Search results

The 2016 presidential campaign in the United States was marked by widespread interference by Russian agents. The interference was especially prominent in digital media. This indicates the possible need for better regulation. To investigate the problem, I examined the legal and regulatory history of US Federal campaign regulation. While these regulations require various disclosures and disclaimers, and set some spending limits, they do not cover advertising messages. More to the point, the disclosure and disclaimer requirements for digital ads are limited and easily circumvented. Possibly because of this, political advertising in digital media has increased dramatically in recent years. I examine current proposals for improved regulation and make recommendations for changes in Federal regulation and in oversight by nonpartisan groups.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.

When a firm implements certain HR practices, different employees attribute different motives and intentions to the firm with regard to those HR practices. Research on HR attributions has made progress toward understanding the relationship between HR practices and employee outcomes from a process perspective. However, this research is still fragmented and lacks a systematic typology of the different types of HR attributions and a compelling organizing research framework. Furthermore, a number of research gaps and opportunities have emerged regarding the nomological net of employee HR attributions. To address the gaps and capitalize on the opportunities, the authors propose an overarching theory-driven multi-level framework that guides the choice of the antecedents and outcomes of employee HR attributions and explains their relationships along with both mediating and moderating mechanisms. Drawing on signaling theory embedded in the proposed framework, the authors identify and categorize various antecedents of employee HR attributions to explain their relationships. The authors also use several additional theories such as social exchange and the job demands–resources model included in their review to identify and categorize various outcomes of employee HR attributions across levels of analysis (i.e., individual, collective [team/group/unit], organization) and explain their relationships. In addition, the proposed framework explains how individual-level employee HR attributions emerge at the collective level and influence collective processes and outcomes. The authors end their review by pinpointing future research needs and discussing related future research directions.

The chapter examined the consumer meanings of product placements embedded in social games in different cultural contexts.

The theoretical perspective guiding the study is phenomenology, and the essay assignment and in-depth interviews were used to collect data.

The chapter was based on two qualitative research projects. Findings revealed that consumers in both countries appreciated certain characteristics of product placement in the context of social game, such as subtleness (naturalness) and unobtrusiveness (users’ freedom of choice and proactive choice); consumers’ real-world consumption in both countries seems to be more or less influenced by the product placement in social games; and while the young American consumers didn’t construct specific meanings for Facebook, the Chinese white-collar consumers actively created meanings for the Chinese social-network site.

The chapter offered some thick descriptions and in-depth analyses of product placements in social games in different cultural contexts from consumers’ experiential perspectives to enrich our theoretical understanding of product placement in the new media environment as well as to add valuable insights to the research literature on new advertising formats in general.

No study to date has been conducted to explore the product placement in social games in different cultural contexts. The study fills the research gap by exploring US college-aged consumers’ and Chinese white-collar consumers’ interpretations of product placements in the context of social games.

Yahya Altınkurt holds Ph.D. from Anadolu University, Turkey. He is assistant professor at Dumlupınar University Faculty of Education in Kütahya. Dr. Altınkurt's research focuses on strategic planning, organizational justice, organizational citizenship, and leadership in schools. His most recent books include Assessment of Researches of School Administration (2008, Anadolu University Publishing coauthored with E. Ağaoğlu, M. Ceylan, E. Kesim, and T. Madden). Dr. Altınkurt's research has appeared in various journals including Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, Education and Science, Educational Administration: Theory and Practice, International Journal of Human Sciences, Academic Sight.

Both accounting professionals and accounting academics have noted the importance of communication skills for the career success of students. Further, the general consensus from the academic and practitioner literature is that these communication skills are an area in which many students could use improvement. One factor that has been shown to impact the improvement and development of these skills is communication apprehension.

In this chapter, we describe a combination of pedagogical methods we employed in tax classes at two universities to reduce written communication apprehension among students. More specifically, we draw ideas from communications research which suggest that increased writing opportunities, progressively increasing the weighting of the assignments, using models and examples for study and comparison, and trying to make feedback more effective may help to reduce written communication apprehension. We implemented this suggested approach by using a series of assignments that incorporated writing components.

Results suggest that writing apprehension reduced from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester. Further, the reduction in writing apprehension was even greater for those students who began the semester with high written communication apprehension. In addition, the results of the survey questions at the end of the semester suggest that the methods also improved students’ confidence in preparing tax-related written communication.

The communications industry faces a recruitment crisis. Despite the pivot to hybrid working and the ever-increasing number of young people opting to study the discipline, over half of recruiters in the public sector and three quarters of those recruiting for agencies struggle to fill vacancies. This chapter examines these trends from a radical feminist perspective, arguing the communications industry is squandering young, female talent by failing both new entrants and mothers returning to work after childbirth. This analysis is based on a series of surveys undertaken between 2020 and 2022 to examine the expectations and lived experience of women, and in particular communications students and mothers, working in or aspiring to work in the sector. Over 73% of the women surveyed had experienced gender-based discrimination and harassment, and 66% had been forced to choose between their careers and having a child. Of the young entrants to the profession surveyed, 88% believed becoming a mother would negatively impact their career, while 32% had experienced discrimination while undertaking their student placement. Analysis of these data indicates the sector faces a crisis of its own making by failing to provide a workplace culture worth working in. The chapter concludes only a direct challenge to male hegemony can redress the gender imbalance, free up talent to meet skills shortages and provide lasting change for women working in communications. It offers a series of recommendations for how professional bodies can address these issues and empower young women to achieve the career outcomes they deserve.

The expected growth of elders and chronically ill patients requires health insurers and health-care systems to shift from primarily focusing on the care of the sick to focusing both on care of the sick and on preventive health care. Public expectations for high-quality health care call for a new, more profound, and more actionable understanding of the healthy customer’s mind regarding health-promoting behaviors. Mind-Genomics may become the next big idea in health service. The relation between Mind-Genomics and data-driven personalized health plans is now being systematically explored. Some of the findings are reported in this research project.

Methodology: Respondents were 200 members of the Excellus American health fund. Based on measures of patient experience the authors created and tested concepts of messaging. The authors conducted a series of conjoint-based designed experiments to establish response patterns to our messaging. The authors analyzed data using Mind-Genomics, an empirical “micro-science” for discovering psychographic mind-sets and mapping motivating messages for healthy behaviors.

Results: The authors segmented patients by attitudes, perceptions, preferences, needs, and behaviors by their responses to messaging, thereby uncovering underlying psychographic mind-sets. The authors used the Personal Viewpoint Identifier to tag each person in the population by a sample mind-set and use the right messaging.

Discussion: To understand the mind of the patient regarding health plans, health funds may use the powerful tools of Mind-Genomics. Health insurers and health systems may implement Mind-Genomics as the next frontier of knowledge development to offer customized health plans, thus investing in preventive medicine.