their usability with user experiments.
Abstract
Purpose
This study developed two presentation modes of scientific articles and evaluated their usability with user experiments.
Design/methodology/approach
Two presentation modes of scientific articles, simply referred to as “genre presentation mode” and “argument presentation mode”, were constructed based on their genre structure and argument structure respectively. Their usability was evaluated by being compared against the existing RichHTML presentation mode in the experiments using eye-tracking and questionnaire methods.
Findings
The participants who were going to find the specific information of scientific articles rated the genre presentation mode higher than they did with either the argument or the RichHTML presentation mode for effectiveness. In contrast, those who were going to understand the general idea of scientific articles rated both the genre and argument presentation mode higher than they did with the RichHTML mode. In terms of efficiency, the participants took less reading time when the articles of non-native language were presented with the genre mode than they did when the articles were presented with the argument mode. When reading the articles in native language to understand the general idea, the participants took less reading time for the articles presented with the argument mode than they did for the articles presented with the genre mode. In comparison, they took less reading time when the articles were presented with the argument mode if they were going to find specific information. For satisfaction, the genre presentation mode was more popular than the argument mode and the RichHTML mode. However, the participants were less satisfied with the argument presentation mode than the other two when reading in native language and intending to find specific information.
Originality/value
The two presentation modes of scientific articles are found to improve the accuracy of information acquisition, shorten the total reading time and be more acceptable by readers.
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Barbara H. Kwaśnik and Kevin Crowston
To introduce the special issue on “Genres of digital documents.” While there are many definitions of genre, most include consideration of the intended communicative purpose, form…
Abstract
Purpose
To introduce the special issue on “Genres of digital documents.” While there are many definitions of genre, most include consideration of the intended communicative purpose, form and sometimes expected content of a document. Most also include the notion of social acceptance, that a document is of a particular genre to the extent that it is recognized as such within a given discourse community.
Design/methodology/approach
The article reviews the notion of document genre and its applicability to studies of digital documents and introduces the four articles in the special issue.
Findings
Genre can be studied based on intrinsic genre attributes or on the extrinsic function that genre fulfills in human activities. Studies on intrinsic attributes include classifications of genres as clusters of attributes, though these classifications can be problematic because documents can be used in flexible ways. Also, new information technologies have enabled the appearance of novel genres. Studies on extrinsic function include ways to use genre for education or information accesses, as well as the use of genre as a lens for understanding communications in organizations. The four articles in the special issue illustrate these approaches.
Originality/value
The paper provides a framework that organizes the range of research about genres of digital documents that should be helpful to those reading this research or planning their own studies.
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The purpose of this article is to develop a contemporary understanding of genre as digital social action. Particular emphasis will be on archiving, tagging, and searching as…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to develop a contemporary understanding of genre as digital social action. Particular emphasis will be on archiving, tagging, and searching as social actions afforded by digital media as a function of their materiality.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach is critical analysis and discussion.
Findings
It is shown through an examination and a concrete example of how the genre is understood as digital social action, how the materiality of digital media affords particular communicative actions.
Originality/value
The article contributes with an understanding of the genre as digital social action consisting of two communicating parts: users’ actions and materiality.
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Wooyoung (William) Jang, Kevin K. Byon, Antonio Williams and Paul M. Pedersen
While each genre and gender has been revealed as significant moderators for esports gameplay intention, exploring the interaction effects between genre and gender could broaden…
Abstract
Purpose
While each genre and gender has been revealed as significant moderators for esports gameplay intention, exploring the interaction effects between genre and gender could broaden our understanding of the drivers’ relative effects on esports gameplay intention. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the interaction effects of gender and genre in the relationship between esports gameplay intention and its drivers (i.e. hedonic motivation, habit, price value, effort expectancy, social influence and flow).
Design/methodology/approach
The hypothesized model was examined using data from a sample (N = 1,194). For the purposes of data analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to examine the hypothesized model. Then, a series of structural invariance tests were conducted to compare the interrelationship between the six determinants and esports gameplay for the six-group model.
Findings
The results of the six-group model comparison indicated that the interaction between gender and genre moderates the relationship between drivers and esports gameplay intention. In particular, the following moderation effects were observed: (1) “social influence-esports gameplay intention” between “male-physical enactment” and “female-physical enactment”; (2) “habit-esports gameplay intention” and (3) “effort expectancy-esports gameplay intention” between “female-imagination” and “female-physical enactment”; (4) “hedonic motivation-esports gameplay intention” and (5) “effort expectancy-esports gameplay intention” between “female-physical enactment” and “female-sport simulation.”
Originality/value
The findings of this current study contributed to clarifying the genre and gender effects in esports gameplay intention and thus the extension of the Esports Consumption (ESC) model (Jang et al., 2020a) and the technology adoption literature. Since the ESC model grounded the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2), the improvement of the ESC model extended UTAUT2. In consumer behavior research in the esports context, this current study contributed to the extension of UTAUT2 on the new moderating mechanisms by adding the interaction between gender and esports game genre.
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Agnès Delahaye, Charles Booth, Peter Clark, Stephen Procter and Michael Rowlinson
This paper seeks to identify and define the genre of corporate history within the pervasive historical discourse produced by and about organizations which tells the past of an…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to identify and define the genre of corporate history within the pervasive historical discourse produced by and about organizations which tells the past of an organization across a multiplicity of texts: published works – commissioned and critical accounts, academic tomes and glossy coffee‐table books – as well as web pages, annual reports and promotional pamphlets.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach takes the form of systematic reading of historical narratives for 85 mainly British and US companies from the Fortune Global 500. For these companies, a search was carried out for US printed sources in the British Library and a survey was conducted of historical content in web pages.
Findings
From extensive reading of the historical discourse, recurrent formal features (medium, authorship, publication, paratext and imagery) and elements of thematic content (narrative, characters, cultural paradigms and business success), which together define the genre of corporate history, have been identified. Such a definition provides competence in the reading of historical narratives of organizations and raises questions regarding the role of history in organizational identity, memory and communication. In conclusion it is argued that the interpretation of corporate history cannot be reduced to its promotional function for organizations.
Research limitations/implications
The list of the formal features and thematic content of corporate history detailed here is by no means exhaustive. They are not variables, but signs, which, in various combinations, compose the narrative and signify the genre.
Practical implications
It seems likely that coffee‐table books will increasingly replace academic commissioned histories, with consultants professionalizing the discourse and formalizing the genre of corporate history.
Originality/value
The genre of corporate history has hitherto been neglected in organization theory, where the linguistic turn has led to a preoccupation with talk as text. The use of genre to analyse corporate history represents a textual turn to literary organizational texts as text.
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Consumers often search for movie information and purchase tickets on the go. A synopsis is often provided by producers and theatres in mobile apps and websites. However, to the…
Abstract
Purpose
Consumers often search for movie information and purchase tickets on the go. A synopsis is often provided by producers and theatres in mobile apps and websites. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, little research has investigated whether the synopsis has an impact on a movie’s box office. This research uses computerized text analysis in examining the influence of linguistic cues of a synopsis on the movie’s financial performance. This paper aims to show that language choice in a synopsis is a significant factor in predicting box office performance.
Design/methodology/approach
A total usable sample of 5973 movies was collected using a web crawler. Computerised text analysis using linguistic inquiry and word count was adopted to analyse the movie synopses data. The empirical study comprises two phases. Phase 1 used exploratory factor analysis on 50 per cent of the sample (Sample 1) to establish the dimensionality of psychological processes as reflected in the linguistic expressions. The analysis identified 11 linguistic variables that loaded on four dimensions. The factor structure was replicated on an independent sample (Sample 2) using confirmatory factor analysis. Phase 2 tested the hypotheses using structure equation modelling.
Findings
Results show that consistency between movie genres and linguistic cues in a film synopsis promotes movie box office revenue when linguistic cues shown in the synopsis confirm a consumer’s expectancies about a focal movie genre. Conversely, a synopsis reduces the movie box office revenue when the linguistic cues shown disconfirm the genre-based expectancies. These linguistic cues exert similar effects on action and crime films but different effects on comedies and drama films.
Research limitations/implications
It is likely that consumer tastes and linguistic styles of film synopses have evolved over time. As a cross-sectional study, such changes were not taken into consideration in the current research. A longitudinal study in the future can reveal the dynamic relationship between film synopses and audience.
Practical implications
Managerially, the findings show that a synopsis is an effective communication touch point to position a movie. This research provides concrete guidelines in crafting synopses with the “rights words’ aligned with movie-goers’ expectations within each specific genre. Beyond movie consumption, the research findings can be applied to other entertainment products, such as TV series and books.
Originality/value
To our knowledge, this research is the first in studying the linguistic cues in synopses and its relation to box office performance. It addresses this knowledge gap by answering the basic question of whether movie synopses matter. Methodically, the paper marks the first attempt to use the two-step structural equation modelling method on computerised content analysis data.
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