Strategic communication applied to nation building in Spain: The experience of the Catalan Region

This article analyzes how strategic communication is being used in the case of regions, “imagined communities,” or the so-called “stateless nations,” for nation-building purposes. It focuses on the case of Spain's Catalonia region in the years since the devolution of power and approval of the Second Statute of Autonomy in 1979. The different successive Catalan governments have made intensive use of mass media campaigns and other soft power methods to enhance Catalan identity. Main efforts have focused on the promotion of the Catalan language, culture, sports, and symbols through public relations, mass media campaigns, the implementation of laws, and the deployment of public diplomacy tactics with the dual purpose of reaching internal audiences. Although a significant part of the Catalan population is alienated from politics, the overall outcome has been positive for Catalan nationalism: identification with Spain has decreased while dual Catalan/Spanish and Catalan-only identification has grown during this period.     

Le modèle de « l'État-stratège » : genèse d'une forme organisationnelle dans l'administration française

Since the 1990s, a new organisational form of the administrative system in France has been steadily redefining relations between central administrations and local state units. Labelled “the steering state” or the “managerial state”, this new paradigm hinges on separating the strategic functions of steering and controlling the state from the operational functions of execution and policy implementation. The making of this new form of state organization involves two parallel processes: political and cognitive. For one thing, the adoption of concrete measures for “government at distance” results from power struggles between three major ministries (Home Office, Budget and Civil Service). For another, a new legitimate “categorization of the state” is being formed in the major committees involved in the reform process of the 1990s; it is borne by top civil servants and inspired by the ideas of New Public Management. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

Beyond anti-terrorism: Metaphors as message strategy of post-September-11 U.S. public diplomacy

This research analyzed the major metaphors the U.S. government created to define the post-September-11 world realities, including “Second Front,” “Axis of Evil,” “Old Europe,” “Responsible Stakeholder,” and “Color Revolution.” The metaphors are found to be rhetorically advocating and share the archetypal metaphor of “democracy vs. tyranny” and “freedom vs. oppression.” The metaphors had their origins in the U.S. national security strategies, and the images they created highlighted aspects of the moral and ideological considerations but hide certain aspects of the realpolitik motivations.     

Articulating influence: Toward a research agenda for interpreting the evaluation of soft power,public diplomacy and nation brands

While the terms soft power, public diplomacy (PD) and nation brands have cemented their place in academic discourse during the early 21st century, the evaluation of these activities has not been given anywhere near the same level of attention. When describing how campaigns are evaluated, scholars tend to make assumptions based on the goals or outputs of an initiative rather than on the basis of reliable, empirical data on its results. Strong positivist tendencies within current scholarship usually lead to evaluation being considered in terms of methodology and best practice, typically with the assumption that certain preferred outcomes will be demonstrable if an ideal model is followed. Most significantly, such approaches seem to underplay the interests and objectives that inform and constrain choices surrounding modes of communication and evaluation. I argue here that PD activities are rarely the product of rational choices about communication options, and nor is PD evaluation the result of applying the “best” methodology. Rather, questions of PD and evaluation practices are bound together in complex organizational and power structures that generate pragmatic responses both to the “problem of influence” and the reporting of results. Through use of the concept of articulation, this article outlines a framework for interpreting evaluation practices from a contextualized perspective, which grasps how and why soft power practices assume certain forms.     

Au-delà du conflit et de la négociation ?

Since the creation of Sociologie du travail, the importance and forms of conflicts and of negotiations have changed. Nor are the stakes still necessarily the same. Given the emergence of new players in public movements and of new strategies in social protest, it is worthwhile reviewing the ideas of “conflict” and “negotiation” in the light of the forms of circulation between different universes (government, labor unions, employer organizations, associations). Though a topic of debate, the law's place in labor relations has special importance with regard to these two ideas.     

An assessment of predictors of student peer evaluations of team work in the capstone campaigns course

The role of peer evaluations of team work in the capstone, campaigns class is investigated. An assessment of the scores on a 16-item, quantitative assessment of student contributions to their team in a campaigns class indicated that students are extremely positive when evaluating their team members. Means for the 16 evaluation items ranged from 1.44 to 2.19 on a 1–7 scale. The evaluation items were regressed with two overall evaluation measures in the form of the “pay” students would receive from other individuals or the group mean payment. The statistically significant predictors for both dependent variables are identified.     

Exponential random graph models of preschool affiliative networks

Exponential random graph models were used to assess the relevance of reciprocity, popularity, transitivity controlling for effects based upon ego and alter sex, and sex homophily, on the formation of affiliative ties in 19 Portuguese preschool peer groups. The number of times two children were recorded as nearest neighbors in focal samples was used as an indicator of the relationship's strength. Independent parameter estimates of the different models (one for each group) were summarized, separately for the three age groups (“3-year-olds”, “4-year-olds” and “5-year-olds”) using a multi-level approach to meta-analysis. Results showed that affiliative ties between children were sex segregated, highly reciprocal, more likely to be directed to a restricted number of children and with a tendency to create transitive triads. The structural processes underlying the formation of affiliative ties were quite stable between classrooms.     

In search of message design best practices: The Silver Anvil Award winners archive

We investigated specific award-winning public relations efforts to derive best practices that bridge industry practices with academic research and pedagogy. The data for this project were the winning entries for the annual Public Relations Society of America's (PRSA) Silver Anvil Award, which is considered the top award recognizing excellence in public relations. We found, however, that the archive of award winners does not provide sufficiently definitive information about what defines any public relations discourse genre or why any genre as used is “excellent.” This archival research provides us with a key rationale for employing rhetorical, narrative, and linguistic theories prospectively to guide public relations message design and planning, theories which hitherto have been used to judge campaigns post hoc or retrospectively.     

How public relations functions as news sources in China

This study re-conceptualizes the interaction between public relations (PR) practitioners and journalists in news construction. Proposing a new conceptual framework of “news-source involvement,” this study applies two dimensions – “involvement width” and “involvement density” – when examining how information and/or stories generated by PR people affect news coverage. Empirically, this study identifies seven types of news sources derived from a systematic content analysis of 1600 stories in four selected Chinese newspapers from 2001 to 2010 – 10-year period. The major findings include: (1) information subsidy has become a popular phenomenon in China; (2) over the past decade, the Chinese government has been slowly but surely becoming more tolerant of public's expression of their opinions relating to social and political issues. Though the government remains as the dominating “news source” for newspapers, other non-mainstream news sources (e.g. grass-root civilian) have emerged. Growing from the used-to-be “silent mass,” they have become the “subordinate majority” nowadays, having strong influence in certain coverage; and (3) PR people as one of the major news sources, interact with media in a selective manner; and such interaction takes places largely on tactical level.     

A content analysis of the newspaper coverage of the three major hurricanes in 2005

As the primary means of communication between government agencies and the general population, the media play an important role in shaping how the public perceives a potential risk. Risk communicators should carefully consider media coverage of disaster to successfully communicate with the public in the future. This paper examines the content of Hurricane news stories and the framing patterns (e.g., emotional vs. logical) used by local newspapers 1 week before the occurrences of three major hurricanes in 2005. “Actions to take to prevent the risk” was the most frequently covered content, followed by “anticipated damages.” The majority of the risk content was presented using logical framing patterns.     

Gérer la qualité de l’eau : singularisation, évaluation et régime de gouvernement

The April-June 2002 issue of Sociologie du Travail opened its pages for a discussion of the question of quality. Authors highlighted two mechanisms: “identification/singularization” (a sociotechnical process of co-constructing the quality of goods and services) and evaluation (a process of building up confidence so as to do away with uncertainty about the quality of goods and services). Can these two processes be analyzed together? If so, how to understand their interactions? As the example of managing the water supply and wastewater shows, jointly analyzing these two processes helps us understand the work of “qualification/requalification”. The relation between singularization and evaluation is clarified by introducing the notion of a “regime of government”.     

Gauging the public's preparedness for mobile public relations: The “Text for Haiti” campaign

The technology acceptance model was created to measure the public's attitudes toward and acceptance of new technologies. Text messaging has been used in the public relations domain for crisis communication alerts, but there have been few attempts to use it in other domains. Through an electronic survey of previous American Red Cross donors, donors to the “Text for Haiti” campaign had more favorable attitudes than those who did not donate via text messaging. However, the survey participants did not completely reflect the technology acceptance model. Although they perceived that text message campaigns were easy to participate in, the path analysis revealed that these thoughts resulted in less desirable attitudes toward participating in the campaigns.     

L’accountability à l’épreuve des incertitudes : le mandat des acheteurs d’énergie

Based on a survey of energy buyers in big industries, this article inquires into the different ways of explaining the actions they perform in situations of high, uncontrolled uncertainty. Describing energy buyers’ activities, the uncertainties and contradictions affecting them, shows how hard it is to explain them, make them visible or justify the decisions made. Energy buyers develop two forms of “accountability”: they claim to have been granted decision-making powers and ask to be evaluated on the basis of their results; or else they “socialize” their activities by involving corporate managers in decision-making. It is argued that “accountability” is stabilized in line with a collective learning process where the experience of uncertainty has a key place.     

Frank Capra's Why We Fight and film documentary discourse in public relations

This article analyzes the influence of Archibald MacLeish's “strategy of truth” and the principles of the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry in the production of Frank Capra's documentary series Why We Fight. One of the main contributions of this research is to show how this series is the most important example of the application of the strategy of truth and, at the same time, one of the main examples of public relations audiovisual product realized to be addressed to American Army as well to the American public opinion. It is argued that Capra's Why We Fight made a substantial and long-lasting contribution to public relations, particularly in terms of its discourse and the use of analepsis has PR narrative resource. Overall, the article positions Why We Fight as one of the greatest efforts ever made in the history of military public relations.     

Between technocracy and democracy: An experimental approach to certification of food products by Japanese consumer cooperative women

Voluntary food certification systems have emerged as a prominent mechanism of food governance in recent years. However, critics have exposed certifications’ inability to secure independence, quality, consumer trust, and costs. Recent criticism is even more pointed in that some theorists have critiqued “alternative” systems such as Fair Trade as neoliberal window-dressing. What is curious about this emerging literature is how little has been said about the role of citizens. Although most of the certification literature has assumed that food certification resides in the exclusive realm of “experts” and that technical sophistication is equated with improvement, I argue that democratization is possible and desirable. This paper draws on a case study of a Japanese consumer cooperative which has conducted a laywomen's food certification system for past ten years. By proposing at least two parameters of evaluation of food certification—redistributive effect and the degree of democratization, the paper expands the imaginary of “politics of the possible” in food governance while acknowledging tension of gendered participation.     

Unemployment duration and personality

This paper focuses on the role personality traits play in determining individual unemployment duration. We argue that a worker’s job search intensity is decisively driven by her personality traits, reflected in her propensity to motivate and control herself while searching for a job. Moreover, personality traits, in as far as they can be signaled to a potential employer, may also enhance the probability of receiving and accepting a job offer.For our econometric duration analysis, we use the well-accepted taxonomy “Big Five” to classify personality traits. Based on individual unemployment data taken from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) our empirical findings reveal that the personality traits Conscientiousness and Neuroticism have a strong impact on the instantaneous probability of finding a job, where the former has a positive effect and the latter has a negative effect. The direction of the effect on the subsequent employment duration is the opposite. We do not find any significant effects of the personality traits Extraversion and Agreeableness on the duration of unemployment. The personality trait Openness eases finding a job only for female unemployed workers and workers with migration background.     

Negative impact induced by foreign workers: Evidence in Malaysian construction sector

Though foreign workers served to overcome the labor shortage in the Malaysian construction market, over-dependence on foreign workers and the negative impacts induced have become a serious social problem. The aims of this research are to identify those negative impacts induced by foreign workers in the Malaysian construction market and to determine strategies in minimizing these negative impacts. Data were collected through a structured interview and survey. The questionnaires were delegated to professionals in construction projects who have direct contacts with foreign workers. Only respondents from those companies registered under the CIDB grade G7 were chosen for this survey. There were 117 sets of questionnaires completed and analyzed through the structured interviews. The three principal factors attracting foreign workers to the Malaysian construction market are “Preference of the employers”, “Lifestyle and working conditions”, and “Unattractiveness of the career pathway”. The main negative impacts induced by foreign workers are “Over-dependence on foreign workers”, “Increment in criminal activities or social problems”, and “Existence of illegal workers”. This research proposes that strategies such as “Attract local workers into the construction industry”, “Industrialized Building Systems”, “Eliminate illegal migration”, and “Improve governance structure” would be successful in minimizing negative impacts induced by foreign workers.     

Destins professionnels des femmes ingénieures. Des retournements inattendus

In the late 1970s, a major change in techniques and a modification of the job structure opened the way for women to become engineers in the computer sciences. At the time, working conditions and policies for managing careers allowed them to benefit from ascending mobility, while still investing in family life. Given its strong growth, information technology soon became the main branch of the French economy with openings for women engineers. The downturn in employment during the 1990s and its management through “psychology-based” training arrangements restored the sexual division of labor, as women were forced out of “noble” positions in engineering and design or even out of the branch itself. These two recent trends — a feminization and then “defeminization” of reputedly “masculine” jobs — are analyzed.     

Comment se font les administrations : analyser des activités administratives constituantes

Between studies in historical sociology on changes in public administrations and microsociological analyses of the ordinary work done by civil servants, an intermediate perspective is advocated, one centered on “constituent administrative activities”. Following a panorama of the varied researches on public administrations, the proposal is made to focus on the arrangements that shape administrations and form their essential operations. Recruitment, personnel evaluation, the division of labor, the restructuring of hierarchies and the activities of keeping written records and statistics (writing and counting) should be the subjects of study. When placed in their historical and social contexts, they help us better understand how public administrations last and change. Discussing the scale of analysis and making comparisons over time and in space, this article presents the other contributions to this special issue. Less linear approaches are suggested for analyzing the historical processes of the “bureaucratization” and “managerialization” of administrative systems.     

Discourses on rurality in post-socialist news media: The case of Lithuania's leading daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (1991–2004)

The Soviet regime defined rurality as a collective-farm or kolkhoz-based society. Since the late 1980s such a state-imposed definition of rurality was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by perestroika and post-socialist reforms. In the new politics of the rural, the role that the news media was playing in shaping public opinion on rural matters was of growing importance. The paper analyzes 3827 articles on rural issues published during the post-independence period (1991–2004) in the leading Lithuanian daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (LR). Two types of discourses in rural coverage are discerned. During the 1990s rural coverage in LR was reflective of conflicts and tensions between relatively prosperous urban classes which benefited from post-socialist reforms and pauperized rural population. Rurality was increasingly associated with the failure of “the moral modernization” of the rural population. Rural population was stigmatized as deficient in values and character, remaining in the grips of the Soviet mentality and state dependency and, therefore, unable to take advantage of opportunities created by the reforms. Since the early 2000s when economic situation in the country improved significantly and Lithuania started negotiations on European Union membership, rurality in LR coverage was gradually re-defined in EU terms as a socio-spacial entity shaped by regional, national, and local policies promoting multifunctionality of rural areas, well-being of rural communities, and active citizenship. Factors that influenced changes in rural discourses are analyzed. Impacts of changing discourses on rural identities, rural politics and policies are discussed.