Search results

Fernandez knew, as did Kenneth Burke to whom Fernandez owed so much, that the fundamental human problem of maintaining what he elsewhere called the “inchoate sense of wholeness” was critically linked to the never-ending dilemma of “the degree to which men can feel the aptness of each other’s metaphors.” And since the publication of “Persuasions and Performances” nearly 30 years ago, a great deal of anthropological, sociological and historical work on “power and resistance,” “hegemony,” and “cultural reproduction and change” can be usefully framed as particular responses to a number of fundamental questions implicit in Fernandez’ quote – When, and under what types of conditions, does any particular “metaphor” or “trope” serve to promote cooperation and social integration? When, and under what types of conditions, does it serve to promote conflict and social disintegration? When and how is the “aptness” of any given “metaphor” or “trope” lost? We believe these to be among the most central, enduring questions in the Human Sciences.

To explore and measure wearout or the acceptance threshold, beyond which, messages in the form of mobile text advertising generate irritation. To assess the set of factors that positively or negatively, according to literature, influences the attitude towards advertising in short message service (SMS) format and on this basis to propose future research along this line. There is also a focus on irritation antecedents.

Two surveys are used to prevent unbiased answers. The first one is driven to study the wearout effect in the SMS context. An offline survey is carried out using a structured questionnaire. A sample size of 188 using convenience sampling is collected. The second research is driven to study irritation and attitude towards SMS advertising. Data are collected through an online questionnaire which is published through social media platforms, an e-mail mailing list and a quick response (QR) code. An international sample size of 253 applying a convenience and snow ball sampling procedure is collected.

The wearout threshold and irritation antecedents in the mobile advertising context are identified as well as positive and negative factors which influence attitude towards SMS advertising. The replies do not match exactly with the significant factors found in previous research.

There are some, among them, sample size and sampling procedure; only one sector was analysed and, although reliability is acceptable, the number of items in each measurement scale was reduced to only two.

Wearout and the characteristics of an SMS message capable to generate positive attitude are described.

Guidelines to improve public attitudes towards SMS advertising and prevention from wearout are given.

Wearout in the mobile advertising context is explored and some insights regarding irritation antecedents and the role played by frequency and other positive factors in the causal model proposed by the academy are assessed.

Cultural dimensions studies can limit managers' ability to overcome challenges within international teams as they perpetuate stereotypical perceptions based on nationality. Instead, managers can use identity theory to build a team culture based on interpersonal awareness in which team members view their colleagues as fully realized and predictable individuals.

In business and management, cross-national and cross-cultural comparisons between countries have been a topic of interest for many decades. Not only do firms engage in business in different countries around the world but also within countries. The population has become more diversified over time, making cross-cultural comparisons within country boundaries increasingly relevant. In comparisons across cultural groups, measurement invariance (MI) is a prerequisite; however, in practice, MI is not always attained or even tested. Our study consists of three parts. First, we provide a bibliometric analysis of articles on cross-cultural and cross-national topics in marketing to provide insight into the connections between the articles and the main themes. Second, we code articles to assess whether researchers follow the recommended steps as outlined in the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) approach. The results indicate that MI testing is incorporated in the toolbox of many empirical researchers in marketing and that articles often report the level of invariance. Yet, most studies find partial invariance, meaning that some items are not comparable across the cultural groups studied. Researchers understand that MI is required, but they often ignore noninvariant items, which may decrease the validity of cross-cultural comparisons made. Third, we analyze the dissemination of MI in the broader literature based on co-citations with Steenkamp and Baumgartner (1998), a widely cited article on MI in the field of marketing. We conclude by noting methodological developments in cross-cultural research to enable addressing noninvariance and providing suggestions to further advance our insight into cross-cultural differences and similarities.

Today, businesses, organizations and governments attach great importance to digital transformation to meet the needs of their customers, business partners, and employees to adapt to the developing technology in recent years. Digital transformation, which is a challenging and mandatory process, has been and continues to be passed by institutions today. However, the successful management of this transformation without conflict can be realized by accurately detecting new communication technologies and examining, understanding, and implementing the transformation process in detail. This process will be painful, where radical changes will take place in the structure, processes, functions, and business models of the organization. Different challenges may be encountered in each of the startup, execution, and governance subprocesses examined in the digital transformation process. Many conflicts such as time and budget shortages, inadequate digital skills and lack of vision for digital customer processes, cybersecurity threats, human resource shortages, difficulty in managing technology, failure to achieve cloud structure integration, vision, and culture differences are the reasons why this process cannot be managed fluently and accurately. For businesses that focus on this goal, regardless of scale, digital transformation has become a necessity, not an alternative to choose. In this study, the digital transformation process and maturity model were discussed, and technological and digital conflicts were emphasized. It seeks to shed light on the work they will do by making recommendations for institutions to manage this process in the best way.

Status, which is based on differences in esteem and honor, is an ancient and universal form of inequality which nevertheless interpenetrates modern institutions and organizations. Given its ubiquity and significance, we need to better understand the basic nature of status as a form of inequality. I argue that status hierarches are a cultural invention to organize and manage social relations in a fundamental human condition: cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals with nested competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes in the effort. I consider this claim in relation to both evolutionary arguments and empirical evidence. Evidence suggests that the cultural schema of status is two-fold, consisting of a deeply learned basic norm of status allocation and a set of more explicit, variable, and changing common knowledge status beliefs that people draw on to coordinate judgments about who or what is more deserving of higher status. The cultural nature of status allows people to spread it widely to social phenomena (e.g., firms in a business field) well beyond its origins in interpersonal hierarchies. In particular, I argue, the association of status with social difference groups (e.g., race, gender, class-as-culture) gives inequalities based on those difference groups an autonomous, independent capacity to reproduce themselves through interpersonal status processes.

Recent worldwide gains in girls’ schooling are raising new questions about the continued relevance of gender for educational inequality. At issue is whether the time has come to shift the policy focus away from gender to socioeconomic status. Answers to this question, we suggest, depend on how gender gaps close, i.e., do they close irreversibly, evenly, and faster than socio-economic (SES)-related inequality?

Against this background and building on contrasted sociological perspectives on inequality, our chapter examines the recent convergence trajectories of several sub-Saharan countries, asking if these trajectories warrant a policy shift away from gender.

Our findings are mixed. Although, the magnitude of sex-related inequality in schooling is consistently smaller than SES-related inequality, the process of gender convergence remains reversible and it unfolds in top-down fashion. Such findings warrant continued attention to gender in sub-Saharan Africa, but with particular focus on poor girls and on synergies that address both female and poor children. This conclusion supports theoretical advances that transcend the Manichean divide between focus on cultural recognition and socioeconomic redistribution.

In 1987, the City of Los Angeles instituted the first gang injunction in the country. Gang injunctions are pursued through the civil courts to seriously restrict the activities and movement of suspected gang members and affiliates. People who have been served with a gang injunction are often prohibited from everyday activities, such as wearing sports jerseys, talking to other gang members, and being out in public past curfew, regardless of age. Though often justified by law enforcement as a necessary tool to fight gang violence, we argue that gang injunctions are similar to Slave Codes, Black Codes, and Jim Crow laws, which established a separate system of justice based on race. As such, gang injunctions serve as an extension of an apartheid-like system of justice that seriously limits the life opportunities of people of color within gang injunction territories.

This chapter draws upon the oral histories of people targeted by gang injunction laws within California, paying particular attention to how gang-identified individuals are surveiled, controlled, and confined.

Gang injunctions operate on an apartheid-like justice system that punishes perceived gang members harsher than non-gang members. These laws affirm the legal tactics that maintain racial boundaries and promote a system of justice that mirrors the Black Codes following the end of slavery. The evidence suggests that gang injunctions solely target low-income youth of color, who have been identified as gang members and served with injunctions.

Despite the ubiquity of gang injunctions within California, there is little research on gang injunctions, and even less literature on how these injunctions shape the life course of suspected gang members. We attempt to address this gap in the literature by showing how gang injunctions are not simply about fighting crime, but rather they are a tool used to control and corral communities of color.