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News, as one of many forms of newspaper output, has long been synonymous with journalism. The “crisis of journalism” is primarily a crisis of the news as a cultural form. Drawing on Carey (2008), this chapter argues that news has lost its monopoly as a source of global experience and everyday drama, and, thus, has lost its commodity value. The decline of traditional forms of news is transforming journalism, and its democratic function as vehicle of public conversation, toward long-form, long-term, and affective narratives.

Simons (1995b) suggests that most writing on empowerment often fails to recognize that empowerment requires greater control. Accordingly, we investigate the type of control via rewards and punishment systems, which fits best in the context of empowered work teams. Specifically, we hypothesized that empowerment will lead to improvement in manufacturing performance only when rewards are based on group performance, i.e. a situation where the collective benefit of both individual team members and those of the firm are maximized. Utilizing a survey methodology, four compensation types were examined, including fixed pay, fixed+non-monetary incentives, individual-based incentives, and group-based incentives. Results show that the favorable effect of work team empowerment was not observed under fixed-pay, fixed+non-monetary incentives, or individual-based incentives. In many instances, fixed-pay or individual-based incentives interact with work team empowerment to produce a negative effect on manufacturing cost, manufacturing lead time, or non-value-added-activities. On the other hand, manufacturing plants which use group-based incentives were able to reap the benefit of work team empowerment and translate that into enhanced performance.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the shift from citizen journalist to social media user by examining how ethics are addressed on social media sites compared to citizen journalism sites.

This paper applies the framework of a 2012 study of ethics on citizen journalism sites to social media sites’ guiding documents to compare how they discuss ethics and what they ask of the users, offering suggestions for how social media sites might imbue users with a sense of their responsibilities and obligations.

The analysis finds that ethics are largely ignored on social media sites, written in legalistic language and framed in negative terms, rather than in terms of responsibilities or obligations.

When citizen journalism was subsumed by social media, much of the language – lacking as it may have been – around users’ responsibilities to each other was lost. This paper suggests social media sites should seek to raise rather than lower the barriers to entry, and imbue users with a sense of the responsibility they accept when sharing information online.

This volume of Advances in Management Accounting begins with an article by C. J. McNair, Lidija Polutnik, Holly H. Johnston, Jason Augustyn and Charles R. Thomas on shifting perspectives involving accounting, visibility, and management action. The article attempts to determine whether or not the accounting abstraction appears to dominate the manager’s perceptions of the physical reality of the firm’s utilization of its physical assets. The article then looks at whether changes in the accounting abstraction (e.g. the addition of capacity cost management reports and measurements) lead to changes in how managers perceive and use their physical assets. Using a cognitive decision-making structure developed by Wagenaar et al. (1995), this study explores the interplay between the structure and nature of capacity reporting (the surface structure of the decision) and the subsequent analysis and choice of managers within the firm (the deep structure of the decision).

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the potential for hyper‐local news websites to support and sustain peripheral rural communities by extending and developing the public sphere(s) in which they engage locally and globally.

Theoretical understandings of communicative spaces, monitorial citizenship and “liquid life” and journalism developed by Jurgen Habermas, Michael Schudson, Zygmunt Bauman and Mark Deuze inform this pilot study of a hyper‐local project undertaken by a UK media corporation. Data sets comprising documentation; news‐website content; interviews with journalists; “knowledge café” exploration of audience interactions and questionnaires are analysed to identify themes and sub‐themes in the production and use of media content.

The hyper‐local project was found to have been put in place without engaging effective involvement of the community concerned and the initial conceptualisation, predicated on assumptions of an inward focus for the community, did not recognise the importance of communicative networks which both supported sustainability within the group and situated that community in wider social, cultural, economic and media dimensions. As such the project tended to reinforce, or at least, not mitigate, the community's geographical isolation.

This is a small‐scale pilot project exploring new forms of media/community engagement and, while the results can be regarded as indicative, further research is needed to investigate hyper‐local developments in a wider contextual field.

The paper addresses an important but little‐researched emergent issue: “hyper‐local”. It explores in detail some of the complexities that are beginning to be theorised in broad terms and extends understandings of local‐level practices and processes.

This chapter explores the ethical challenges related to the study of children in highly complex and sensitive family circumstances where intimate partner violence has taken place. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at a women’s refuge in Denmark, the author unpacks and discusses three key ethical aspects of conducting research with children: gatekeepers and consent, researcher positionality, and participant confidentiality. These aspects highlight the centrality of trust when undertaking sensitive research with children. In qualitative research, trust is often described as an important aspect of the research process, but research rarely takes into account that trust can vary according to the relationship or research context. What spurred these reflections was questions asked by some of the mothers about what their child had told the author. Examples of this kind illustrate the complex role and positionality of the researcher when seeking to enter and explore the everyday lives of children living in complex family circumstances. Furthermore, the notion of trust brings attention to how different relationships of power – in this case between children and mothers – can influence the research encounter. The chapter concludes with a discussion of children’s own positionality in research about their experiences and life worlds, and calls for researchers to be ethically mindful about how powerful dynamics that emerge during research can support (or hinder) children’s rights as research participants.

In order to avoid the problem of volumetric locking often encountered when using constant strain tetrahedral finite elements, the purpose of this paper is to present a new composite tetrahedron element which is especially designed for the combined finite-discrete element method (FDEM).

A ten-noded composite tetrahedral (COMPTet) finite element, composed of eight four-noded low order tetrahedrons, has been implemented based on Munjiza’s multiplicative decomposition approach. This approach naturally decomposes deformation into translation, rotation, plastic stretches, elastic stretches, volumetric stretches, shear stretches, etc. The problem of volumetric locking is avoided via a selective integration approach that allows for different constitutive components to be evaluated at different integration points.

A number of validation cases considering different loading and boundary conditions and different materials for the proposed element are presented. A practical application of the use of the COMPTet finite element is presented by quantitative comparison of numerical model results against simple theoretical estimates and results from acrylic fracturing experiments. All of these examples clearly show the capability of the composite element in eliminating volumetric locking.

For this tetrahedral element, the combination of “composite” and “low order sub-element” properties are good choices for FDEM dynamic fracture propagation simulations: in order to eliminate the volumetric locking, only the information from the sub-elements of the composite element are needed which is especially convenient for cases where re-meshing is necessary, and the low order sub-elements will enable robust contact interaction algorithms, which maintains both relatively high computational efficiency and accuracy.