Search results

This paper aims to explore a national anti-hate messaging project, #USvsHate, and its call to students to create public messages refusing “hate, bias, and injustice.” Participants indicated that #USvsHate’s invitation to publicly express students’ ideas about equal human value functioned as a next step in furthering youth voice and critical consciousness toward societal inclusion and justice.

Using grounded theory, analysis drew from teacher interviews (n = 45), student focus groups (n = 30), anonymous participant questionnaires and student-created messages and backstories (n = 250) gathered between 2017 and 2020.

Participants indicated #USvsHate’s call to amplify student voice offered a next step to act upon awareness of social issues by denouncing hate while promoting inclusivity. Four invitations related to the project’s “anti-hate message” call emerged as important to participants: the invitation to comment personally on improving society; the creative invitation to share perspectives in any media form; the invitation to speak to a promised public audience; and the invitation to join a collective “us” improving society.

Youth voice and critical consciousness scholarship show the importance of supporting K12 youth to develop abilities to speak about injustice while pursuing an inclusive democracy. Still, less research highlights youth who might enter a classroom with some level of such awareness. This research extends existing scholarship by examining a potential next step to inviting critical consciousness and youth voice in any classroom. It also explores the potential pitfalls of this open-ended approach.

The purpose of this study is to expand the experience economy model and to determine if this model provides a better understanding of the process of growing intention to continue using religious cultural heritage content delivered digitally and intention to visit religious cultural heritage sites. In particular, it examines the influence of spiritual experience on the evaluation of religious cultural heritage content, comparing delivery via virtual reality (VR) to a web-based experience.

In this study, a representative religious cultural heritage destination, Jerusalem, was chosen as an example for the application. Participants (n = 292) were randomly divided into two groups, one group using the web and the other group experiencing VR. After experiencing the destination virtually, participants completed a survey, the results of which were analyzed using path analysis and multi-group analysis.

The results suggest that spiritual experience mediates the four elements of Pine and Gilmore (1998) experience economy model and the intention to continue engaging with the content virtually. Intellectual awareness of religious cultural heritage strengthens the spiritual experience, which mediates educational and aesthetic experiences and the successful use of VR and the web. Additionally, for participants experiencing VR, the influence of spiritual experience on the intention to continue using the virtual media to consume content related to religious cultural heritage sites and to visit actual religious heritage sites was stronger than for participants using the web.

This study based on an expanded experience economy model explores the use of digital technologies for the enhancement of spiritual experience. Comparison of web-based and VR content delivery provides important implications for destination marketers in terms of promoting destinations online and encouraging intention to visit actual sites in the future.

This paper aims to understand the discrepancy between Germany’s immediate positive response to the so-called “Europe 2015's refugee crisis“ and the strict asylum legislation adopted in Germany in the following year.

The discrepancy is attributed to external and internal forces. The external force is Germany’s obligation to adhere to the Common European Asylum System. The internal force is the role of the different policy actors. The paper focuses on the role of the media as an example of a private policy actor. Through adopting the theory of the social construction of target populations, the paper studies how the media constructs “asylum seekers”, the target of the new asylum legislation. The role of the media is analyzed using the methodology of qualitative content analysis of a selected number of newspaper articles.

The majority of the studied articles problematized receiving and hosting refugees and focused on the reason behind migration differentiating between asylum seekers fleeing conflict areas and all others who might be abusing the asylum channel. The findings of the content analysis, as such, resonate with the amendments that focused on facilitating the integration of accepted “refugees” but restricted further entry. As such, it could be argued that these findings explain the influence of the media on the amendments and as such provide an explanation to the discrepancy between the initial response and the amendments.

The analysis focused on one newspaper. The findings, as such, are not representative. The aim is only to provide an example of how the German media dealt with the refugee crisis and to suggest using the theory chosen by the paper to analyze the link between asylum legislation and the construction of asylum seekers. To understand how asylum legislation is influenced by how asylum seekers are constructed, more studies are needed. Such studies could analyze the role played by other media outputs and/or the role played by other policy actors in constructing the target of the policy.

The media’s response is based on analyzing a sample of newspaper articles published by a German newspaper following the so-called 2015 refugee crisis. Accordingly, the findings represent an original endeavor to understand how the media reacted to the crisis.

Photos are powerful tools to attract individuals’ attention and convey service experiences. Yet exactly how visual cues in a photo contribute to the perceptions of the staged servicescape, and how these perceptions inspire online booking/reservation behaviors, remains underexplored. Addressing the gap, this study aims to uncover (1) how perceptual information mediated by an online photo contributes to the formation of consumers' holistic perceptions of the service environment and (2) how such consumers' holistic perceptions further influence customers' online purchasing behaviors.

This research adopts an innovative crowdsourcing approach and refers to field data on consumers' online hotel booking behaviors to examine relationships among inferred servicescape dimensions, consumers' holistic perceptions of the mediated servicescape and their actual online booking/reservation behaviors (e.g. page-view and meta-click behaviors).

Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis indicated that five mediated servicescape dimensions (i.e. color, lighting, furnishings, layout and style) contribute significantly to consumers' perceptions of the mediated servicescape (CPMS) and exert different impacts on CPMS. Connecting the crowdsourced rating and consumer behavioral data, CPMS is found to influence consumers' aggregated page-view and meta-click behavior, especially in the US market.

Building upon servicescape theory, the medium theory and the online booking literature, this research proposes a novel conceptual framework of CPMS to theorize the process by which visual cues in online photos contribute to CPMS and subsequent online purchase behaviors. Findings from this research extend Bitner's servicescape framework to mediated service contexts and provide practical implications for promoting service businesses.

This study investigates how personality traits influence individuals’ intention to become community group buying (CGB) leaders.

Data include 517 valid questionnaires that are employed to examine the research model and test the hypotheses using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

This study reveals that among the Big Five personality traits, extroversion and neuroticism have more impact on the perceived ease of use and usefulness of social media, and individuals with high levels of these traits are more likely to become CGB leaders. Perceived ease of use only mediates the relationship between agreeableness and CGB leader intention, whereas perceived usefulness mediates the relationships between conscientiousness and CGB leader intention and neuroticism and CGB leader intention.

This study can serve as a catalyst for advancing the exploration of how personality traits and social media affect the intention of being CGB leaders. In addition, the study investigates the mediating effect of social media technology acceptance obtaining valuable insights into how social media affects individuals’ intention to become CGB leaders, expanding the research in this field.

• (1)

  Individuals with extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness personality traits exhibit higher perceived ease of use and usefulness of social media.

• (2)

  Unlike previous research suggested, neurotic individuals appear to be attracted to becoming community group buying (CGB) leaders.

• (3)

  Individuals with high agreeableness are encouraged by ease in pursuing CGB leadership.

• (4)

  Perceived usefulness mediates the relationship between conscientiousness and CGB leadership intention and neuroticism and CGB leader intention.

Individuals with extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness personality traits exhibit higher perceived ease of use and usefulness of social media.

Unlike previous research suggested, neurotic individuals appear to be attracted to becoming community group buying (CGB) leaders.

Individuals with high agreeableness are encouraged by ease in pursuing CGB leadership.

Perceived usefulness mediates the relationship between conscientiousness and CGB leadership intention and neuroticism and CGB leader intention.

The present article seeks to further the analysis by examining the epitext employed by the press seeing as the epitext in the digital spaces might have given Animal Farm and its Thai re-translations a new lease on life.

The interest in the study of translation and paratext has primarily been in analysing peritextual material of translated texts, not on the epitext, the distanced elements located outside the book. To add to a limited amount of research into epitext, this study focusses on the element that is external to the published re-translations: the news items published by the media in the Thai and English languages from May–June 2019, immediately after the Thai PM’s book recommendation.

These news items, as an epitextual element, primed, explained, contextualised, justified and tempted readers. The “Afterlife” of Animal Farm in Thailand is sustained by political upheavals and re-translations. Rather than through their textual qualities, the re-translations of Animal Farm compete with each other through epitext.

In discussing literary re-translation of Animal Farm in the digital age, Genette’s categories of paratextual field are not without their merits. The materials examined in this article are posted by web administrators with collective identity or institutional affiliation. In some of these news items or articles, materials created by different paratextual creators are selectively coalesced within a singular textual space. The site users or news readers encounter various elements in the texts that had been curated by journalists. In other words, these elements had been consciously crafted.

When organizations engage in misconduct, social control agents play a crucial role in sanctioning them to show the enforcement of societal norms and reduce the risk of future deviance. We study the interaction between the government and the media, two key social control agents, in the evaluation organizational misconduct. While past work has focused on the influence of the media on the government, we theorize the influence of the government on the media. The government is a social control agent with supreme formal authority to punish misconduct, and thus its actions are of particular interest to the media as they form evaluations of misbehaving organizations. However, the government, tied by conflicting demands, sometimes turns a blind eye to misconduct and supports misbehaving organizations for the greater societal good, instead of punishing them. How is the media’s perception of misbehaving organizations affected by such government actions? We explore this question by looking at the case of the 2008 government bailout of investment banks in the United States, after those were caught red-handed for their involvement in the sub-prime financial crisis. Carrying out a content analysis of newspaper reporting (2007–2011), we show that the negative perception of investment banks and their misconduct is attenuated when they receive government support. Our work contributes to the emerging literature on the social construction of organizational misconduct and illuminates the interaction between government and media in the evaluation of behavior as organizational misconduct.

Satellite images can be a powerful source of data for analyses of conflict dynamics and social movements, but sociology has been slow to develop methods and metadata standards for transforming those images into data. We ask: How can satellite images become useful data? What are the key methodological and ethical considerations for incorporating high-resolution satellite images into conflict research? Why are metadata important in this work? We begin with a review of recent developments in satellite-based social scientific work on conflict, then discuss the technical and epistemological issues raised by machine processing of satellite information into user-ready images. We argue that high-resolution images can be useful analytical tools provided they are used with full awareness of their ethical and technical parameters. To support our analysis, we draw on two novel studies of satellite data research practices during the Syrian war. We conclude with a discussion of specific methodological procedures tried and tested in our ongoing work.

Contemporary cities are the subject of new forms of visualization that are not only changing how we see the urban world but how it operates as a social environment. This chapter explores Google's Street View database and the Google Maps platform as sites for the production of distinctive new streams of visual data about cities around the world. I argue that this kind of digital infrastructure presents urban researchers with both new opportunities and new challenges, raising complex questions about the role of visual images in the context of the ongoing transition to a digital, computational, and networked image world.