Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Book Review: Drawing Card, Scott D. Peterson

Communication Faculty Publications

Although Drawing Card employs many of the standard conventions of a baseball novel, Mills' book also makes significant and surprising departures. Instead of telling the story of a player's experience in the game, the narrative derives primarily from the consequences of a dream denied. The novel also serves as a cultural history of Cleveland of the 1930s and 1940s with side trips to Sicily at various key points in the island's history.

Testing News Trustworthiness In An Online Public Sphere: A Case Study Of The Economist's News Report Covering The Riots In Xinjiang, China, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

This paper explores the news trustworthiness and media credibility of The Economist’s news report on 9 July 2009, and the communicative roles of 846 readers’ responses. Theoretically guided by news translation and cultural resistance and the online public sphere, we applied online field observation and discourse analysis and achieved two main findings: First, although the news report covered the Xinjiang riots with comprehensive and attractive details, it violated the core journalism value of media credibility and journalistic objectivity by providing misleading pictures and significant unreliable and biased coverage. Second, the major communicative roles of the online readers’ responses generally match …

Helping Junior Faculty Achieve Success In Promotion And Tenure, Jon A. Hess

Communication Faculty Publications

Part and parcel of the chair’s job is to prepare junior faculty to achieve success. In academic departments that typically means achieving tenure and promotion to associate professor. In my experience, the success of a junior faculty member has as much to do with what the department and chair do as with the faculty member’s native ability. Junior faculty need to learn what activities are rewarded and what are not, what strategies they may use during their probationary period to develop the evidence needed for a successful tenure case, and how to present their materials in their file—what evidence is …

Does Culture Matter? The Effects Of Acculturation On Workplace Relationships, Guowei Jian

Communication Faculty Publications

In spite of immigrants’ growing role in the workforce of the United States and other developed countries, organizational communication research about the experience of immigrant employees in the host culture is still very limited. Drawing on the bidimensional acculturation theory, the purpose of this study was to investigate the association of acculturation of immigrant employees with three types of workplace relationships: leader–member exchange (LMX), coworker, and mentoring relationship. Based on a survey of immigrant employees in a U.S. Midwestern city, the study reveals that the two dimensions of acculturation, adjustment to one’s host culture and retention of one’s original culture, …

Benefits Of Courtroom Cameras Outweigh Costs, Jeremy Harris Lipschultz

Communication Faculty Publications

The Illinois Supreme Court recently authorized the use of television cameras and "other recording devices" for "extended media coverage" of the courts in the state. For the first time, this extends access in that state to all trial courts following an appellate experiment that began in the 1980s. It took the efforts of Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride to "bring more transparency and accountability" to the sometimes troubled Illinois criminal justice system.

Vague And Outdated Fcc Indecency Policy Must Be Altered, Jeremy Harris Lipschultz

Communication Faculty Publications

The FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. case is the most recent iteration of an ongoing struggle to apply the US Supreme Court's flawed majority reasoning in FCC v. Pacifica — a 1978 decision that set in motion a scheme to try to protect children from broadcast profanity and nudity.While the channeling of such content to overnight hours seemingly protected some adult's First Amendment rights,I have argued for more than 20 years that the vague and subjective definitions promulgated by the FCC are problematic.

Revisiting The Association Of Lmx Quality With Percieved Role Stressors: Evidence For Inverted-U Relationships Among Immigrant Europeans, Guowei Jian

Communication Faculty Publications

Although earlier research on leader-member exchange (LMX) theory supported a negative linear relationship between LMX quality and role stressors, recent studies suggest that a more complex, nonlinear relationship may exist between LMX quality and variables traditionally associated with it. Based on communication research of LMX and social exchange theory, the aim of this article is to revisit the relationship between LMX quality and role stressors by reconceptualizing their associations and testing the hypotheses of an inverted U relationship. A survey study among immigrant employees revealed differential effects of LMX quality on role stressors. In particular, with role conflict and role …

Intellectual Property Rights (Ipr) Disputes In Cyberspace: U.S. Hegemony And Chinese Resistance, Dexin Tian, Chin-Chung Chao

Communication Faculty Publications

This paper aims at explicating the hegemonic pressure from the U.S. side and the constant resistance from the Chinese side during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in the cyberspace. The theory of hegemony and extended literature review reveal that during the U.S.-China IPR disputes in cyberspace, the dominant U.S. power has shaped the IPR world order so effectively for its own interests that China as a disadvantaged country has been included, albeit with reservations, in the broad consent of the U.S. hegemonic sphere of influence. This study has also demonstrated significant theoretical and practical implications.

Building Support For The Introductory Oral Communication Course: Strategies For Widespread And Enduring Support On Campus, Jon A. Hess

Communication Faculty Publications

A strong introductory course is important for many communication departments, for the discipline, and for meeting our obligation to society. This paper utilizes the example of a recent curricular reform that threatened to eliminate a required oral communication course to reflect on strategies departments can use to build widespread and lasting support for the course. The paper reviews the events that led to the challenge and details the department’s response, which offers lessons that may be useful for other institutions. Four lessons include:

* Tailoring the introductory course to the institution’s needs and mission

* Involvement in university work

* …

Communication Strategies To Restore Working Relations: Comparing Relationships That Improved With Ones That Remained Problematic, Jon A. Hess, Katelyn A. Sneed

Communication Faculty Publications

When considering problematic workplace relationships, the question naturally arises of how people can deal most effectively with these challenges. What people most want with difficult relationships is a way to make the problems go away. That desire calls for research on strategies to transform problematic relationships into non-problematic relations. For this issue, there is both good news and bad news.

First, the bad news: There are few easy answers when dealing with problematic relations. Problematic relationships are difficult by definition. Relationships that involve challenges a person can easily resolve are not difficult relationships. The co-construction of these relationships often intertwines …

Reification, Reanimation, And The Money Of The Real, Alessandra Raengo

Communication Faculty Publications

This essay is an exercise in a form of looking from a distance. It is prompted by the desire to explore the connection between two stunning objects, namely, Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Slavery (2006), a digital animation of a stereoscopic card picturing slaves at work in a cotton field, and Nick Hooker’s 2008 digital video for Grace Jones’s song Corporate Cannibal. This is not an essay directly about Ken Jacobs and even less about Grace Jones, but rather an attempt to show how, for me, these two works belong to the same set. The set I am thinking about is …

Fdr, The Rhetoric Of Vision, And The Creation Of A National Synoptic State, Mary Stuckey

Communication Faculty Publications

Throughout his administration, FDR engaged in a complex set of arguments that worked together to defend democracy in general as a viable form of government; American democracy as the highest expression of democratic government; the primacy of the federal government as the most efficient and effective locus of democratic power; and the executive office as the culmination of the form, efficiency, and locus of that power. My specific concern here is with one form those arguments took, the visual metaphors that permeate FDR’s rhetoric. Visuality in FDR’s rhetoric is especially intriguing because of the way it interacted with the prevailing …

Fishing For Animal Rights In The Cove: A Holistic Approach To Animal Advocacy Documentaries, Carrie Packwood Freeman

Communication Faculty Publications

The Oscar-winning 2009 documentary The Cove serves as a thrilling and poignant advocacy tool promoting activism to save free-roaming dolphins off the coast of Japan from kidnapping, enslavement in marine parks, and slaughter for meat. This essay evaluates the ethical and social justice implications of The Cove not just for dolphins but for the animal rights movement as a whole, particularly in terms of how it could challenge the ethicality of humans killing any nonhuman animals for food. Strategic media recommendations are made for how animal protection advocates could better deconstruct the human/animal dualism that is at the root of …

Speaking Ill Of The Dead: Anonymity And Communication About Suicide On Mydeathspace.Com, Lynette G. Leonard, Paige W. Toller

Communication Faculty Publications

From birth to death, many individuals chronicle their lives online through blogs, pictures, games, Web sites, and social networks. Online spaces, created by the living about the dead, provide a glimpse into often invisible or silent grieving practices. To investigate the role computer-mediated communication (CMC) plays in influencing communication surrounding the often private and taboo topic of suicide, we analyzed the comments sections of MyDeathSpace.com. Our results suggest both a breaking down of social taboos (speaking ill of the dead) and a reaffirming of strict social norms (enforcing a narrow range of acceptable presentation of identity and purpose in life), …