Communication
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Item Managing intractability: Wrestling with wicked problems and seeing beyond consensus in public relations(2019) Capizzo, Luke W; Sommerfeldt, Erich J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Managing intractable or wicked problems—irrevocable, difficult-to-solve, often values-driven conflicts—is a regular occurrence for public relations practitioners. Yet, such problems and how to manage them are often outside of the bounds of public relations theories are aimed at building consensus. This dissertation builds on the existing literature carving out a place for dissensus-oriented (e.g., Ciszek, 2016; Ciszek & Logan, 2018; Coombs & Holladay, 2018; Willis, 2016) or agonistic (e.g., Davidson, 2016; Davidson & Motion, 2018; Ganesh & Zoller, 2015) public relations theories and practices. Through interviews with public relations practitioners facing intractable scenarios and the integration of dissensual and agonistic perspectives of Lyotard (1984), Rancière (2010), Mouffe (1999) and others, the dissertation examines the role and impact of wicked problems in practice. Managing intractable problems involves organizational awareness of publics, communities, and societies, as well as a re-evaluation of effectiveness for public relations practitioners. Among its contributions, the dissertation generates a praxis-centered definition of the facets of intractability and new frameworks for social issue engagement and holistic measurement.Item EXPLORIGN PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTITIONERS’ ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING AT WORK: A WHOLE-PERSON, PROCESSUAL, AND CONTEXTUAL LENS(2019) Guo, Jiankun; Anderson, Lindsey B.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The topic of ethics is gaining importance and urgency, particularly for public relations, a field responsible for communicating and building relationships between organizations and publics. While normative ethical theories abound in this discipline, tensions exist between traditional theories privileging rationality, autonomy, universality, and professional ethics, and emerging theories that value emotions, relationships, contexts, and personal ethics. Furthermore, practitioners’ ethical decision making process in their embedded organizational, industry, and sociopolitical environments has not been fully addressed. This dissertation fills in these research gaps by exploring public relations practitioners’ meaning making of ethics and thereby reconciliating tensions between traditional and emerging ethical theories (RQ1), detailing practitioners’ ethical decision making (EDM) process from a whole-person perspective (RQ2), and assessing how micro, meso, and macro level ethicality interact from a participants’ point of view (RQ3). 37 semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with current or past U.S. public relations practitioners who represent a variety of work settings, industries, specializations, and sectors. Interviews were transcribed and data were coded thematically and analyzed abductively. Findings suggested that practitioners constructed the meaning of ethics primarily via their concerns for work and organizational-public relationships, contextual particulars, and an alignment of personal and professional ethics. They utilized a variety of cognitive, emotional, intuitive, imaginative, and discursive skills during their ethical decision making (EDM) process exhibiting a whole-person based approach to EDM. Additionally, practitioners’ ethicality was both a result of contextual influences as well as a contributor to higher levels of ethical standards for their environment—on organizational, industry, and societal levels. Theoretical and methodological implications were drawn from the findings, so were practical implications provided in terms of ethics training programs.Item Responding to Group-Directed Criticism(2019) Ma, Rong; Atwell Seate, Anita; Fink, Edward L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I investigated how group members respond to a criticism of their group. Realizing the conflict between two literatures, the black sheep effect and the intergroup sensitivity effect, I drew on theories of face, social identity threat, and emotion to create an integrative model. The model proposed that contextual factors (presence of an outgroup audience and critic’s group membership), a message attribute (message accuracy), and individual perceptions (presumed media influence on the outgroup and identity importance) work in tandem to predict perceived threats to social identity (through perceived critic’s constructiveness) and to collective face. These threat perceptions in turn predict a series of evaluative, emotional, and behavioral intention outcomes. Three pilot studies were conducted to construct the message stimuli, validate the instruments, and check the manipulation of message accuracy and the assumptions of the theoretical model. An experiment was conducted to test the proposed model. Findings have suggested that (1) it is important to consider multiple causes of threat perceptions; (2) it is necessary to differentiate the two types of collective face threats, as well as the four types of social identity threats; (3) some threat perceptions can lead to desirable outcomes; (4) there may be two major strategies to restore positive distinctiveness of the group in the face of criticism; (5) collective face threat can lead to facework by group members, which involves resolving the issue mentioned in the group criticism; and (6) future research on group criticism should examine the nuances of critic’s group membership, as well as the effects of expected critic’s effort. Although with limitations, this study contributes to theory and research on group criticism specifically, and on intergroup communication more broadly.Item Gold Star Pilgrimages: Tracing Maternal Citizenship Through the Great War Era, 1914-1933(2019) Lucas, Melissa Anne; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From 1930-1933, the U.S. government funded Gold Star Pilgrimages—two-week voyages for Gold Star mothers to military graveyards in Europe where their sons were buried. These Pilgrimages emerged after a decade of public deliberation over the responsibilities of American mothers to motivate sacrifice during war and commemorate death at war’s end. The political rhetoric surrounding the Pilgrimages often valorized white, biological, and patriotic Gold Star mothers as the most authentic ideals of women’s citizenship, condemned women who challenged the patriotism of maternal sacrifice, and marginalized African American mothers through segregationist practices. This project analyzes how Pilgrimage rhetoric constructed American Gold Star mothers as models of citizenship and how this ideal empowered and limited women’s political engagement and identity during an era of war, social protest, and suffrage. The chapters specifically trace how public discourse before and during the Pilgrimages defined, challenged, and reinterpreted maternal citizenship throughout the Great War era. In this study, I analyze three case studies that shaped Gold Star rhetoric and in turn conceptions of maternal citizenship from 1914 to 1933. Prior to American entry into the Great War, women’s peace and preparedness organizations publicly clashed over meanings of maternal responsibility (Chapter 1). After the war and women’s enfranchisement, Pilgrimage advocates and government officials debated Gold Star Pilgrimages through a series of congressional hearings. In the process, they exalted the Gold Star mother over more progressive forms of women’s citizenship (Chapter 2). After the government announced its decision to segregate the Pilgrimages, many prospective African American Gold Star Pilgrims publicly justified their decision to accept or boycott the Pilgrimages as a performance of maternal citizenship (Chapter 3). The Pilgrimages debates ultimately illustrate how war commemoration can function to exalt and discipline performances of maternal citizenship. The contemporary rhetoric of Gold Star mothers continues to spark public debate about what it means to authentically embody the Gold Star ideal. This project challenges the notion that the Great War has been “forgotten” in U.S. public memory by highlighting the enduring rhetorical legacies of Gold Star Pilgrimages in contemporary political discourse.Item CONSTRUCTING A LEGACY: THE ROLE OF ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIONS IN REMEMBERING BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION(2019) Bruner, Jaclyn Leigh; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the landmark Supreme Court decision that outlawed legal segregation in the United States. This project engages with three commemorative events that mark the anniversary of the decision--the 25th, 50th, and 64th anniversaries--to investigate how public memory of Brown v. Board of Education is constructed and how the legacy of the decision is remembered. Anniversaries, as moments where kairotic and chronotic conceptions of time come together, offer an opportunity to (re)define the past through the work of public memory. Although Brown’s memory at the “monumental” 25th anniversary featured coordinated regional commemorations, Brown’s legacy of race and memory is nationalized and largely sanitized by the 50th anniversary. In contrast to these momentous anniversaries, the non-monumental 64th anniversary articulated a counter-regional identity for Topeka, Kansas. By tracing the public memory of Brown across a 60-year period, this dissertation extends James Boyd White’s theory of justice-as-translation, asserting that the critical, rhetorical attention to the public memory of the Brown decision enacts a form of narrative justice and, consequently, advances a new way of conceptualizing persistent, de facto segregation and racial injustice in our contemporary world.Item Vanishing Images?: Mediations of Native Americans in the Tradition of the Western(2019) Soeder, Janna; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the legacy of the Western, one of the most prolific genres in American popular culture. With its focus on the central conflict between Native Americans and white settlers, the Western has shaped Indian stereotypes that continue to influence how Americans look at Native Americans today. This dissertation interrogates how Western visual and narrative conventions continue to influence Indian images in current US public discourse, and how these conventions are renegotiated or replaced in contemporary texts. It concludes that, in both texts that seek to dismantle stereotypes and in texts that could be considered self-representation, dominant frameworks, such as the visual conventions of the National Geographic, media frames concerning Indianness, and national museums, nonetheless recirculate (revisionist) Western conventions. Therefore, visual tropes, such as the Noble and Ignoble Indian as well as the Indian Warrior, and narrative tropes, such as the Cowboy/Indian dichotomy, exist in non-Western popular texts in updated forms, as three case studies demonstrate. First, Aaron Huey’s National Geographic photos reflect Western conventions by depicting Native Americans in the duality of the traditional and spiritually-minded Noble Indian on the one hand, and the modern, poor, and decrepit Ignoble Indian on the other. Second, the press coverage of the Cowboy and Indian Alliance insisted on the narrative of the “unlikely alliance” between Native and non-Native activists. Third, the National Museum of the American Indian exhibit, Americans, reaffirms the visual of the Indian Warrior over other iterations. Two dynamics seem to effectively challenge Western conventions, as demonstrated in the Native criticism of Huey’s project, the Native self-representation in the CIA protest, and the NMAI. First, articulating modern Native American identities negates the Western’s generic Indianness and rejects a cultural conceptualization of Indianness. Emphasizing Native American sovereignty affirms Native political agency and rejects stereotypes such as the Ecological/Spiritual Indian. Second, embedding public constructions of Indianness in historical and social context challenges American master narratives of benign expansion.Item No Tangle So Hopeless: Toward a Relational Cluster Analysis(2018) Nichols, Annie Laurie; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How does a semi-nomadic shepherd people on the border of Russia and Azerbaijan place themselves? How do twitter users challenge and transform institutional versions of events? How can citizens resist then narrow confines of reductive algorithmic assumptions on the internet? Questions such as these are not readily answered with traditional rhetorical methods, yet they recommend a rhetorical approach to their focus on meaning-making, constitutive community, and identity creation. This project argues that Kenneth Burke’s method of cluster analysis can be profitably revived to meet rhetoric’s growing need for an approach that focuses on relationships, listens to vernacular voices, engages multiple texts, and considers the world from other viewpoints. The most commonly used approach to cluster analysis is a reductive equational form that is primarily concerned with the dissective, analytic half of cluster analysis. Reconstituting Burke’s more constructive, drawing-together form, this project develops a relational cluster analysis that centers in connections, community, and the relationships between words, people, and ideologies. Relational cluster analysis’ effectiveness is demonstrated by use with ethnographic fieldnotes, a database of 5 million tweets, and the algorithmic infrastructure of Web 2.0. These exemplars demonstrate that, when applied at several layers of meaning, such as individual, community, dominant culture, and cross-cultural, this relational method is particularly generative in working with vernacular voices, community meanings, networked arguments, and digital cultures. Inductively listening to meaning-making foregrounds the subject, leading to substantial insight into not just individual but also community and cultural values and orientations. The elastic nature of a relationally-focused, multilevel cluster analysis affords the opportunity to gaze, engrossed, from others’ points of view.Item LEGITIMIZING THE CULTURE OF BIG TIME SPORT: RHETORIC AND THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT-ATHLETE(2019) Alt, Rebecca A.; Murray Yang, Michelle; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Legitimizing the Culture of Big-Time Sport: Rhetoric and the Myth of the Student Athlete analyzes and evaluates organizational rhetoric in the context of “big-time” sport, or universities with high-profile, revenue generating [men’s] athletics. I analyze the macro organizational rhetoric of the NCAA, rhetoric at the institutional level (in my project, the University of Maryland), and rhetoric of resistance from two college athlete advocacy organizations. I engage organizational discourse ranging from handbooks, strategic plans, and mission statements to promotional materials, press releases and public addresses. My texts were acquired from archival sources, news sources, and online. I also articulate my analysis in terms of the broader cultural and ideological formations at play, such as corporatized higher education, neoliberalism, and hegemonic masculinity. My purpose is to explore discourse that legitimizes the culture of big-time sport. I argue that the myth of the student-athlete, which hinges on three axiological-ideological topoi – purity, welfare, and excellence – is the primary legitimizing discourse of big-time sport culture – both the good and the bad. This project holds both disciplinary and social significance. Whereas important research has been conducted on sports from mass media or public relations perspectives (i.e., crisis communication during scandal), this dissertation expands the scholarly view to consider the networked and interdependent rhetorical culture of sport and higher education as illuminated through competing organizational discourse. Further, this project is interdisciplinary; it aims to join scholarship in critical/cultural studies disciplines with scholarship in communication. As a result, this project contributes to both the academic and public debates surrounding big-time sport and intervenes with practical recommendations for organizations, leaders, fans, and critics of big-time sport. The issues my dissertation explores are urgent in nature given the issues big-time sport fosters, especially as they implicate the health and well-being of college athletes and the quality of higher education. Aside from shedding light on current issues in big-time sport from a rhetorical perspective, this dissertation makes the following contributions to rhetoric and communication scholarship: First, it explains the ideological and axiological topoi of the myth of the student-athlete; second, it provides an extended critical framework to understand and analyze discourse of and about big-time college sport; and third, it bridges disciplinary and interdisciplinary divides in scholarship to contribute practical interventions for the problems in big-time sport.Item The Dynamics of Intimate Intercultural Relationships: The Negotiation of Cultural and Relational Identities on Intercultural Couples’ Conflict Management(2019) Chien, Hsin-Yi; Atwell Seate, Anita; Khamis, Sahar; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research suggests that intercultural romantic relationships are replete with opportunities for conflict. Intercultural couples not only need to manage relational concerns, they also need to reconcile cultural differences. During this process, interculturally-dating/married individuals often engage in cultural (un)learning. However, the intersection of intercultural communication, acculturation, and conflict communication remains largely untheorized in extant literature. Moreover, extant studies on intercultural couples’ conflict management are mostly conducted with Western samples, with a majority of them studying interracial couples that share the same national culture. To address these gaps, this dissertation employed a mixed methods design to study interculturally-dating/married Taiwanese’s relational conflict experiences. This dissertation project aims to provide a better understanding of how cultural and relational factors might work in tandem to influence intercultural couples’ relational conflict management and relational dynamics, including their relational identity orientations and relationship satisfaction. Study 1 was conducted using qualitative in-depth interviews (N = 20). Results showed that (a) some participants enacted conflict strategies that were inconsistent with their endorsed cultural values and that (b) the so-called (non-)constructive strategies, as categorized in Western conflict literature, did not seem to have uniform influences on relationship satisfaction. These unexpected findings indicated that new approaches are needed to more thoroughly understand intercultural couples’ conflict management. In Study 2, a cross-sectional survey with interculturally-dating/married Taiwanese was conducted to test two working models (N = 412). The first working model proposed that cultural (i.e., self-construals), relational (i.e., concerns for self and the partner), and contextual (i.e., neighborhood compositions) factors, collectively, influenced respondents’ relational identity orientations. It was further hypothesized that relational identity orientations predicted respondents’ actual conflict behaviors, whereas self-construals predicted their preferred conflict styles. The second working model investigated if discrepancies between conflict style preferences and enacted conflict behaviors represented an identity gap, which negatively influenced relationship satisfaction. Results provided partial support for these hypotheses. Although relational identity orientations functioned as better predictors of actual conflict behaviors than self-construals, their effects were in the opposite direction than hypothesized. While personal-enacted identity gap negatively predicted relationship satisfaction, the hypothesized indirect effects from conflict management discrepancies to relationship satisfaction through identity gap were only significant for two out of five conflict types: integrating and avoiding. Taken together, results indicate that a theoretical framework that simultaneously captures cultural, relational, and contextual influences provides better prediction of interculturally-dating/married individuals’ actual conflict behaviors. In addition, this dissertation suggests that inter/cross-cultural conflict research can benefit from a non-Western centric approach to theorizing the effects of conflict tactics.Item IMPROVING CHRONIC ILLNESS MEDICATION ADHERENCE: A COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING-BASED MODEL OF PERSUASIVE COMMUNICATION(2017) Iles, Irina; Nan, Xiaoli; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The World Health Organization estimates that, by 2020, the number of Americans affected by at least one chronic condition requiring medication therapy will grow to 157 million. Effective medications are a cornerstone of prevention and disease treatment, yet only about half of patients take their medications as prescribed, resulting in a common and costly public health challenge for the U.S. health care system. As with much of health care, drug adherence is primarily about human behavior. Therefore, patients who lack motivation to take their medication as prescribed cannot be forced or simply educated to take their medication; they must be persuaded and motivated to do so. However, existing literature on how persuasion-based behavioral change can be achieved for non-adherent patients is sparse. To help build more evidence on how effective communication can be used to promote drug adherence for patients who have been diagnosed with chronic illness, this research tested the effectiveness of counterfactual thinking as a message design strategy aimed at increasing drug adherence among individuals at risk for nonadherence. Findings from experiments 1 and 2 showed no effect of counterfactual thinking on medication adherence. Findings from experiment 3 showed that, in a sample of 303 patients with type 2 diabetes at risk for nonadherence, messages including upward counterfactual thinking (e.g., “if only I had taken my medication as prescribed, I would not be in the hospital right now!”), compared to messages including downward counterfactual thinking (e.g., “it could have been worse and I could have died!”) or no counterfactual thinking, increased perceptions of medication adherence self- and response efficacy, and behavioral intention to take one’s medications as prescribed. Counterfactual thinking-based messages are a promising and easy to use persuasion strategy for patients who are at risk for nonadherence. Counterfactual thinking can be incorporated in interventions aimed at increasing adherence, and in doctor-patient or pharmacist-patient communications. Future studies should replicate these findings patients who have other chronic illnesses. Furthermore, measuring actual medication adherence behavior as opposed to behavioral intention, would provide a better indicator of the effectiveness of counterfactual thinking in increasing adherence.