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National Identity Through Prototypes And Metaphors: The Case Of "Romanianness", Razvan Sibii

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

The last country God created was Romania. Realizing that he still had a lot of riches left over from the other countries, He let Romania have more natural treasures than anybody else. Seeing this, Saint Peter asked in surprise: "My Lord, why are you giving this country more riches than you've given to any other?" "Don't you worry," said the Lord, "Just wait 'till you see the people I will put in charge of those riches!..."

Whether Saint Peter was eventually satisfied with Romania's condition, we do not know. What this paper does investigate, however, is what God meant by …

Influence Of American Media Upon Korean Broadcasting Culture - Analyzing 'American Idol' Vs. 'Superstar K Ii', Han Na Shin

Masters Theses

This study examines the influence of American media on Korean broadcasting culture, based on analysis of American Idol and SuperStar K Season II. Viewer ratings were analyzed to find out the popularity of American programs in South Korea. Web-based surveys and individual interviews were analyzed to figure out the difference between both programs and its influence upon Korean viewers. The result shows that American programs currently influence the Korean media and Korean viewers, and that influence is getting more produced. With those findings, the study concludes it affects Korean viewers and Korean society as well. Audition programs become one of …

Color And Brand Design For Multicultural Packaging, Kyle Valdillez

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study is to determine how companies can use the color and brand design of packaging to effectively communicate their products across multiple cultures. Companies are entering new markets overseas where culture is affecting how a product is being perceived. Whether it is positive, negative, or neutral, they must accommodate these influences to potentially increase profits. This study will specifically explore the Spanish and Japanese cultures in comparison to the American culture, concerning the meanings of various colors and their use in brand design. The research methods used were historical research and content analysis. Through thorough examination …

The Royal Presidio Of Monterey : A Socio-Cultural Analysis Based On Zooarchaeological Remains, Jennifer A. Lucido

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Royal Presidio of Monterey served as the focal institution of military power and government of Alta California from ca. 1770 to 1840 during the Spanish colonial missionization of the indigenous populations. Like the Franciscan missions, the Royal Presidio of Monterey was a multicultural settlement, home to Spanish soldiers, mestizo settlers, and Native Californians. During archaeological monitoring of the Royal Presidio of Monterrey, spanning from 2006 through 2008 which was conducted by Dr. Ruben Mendoza and his field crew of California State University, Monterey Bay students, significant Mission era architectural features were discovered and identified, in addition to the recovery …

The Impact Of Culture, Industry Type, And Job Relevance On Applicant Reactions, Olivia Martin

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The present study sought to understand how national culture, industry, and the perception of job relevance has an influence on an applicant's reaction to an online personnel selection assessment. A review of the literature on attribution theory (Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Ployhart & Harold, 2004) and organizational justice theory (Gilliland, 1993; Ployhart & Harold, 2004) provided the theoretical basis for the hypotheses of this paper. Applicant data from companies in manufacturing, finance, retail, and telecommunications were examined to explore differences in applicant reactions. Additionally, data between those in Mexico and the US within the telecommunications industry were examined to distinguish …

Crossing The Valley Of Death: A Multi-Sited, Multi-Level Ethnographic Study Of Growth Startups And Entrepreneurial Communities In Post-Industrial Detroit, Marlo Rencher

Wayne State University Dissertations

The intention of this research is to reveal the humanity of the startup experience for American growth companies. What is it about the growth entrepreneurship experience that has been hidden from view? Can we begin to articulate a holistic view of entrepreneurship--including those human universals and culture-bound particulars that must be successfully navigated?

This study is an ethnographic account of three Detroit-based entrepreneurial communities and the people within them. This research examines the sociocultural features of entrepreneurship on three levels. The first level of context for growth businesses to be studied is that of their entrepreneurial community. These communities have …

Live From New York, It's The Fake News! Saturday Night Live And The (Non)Politics Of Parody, Amber Day, Ethan Thompson

English and Cultural Studies Journal Articles

Though Saturday Night Live's “Weekend Update” has become one of the most iconic of fake news programs, it is remarkably unfocused on either satiric critique or parody of particular news conventions. Instead, the segment has been shaped by a series of hosts who made a name for themselves by developing distinctive comic personalities. In contrast to more politically invested contemporary programs, the genre of fake news on Saturday Night Live has been largely emptied to serve the needs of the larger show, maintaining its status as just topical, hip, and unthreatening enough to attract celebrities and politicians, as well …

Introduction: Continuity And Change In Russian Culture, Dmitri N. Shalin

Russian Culture

This project on Russian culture goes back to the Spring of 1990 when several American and Russian scholars converged at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and decided to join forces in a study of changes sweeping the Soviet Union. From the start, the participants agreed that they would not try to chase fast breaking news from Russia -- a hopeless task given the pace of recent changes, but rather would focus on the continuity and change in Russian culture, on the long-term social forces that compel the Russian people to reexamine old ways and reevaluate old values.

Learning Experiences Of International Students In Online Course : Mixed Methods Study, Gulnara Sadykova

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study explored the learning experiences of international students in fully online courses offered through a US university. Employing a sociocultural framework, particularly ideas put forward by Russian psychologists L. Vygotsky and American scholars R. Scollon and S. W. Scollon, the study examined the interplay of host and native cultures in an online learning environment and studied its effect on international students' learning experiences, specifically on the learning experiences of one focal student from China.

Accelerated Culture: Exploring Time And Space In Cinema, Television And New Media In The Digital Age, Thomas J. Connelly

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the impact of speed on the interrelation and the overlapping of the production and consumption of cinematic and televisual texts. It explores the immediacy of digital media and new economic processes, and how they are informing structures of perception, as well as lending themselves to new and different ways of seeing the moving image in the digital age. These visual expressions are evident in the changing perception of the long take; the increasing use of video gaming aesthetics and database narratives; new and variant forms of narrative and visual styles in television; and the speed …

Mississippi Breakdown: A New Look At The Mississippi Old Time Fiddle Music Traditions, Joseph Jamison Hollister

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a cultural study that focuses on the fiddle music of Mississippi. It includes both Anglo and African American roots. Also, the white blues fiddle traditions of Mississippi are examined and analyzed.

Seeing Stars: Emotional Trauma In Athlete Retirement: Contexts, Intersections, And Explorations, Scott P. Tinley

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Few areas of modern sport are as misunderstood in popular and academic literature as that of retired professional and elite athletes. While the subject has been studied, the case of the retiring athlete has yet to be fully explored in a detailed, qualitative, and interdisciplinary study focusing on nuanced contexts affecting the quality of an athlete's exit from sport. Utilizing 3 participant groups--29 elite athletes (16 sports, 18 males, 11 females), 9 professional sport administrators, and 8 sport media journalists--over an 18-month period, extensive semi-structured interviews resulted in 1,436 raw data themes that constituted 13 direct, 3 indirect, and 3 …

Nature Is Ordinary Too: Raymond Williams As The Founder Of Ecocultural Studies, Rodney Giblett

Research outputs 2012

In a recent article in Cultural Studies, Jennifer Daryl Slack called for the jettisoning of ecocultural studies as an add-on to Cultural Studies and the revitalizing of Cultural Studies with the eco as integral to it. One way I propose of doing so in this article is to revalue and re-establish the beginnings of Cultural Studies, and of ecocultural studies, in the work of Raymond Williams in which both were integral to the other. I call Williams both a founder of Cultural Studies and the founder of ecocriticism and ecocultural studies, though of course he did not use these terms, …

Revisiting The Mutual Embeddedness Of Culture And Mental Illness, David Lackland Sam, Virginia Moreira

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

In this paper, we discuss the intricate relationship between culture and mental illness. Our central position is that there cannot be mental illness without culture. We argue that our limited knowledge to the onset, manifestation, course and outcome of mental illness is due in part to the cross-cultural psychological conceptualization of culture, where culture is seen as an independent variable influencing mental illness, the dependent variable. This is in addition to the limitations of the biomedical model in accounting for the origins of mental illness. Using depression and schizophrenia as examples, we argue for the need to see culture and …

Job Satisfaction Determinants: A Study Across 48 Nations, Jeanine K. Andreassi, Leanna Lawter, Martin Brockerhoff, Peter Rutigliano

WCBT Faculty Publications

This paper examines the drivers of job satisfaction across four cultural regions—Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Using Hofstede’s theory, determinants were used to predict job satisfaction for each region and then compared to determine significant differences. Data was collected from a proprietary industry survey on employee work attitudes. The sample consisted of over 70,000 employees from 4 large multinational organizations. Data was analyzed using regression analysis and comparison testing across models. There are significant relationships between job characteristics and job satisfaction across all regions of the world, with a sense of achievement universally the most important driver. Although …

Nurse Educators' Perceptions About The Culture Of Nursing And Their Role In Bringing Students Into That Culture: A Focused Ethnography, Susan Maria Strouse

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to discover nurse educators' perceptions about the culture of nursing and how they bring students into that culture.

Background: Although the extant literature addresses the process of socialization to the profession, literature exploring socialization as enculturation is scant. Nurse educators' perspectives on the culture of nursing needed further exploration, as their voice on this topic is relatively silent and they provide the first formal enculturation to the profession. Viewing nursing as a professional culture may more effectively enable faculty to clarify and explicate for students the values, behaviors, symbols, and beliefs inherent in …

Cultural Similarities And Differences In The Conceptualization Of Emotion, Christie N. Scollon, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Research on emotional experiences across cultures is reviewed from a cultural psychological perspective. Psychometric approaches to evaluating the structure of emotions has consistently replicated two broad dimensions (positive and negative affect) in several countries. Nevertheless, there are cultural differences in other aspects of emotional experience such as the relation between positive and negative affect, the nature of specific emotions (e.g., pride and affection), and the types of emotions that are valued. Recent research on the cognitive organization of emotional experiences may provide additional insights and these methods await broader application in crosscultural research.

From Multiculturalism To Technique: Feminism, Culture And The Conflict Of Laws Style, Karen Knop, Ralf Michaels, Annelise Riles

Faculty Scholarship

The German chancellor, the French president and the British prime minister have each grabbed world headlines with pronouncements that their state’s policy of multiculturalism has failed. As so often, domestic debates about multiculturalism, as well as foreign policy debates about human rights in non-Western countries, revolve around the treatment of women. Yet there is also a widely noted brain drain from feminism. Feminists are no longer even certain how to frame, let alone resolve, the issues raised by veiling, polygamy and other cultural practices oppressive to women by Western standards. Feminism has become perplexed by the very concept of “culture.” …

The New Mexican Migration: Remembering Violence, Connecting, And Living In The Third Space, Uriel G. Posada

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The concept of identity has become a topic of discussion in the last few decades, especially with the growing immigration across several countries. Countries such as the United States and Canada are receiving people who arrive from different parts of the world and who are changing the composition of these countries. In this thesis I explore how a group of Mexican journalists are adjusting their identity as they live in countries outside of Mexico. Five of the journalists are now living in the United States, and one of them is in Canada. They were forced to leave Mexico after they …

The Metroburb: American Values In Facebook Culture, Heather Marie Carlson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Using critical discourse analysis, fantasy themes were extracted from user profiles and postings to examine American values found in Facebook culture.

Core values found on Facebook worked to create not only socially recognizable identities enacted and communicated through the participants, but also a particular culture to which participants both reflected and contributed in Facebook. Themes and values extracted from findings indicate that Facebook users should be casual, technologically-aware, social, respectful and fair to others, “good little copers,” financially savvy while at the same time valuing higher education, a healthy lifestyle, family and travel.

Because Facebook is an interestingly fluid cultural …

Promotion, Prevention Or Both: Regulatory Focus And Culture Revisited, Jenny Kurman, Chin Ming Hui

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

Regulatory focus theory (e.g., Higgins, 1997) presented a differentiation between promotion orientation, focused on growth and advancement, and prevention orientation, focused on safety and security. Cross-culture differences in these systems generally show that that collectivist, Eastern cultures (mostly East-Asian cultures) are considered as prevention oriented whereas Western cultures are considered as promotion oriented. Two main claims that contribute to the refinement of the relations between culture and regulatory foci will be presented. The first refinement pertains to the relations between individualism-collectivism and regulatory foci on base of the vertical-horizontal distinction, showing that vertical collectivism is especially relevant to regulatory foci. …

Individual Differences In Anxiety Sensitivity: The Role Of Emotion Regulation And Alexithymia, Amrit Kaur

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The literature has shown anxiety sensitivity to be a significant risk factor in the development of pathological anxiety. Recent theoretical models have also emphasized the additional importance of emotion regulation in predicting the development of anxiety disorders. The present study examined the interactive influence of anxiety sensitivity and emotion regulatory strategies on anxiety symptoms in an ethnically diverse sample recruited in Singapore in order to determine the most appropriate anxiety prevention strategies to pursue. Results indicate that emotion regulation skills had a much greater effect on anxiety levels in this non-clinical sample than anxiety sensitivity and, second, that emotion regulation …

The Use Of Soil Micromorphology At Sylvester Manor, Eric Proebsting

Northeast Historical Archaeology

Soil micromorphology is a vibrant sub-discipline of archaeology that studies sediment fabric, color, composition, shape, layering, and sorting using intact soil cores and thin sections. This technique takes into account the dynamic relationship between people and the world in which they live, and has contributed useful archaeological data to the Sylvester Manor Project. This paper constructs a landscape history for portions of the South and West lawns using soil cores and thin sections. Results reveal how Sylvester Manor’s lawn, Midden, and Brick and Mortar Layer were composed, as well as how they were changed over time by plant and animal …

The Archaeology Of Sylvester Manor, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Katherine Howlett Hayes, Anne P. Hancock

Northeast Historical Archaeology

This chapter introduces the history of the Sylvester Manor Project. It emphasizes the importance of the interdisciplinary approach employed during the project and the overall goals of the investigations. A discussion of pluralistic space and its importance as a central theme of the investigations is also presented. This is followed by a discussion of the Native American history of Shelter Island and its European colonization with particular attention given to the initial establishment of Sylvester Manor as a provisioning plantation, its connections to two large sugar plantations on Barbados, and its subsequent transformation into a commercial estate.

Land, Gender, And The Politics Of Identity Formation: Uncovering Hispana/Mexicana Voices In The Southwest, Karen R. Roybal

American Studies ETDs

The southwestern United States has an exceptional history that makes the region a prime focus for study concentrating on culture, tradition, language and land. As an area closely tied to the concept of conquest, the Southwest has had its share of issues related to colonization, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and cultural erasure. This study focuses on the Southwest as a region that is closely linked to the land as it relates to the formation of identities of its people. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have historically experienced struggle, particularly after 1848 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when …

The Holistic Complementary Structure Of Western Bio-Medicine And Traditional Healing And Achieving Complete Health, Candace Gail Oubre

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Achieving complete health requires a deep understanding of complementary cultural competency sensitivity between physician and patient. This may include but is not limited to access to preventative health care resources, access to health educational resources and access to cultural healing resources, for example, shamans, Ayurvedic physicians, and herbal healers. Advocates of cultural competency emphasize great importance on knowledge of the patients' cultural background; however, the transcendence of this knowledge can be explained further through complementary cultural competency sensitivity. This is when the cultures of the physician and patient complement each other in terms of understanding what is in the patients' …

Early Childhood Bilingualism Leads To Advances In Executive Attention: Dissociating Culture And Language, Sujin Yang, Hwajin Yang, Barbara Lust

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This study investigated whether early especially efficient utilization of executive functioning in young bilinguals would transcend potential cultural benefits. To dissociate potential cultural effects from bilingualism, four-year-old U.S. Korean-English bilingual children were compared to three monolingual groups – English and Korean monolinguals in the U.S.A. and another Korean monolingual group, in Korea. Overall, bilinguals were most accurate and fastest among all groups. The bilingual advantage was stronger than that of culture in the speed of attention processing, inverse processing efficiency independent of possible speed-accuracy trade-offs, and the network of executive control for conflict resolution. A culture advantage favoring Korean monolinguals …

The Oddity As Commodity: Television And The Modern Day Freak Show, Robin Marie Cecala

Dissertations

A new genre of documentary and reality program has appeared on cable television in recent years. Suddenly, little people, conjoined twins, the morbidly obese, Treeman and Mermaid Girl are the new stars of cable. This latest genre features people with medical conditions once exhibited in the turn of the century freak shows.

The goal of this dissertation is to argue that documentary programming on cable is becoming a modern version of the P.T. Barnum-style freak shows. The analysis uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine representations of race, culture and disability. The dissertation also discusses the history of the …

Menopause As A Social And Cultural Construction, Bre'on Kelly

XULAneXUS

No abstract provided.

An Educational "Clip": Arab Students' Experiences Of Curriculum In A U.S. University, Daad Adel Rizk

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This is a multicultural study of culture adaptation, language challenge, identity formation, and power struggle -"CLIP"- depicting three Arab students who have attended or are currently attending a University in the rural South East Region of the United States of America (circa 2009-2010) When Arab students go to college in the United States of America, two cultural extremities (East and West) meet and attempt to form relationships; two different languages, Arabic and English, written in opposite directions search for a middle page to help them communicate. Books in the Arab World are read right to left, while pages in the …