The study attempts to understand the complexities of identification in situations when broader organizational and institutional discourses actively challenge the skills and expertise of organizational members who are minorities, arguing that a lens of sustainability allows greater understanding of the ongoing processes at stake, rather than achieving a static outcome. By studying international female graduate engineering students, the paper examines the intersections of gender and foreignness which lie at the root of the nature of identification with the engineering profession. Analysis of data from interviews and focus groups involving 49 participants reveals that the members face barriers which create tensions regarding linkages with the organization and the broader engineering profession, which in turn threaten their engineering identities. Additional analysis shows that the members communicatively reconfirm and recombine their identities, drawing from alternate non-organizational resources which help the members sustain themselves in the organization. The findings extend our understanding of organizational identity, capitalizing on member identification and diversity through the mobilization and utilization of organizational and non-organizational resources in the organizations.
This research studies participants’ self-repair practices in instant messaging (IM) interactions. IM is an online forum that allows two people to converse with each other through the exchange of text messages. Same turn, self-repair practices in IM are particularly interesting because here the message composition experience is uniquely poised between the written and oral contexts of communication. The composition is private and textual yet it is for an immediate audience. Drawing on the comparative approach used by Drew, Walker and Ogden (2013), the analysis compares the initial and final versions of participants’ messages and observes the repair operations they perform (Schegloff, 2013), the technology used to effect the repair and the actions thereby achieved. The data used for this research comprise 15 chats between 30 participants. The initial versions of the messages were recorded using a key logging software and these were compared with the final versions retrieved from the chat logs. A total of 671 messages were analyzed to study the ways in which participants self-repair their messages to design turns that are best suited for particular interactional needs. The analysis suggests that the repair operations that IM participants perform are not very different from their oral counterparts and include replacing, inserting, adding, deleting, aborting, searching and sequence jumping. IM participants engage in such repair to achieve significant actions such as upgrading or downgrading their claims, displaying sensitivity to epistemic authority, searching for the right referent amongst others. Besides issues related to turn design, self-repair in IM is used for another crucial function: to address trouble arising out of sequential placement of messages and to construct messages that are most appropriate for an ever-changing semantic environment.
Brand equity is a brand’s incremental value due to its name. It has been long argued that brand equity must be the ultimate criterion of success in brand management because brand equity contributes both to long-term sales and long-term profits. Celebrity endorsement has gained prominence as a popular resource for marketing strategies among many firms. This research aims to empirically test the role of celebrity endorsements in the brand equity formation process. This study explored the relationship between celebrity endorsements and four dimensions of brand equity of Aaker’s (1991) brand equity model in Indian luxury products market. Data were collected through a shopping mall intercept survey of 202 respondents in the cities of Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida and Chandigarh. Exploratory factor analysis was used for reducing the number of scale items while regression was used to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show a positive and significant effect of celebrity endorsements on two brand equity dimensions, that is, brand awareness and brand associations, but celebrity endorsements do not have any significant influence on other two dimensions, that is, perceived quality and brand loyalty. We finally discuss the implications—both theoretical and managerial—before providing directions for future research.
Ever since its establishment in 1944 the World Bank (the Bank), along with the International Monetary Fund, has progressively increased its influence on economic affairs of the world. The Bank’s concern with development knowledge represents one such area of its extended reach. The latter years of the last decade of the twentieth century were marked by a remarkably heightened interest of the Bank in development knowledge, manifested in the declaration of the Bank as The Knowledge Bank by its president in 1996, James Wolfensohn, and positioning the Bank as a knowledge resource for global political and economic structuring. This article focuses on this newfound sphere of activity of the Bank and, in this context, outlines the major critiques that are levied against policies of the Bank. Specifically, we look at the position paper ‘Beyond the Numbers: Understanding the Institutions for Monitoring Poverty Reduction Strategies’ to understand its prescriptions in the light of the Knowledge Bank project and to examine closely the current framework of knowledge pushed by the Bank. We undertake a theme analysis of the document to critically examine the specific knowledge claims put forth by the Bank.
Corporate media ownership facilitates the licensing of cultural products for multiple uses. The authenticity of a cultural form, including those included in comic books, has changed through the transformation of the original comic book characters. Moreover, those transformations may engage us more through this evolution from authenticity to transforming character. In the context of Disney’s merger with Marvel Comics in 2009, was the authenticity of popular comic characters’ original visual images transformed by reproduction in other media forms? This study explored potential transformations of the original image of the Marvel Comics character Wolverine in diverse media formats, as well as the possibility of shifting its authenticity through recreations or infantilization to appeal to different audiences.
The theme of subalternity with its inherent ramifications is yet to find favour among film makers in India. Progressive film makers of the 1960s attempted to address the theme of subaltern and dared to give the subaltern a voice, but they remained singular attempts. Through a case study on a Malayalam film (a regional film industry from the state of Kerala in India) Papilio Buddha this article tries to analyze the representation of Dalit community in Indian cinema. Though Malayalam film industry has tried to address the concern of Dalits, they have been stereotyped in many ways and reduced to being sidekicks to villains or unskilled labourers having no identity. They remained as instruments to idolize the hero, to act as a contrast to the elite protagonist or as the poor helpless victims who offer the protagonist an opportunity to display his heroism. Papilio Buddha grabbed media attention when it was denied clearance by the censor board as it explores the territory of Dalit consciousness by focusing the lens on the land strike by the Dalit communities and creating a counter narrative to the hitherto idealized images created by the state.
After more than two decades as social media became regularized, domesticated and incorporated into our everyday life, we need to understand, both, how social media is shaped by and is shaping the practices humans use in interaction with, around and through it. With the advent of social media, everybody is affected, in one way or the other, by very ubiquity of new online expertise; children and young adults are usually among the first and keenest and passionate users of information and communication technologies. However, teens’ voices are rarely acknowledged and considered effective in shaping the public discourse. This article claims that the new social media opens up the possibility for the young (13–17-year olds), of being part of the global world and at the same time being true to their roots and middle-class moralities. This article emphasizes that social networking sites act as a democratizing element which balances the power somewhat in favour of teens and helps them negotiate between being world class citizens and the torch bearers of Indian middle-class morality. This article explores their sense making of these often contradictory, yet connected, intersecting/overlapping, yet distinct, worlds.
This article argues that the amount and nature of disability representation in English and Telugu news media directly and indirectly serves neo-liberal objectives. Disability construction in the Indian print news media may be construed as a product of the political economy of representation. News articles present disabled people as having ‘use value’ in society, ready to be offered for ‘exchange value’ in the market. These insights are derived from a close reading of news articles using framing analysis, which allowed us to explore the underlying political economy of disability coverage in mainstream news. This article situates the symbiotic economic relations established through the media’s consciously placed disability representation within the existing discourses related to disability. It also attempts to reevaluate the available themes on disability and media representation with a view to uncovering the implied meanings of political economy recurrent in print news in India.
Entertainment education has proved its mettle in making health communication effective. The craft of designing informative but non-pedantic messages lies in packaging them in an entertaining manner. This article presents the aspects of positive deviant practices solicited through a research in identifying unique behaviours related to some very personal and familial issues like early pregnancy and adoption of contraception and family planning, safe motherhood and countering the preference for a male child. The identified positive deviant behaviours formed the crux of the substance of the script of an edutainment tele-drama series Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon.
As the industry of international fertility tourism has continued to grow around the world India has become a hotbed of controversy around the practice of commercial surrogacy. Some estimates claim that over 5,000 babies are born every year in India via surrogacy. With transnational surrogacy becoming a more widely known reproductive alternative, there are ongoing debates both in academia and the media regarding the extent to which women are empowered while also protected in the current structure of surrogacy. The resulting arrangement between intended parents, healthcare providers, surrogates and other agencies has become incredibly complex and wrought with challenges. As Shome & Hegde (2002a) have pointed out, the current state of globalization creates processes by which economic and cultural power lines shift rapidly. In light of the industry growth, the government and the Indian Council of Medical Research proposed guidelines and legislation aimed to regulate the Assisted Reproductive Technology industry that benefited from specific medical tourism trends. This manuscript discusses the business of surrogacy and explores the implications of the proposed policy amidst a controversial ban of commercial surrogacy for international patients through a critical discourse analysis of the policy, bolstered by direct interviews with health providers and surrogates. The analysis explicates the complexity and paradoxes of the arrangement highlighting the agency of each stakeholder involved. Unsurprisingly, the analysis shows a lack of protection for individual surrogates and a privileging of intended parents interests and needs. However, there are also important opportunities for potential regulation that works towards all needs.
This study employed the media uses and gratifications model to examine the needs and motives of Instagram users that predict self-disclosure use. Students from the Gulf University of Science and Technology, Kuwait, were surveyed for this study. This study suggests that Instagram provides categories of needs and motives similar in nature to those of the other social media such as self-expression, social interaction, entertainment and opinion exchange. It also caters to the need for experimenting with photography that few available social media satisfy. Self-expression and social interaction needs were the strongest predictors of the use of Instagram for self-disclosure on all its dimensions, that is, honesty, amount, positive valence and depth. Other intersecting factors such as biological sex and frequency of use showed different patterns of use. The implications of Arab culture on Instagram use are discussed since Kuwaiti culture, as opposed to the Western cultures, is more collectivist in nature.
This article attempts to analyze the relation between individual, the machinic systems and capitalist ideology that gets more consolidated with the digital by looking closely at the ways in which the human–machine relation gets standardized through the ‘stabilization’ of technology in what is referred to as Web 2.0. Considering certain aspects of print culture that led to what Foucault refers to as the ‘principles of exclusion’—the way in which discourses delimit itself—the larger cultural economies that involved the production and manipulation of symbols in web is critically re-examined. The print-informed relation of individual and text finds its contemporary ramifications in our understanding and usage of hypertext as HTML. The article traces the crucial stages during the establishment of World Wide Web at the turn of the century and affects the question ‘What is a blogger’ in the same vein that the question ‘What is an Author’ was asked to trace the role that weblog format played in the constitution of ‘access’ to cyberspace. The larger implication of such an enquiry would be to situate ‘cyborg’ subjectivity as one that consolidates human identities as more textual, archived and accessible. The amalgamation of human–machine capacities through the stabilization of material technologies in the digital world concern the governmentality of bodies through HTML, its ideological significations and the praxis that led to its stabilization in the turn of the millennium.