The importance of appearing competent: An analysis of corporate impression management strategies on the World Wide Web

Web sites have become important impression management tools for corporations because they represent a constantly available source of information for an organization's publics. This study used quantitative content analysis to assess current corporate impression management techniques, using Jones’ typology of impression management strategies: ingratiation, competence, exemplification, supplication and intimidation. Findings indicate that corporate Web sites focus on competence and exemplification strategies, and that they are not using the full two-way communication capabilities of the Web.     

Researching Chinese Cultural Understandings of Marriage via Similes and Metaphors on the World Wide Web

In an attempt to understand how changes in the societal context of Chinese marriage are reflected in Chinese cultural understandings of marriage, we explore Chinese similes and metaphors for marriage posted on the World Wide Web. Seven themes were found: You will have to decide whether a marriage will work for you, marriage is not about romantic love, marriage is bitter and sweet at the same time, marriage is strong and real, you must work at a marriage, marriage is risky, and marriage is not always taken seriously. The themes give a picture of cultural meanings for marriage in China that reflect more traditional ideas and such recent changes as the move to greater freedom of choice of spouse and greater ease of divorce. The themes provide cultural understandings both by characterizing contemporary marriage and by capturing advice about how to find a partner and make a marriage work.     

Internet presence and historically black colleges and universities: Protecting their images on the World Wide Web?

This study examines how historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) use their home pages to present images of themselves. The home pages of 96 institutions were examined using content analysis. The findings suggest that HBCUs are not using their home pages to project a strong image. For example, less than 10% of these institutional home pages made mention of institutional rankings, and less than 20% made mention of students, athletics or faculty. The authors make suggestions for how HBCUs can better project institutional image with changes to home page content and design.     

Keeping Up: Web Design Skill and The Reinvented Worker

The flexible reinvented worker figures prominently in accounts of informationage work (Touraine 1971; Bell 1976; Zuboff 1988; Block 1990; Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Castells 1996; Rifkin 1996; Sennett 1998). These accounts argue that new media workers, in particular, need to be flexible, to often readjust to new technology and to reskill constantly. While these arguments normally emphasize the role of changing work conditions, in this paper, I investigate the formation of skill in the new media industry. Specifically, I ask how employers in the late 1990s framed a particular new media skill, web design, and how this skillset dealt with upgrades and changes. Using classified job advertisements, trade publications, informant interviews, and fieldwork, I document the articulation of web design skill and its boundaries. My findings highlight how skill definition, rather than work conditions, affects new media work. I show that the web design skill-set: 1. emerged as a fluid, rather than narrow and technically defined, set of competencies; 2. thrived in a tension between art (design) and code (development); 3. utilized web technology itself to create professional institutions; and 4. required constant skill maintenance and upgrading, what I, echoing an informant, call 'keeping up'. I conclude by suggesting that the definition of what constitutes a skill is essential to one of the greatest challenges of new media work: the phenomenon of re-skilling.     

“I Don't Go By Sean Patrick”: On-Line/Off-Line/Out Identity and SeanPatrickLive.com

Web cams are cameras that are attached to a computer in order to send continuously updated pictures over the Internet. SeanPatrickLive is a Web cam site that documented the life of Sean, a gay man living in the Washington, D.C. area. This essay is the result of ethnographic interviews with Sean Patrick. It discusses Web cams within the context of the cyberqueer, examining how sexuality is presented on-line, using the Internet and the Web cam as a form of gay/queer politics, and performing identity on- and off-line.     

PR practitioners’ use of social media tools and communication technology

As social media moves from “buzz word” status to strategic tool, more practitioners are developing skills related to this online communication technology. This study surveyed working public relations practitioners about their adoption of 18 social media tools and their perception on the growth of social media trends in public relations practice. Results provide an overview of the adoption of social media, as a whole, in the industry.     

Queering Identities: The Roles of Integrity and Belonging in Becoming Ourselves

This article presents a picture of the complexities and contradictions in the daily lives of people in the Seacoast area of New Hampshire who identify as, or are identified as, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender queer, questioning, and allied people (LGBTQQA). In this study, the author uses a grounded theory approach to focus on the Create Our Destiny conference. Clear patterns emerged, such as the importance of coming out, labels, and gender identity. A common theme underlying these areas was the tension people experienced between seeking a sense of belonging and maintaining their personal sense of integrity. This study shows that people in the Seacoast want to be fully and wholly themselves, or as the author represents their interests, to strive toward singularity. The author argues that striving towards singularity requires people to grapple with their unexamined codes and principles, such as those pertaining to compulsory heterosexuality and gender duality, by increasing and valuing self-awareness and reflexivity.     

Organizing Cyberspace: Strategies for Teaching About Community Practice and Technology

Summary

The coming millennium will bring new challenges and opportunities to those who struggle for the survival of communities. The incorporation of information technology is important to the conduct and teaching of community practice. This paper discusses how technology is changing community practice and considers the implications for social work education. The paper has three parts. First, it will consider the role of information technology in changing the context for community practice. Second, it will examine the incorporation of information technology into current and emergent community practice interventions. Finally, the paper will explore ways that these issues can be taught within the community practice curriculum.     

WEB PAGES, AUTHORS AND AUDIENCES: The meaning of a mouse click

One popular framework for analysing web pages has been to think of them as identity performances on the part of the author. This framework opens up possibilities for analysis of the ways in which identity performances are composed. The personal web pages to which this perspective is most immediately applicable, are, however, now only a small proportion of the overall amount of information available on the World Wide Web. It would be possible, by extension, to analyse institutional web pages as performances of the institutional identity. It is the contention of this paper that to do so is to miss out on some important aspects of web page design: namely that the production of a web page involves understandings not only of the audience for the page but also of the capacities of the technology. In addition, web page production has to become a socially meaningful act for the individual web page developer and the institution concerned. It is, therefore, argued that the analysis of web pages can usefully learn from media studies and the sociology of technology in this respect. An interview-based study of the developers of web pages for the service departments of a UK university is described. The ideas of audience which the authors use are far from homogeneous: they include an institutional offline audience for the page, a pre-existing imagined audience, developers themselves as audience, and the technology of the browser as a stand-in audience. The audience and the capacities of the technology are developed in context through the practices of designers.     

Colleges and universities’ use of the World Wide Web: A public relations tool for the digital age

This study explores college and university Web sites to determine the extent institutions utilize the Web to accomplish public relations goals. A sample of the 129 best national universities in the United States compiled by the US News and World Report was used for analysis. Results show that schools with a small-medium level of student recruitment and alumni giving are more likely to actively utilize the Web. In this light, schools behind in school excellence strive to use the Web as an important public relations tool to overcome their inferiority to superior schools.     

An application of the nonprofit virtual accountability index: Accountability in sport for development and peace

In this research note, we examine web-based accountability practices of human service nonprofits. Data were collected directly from the organizational websites of an international sample of 532 organizations involved in operating sport for social change programs, more commonly known as the field of sport for development and peace. Websites were coded using the nonprofit virtual accountability index—a theoretically grounded and robust tool—to measure information and interactivity available for stakeholders across five dimensions of accountability. Analyses of variance and independent t-tests were used to test potential group differences based on geographical region, the thematic types of social change efforts, and the type of sport used to deliver programming. The results of this analysis highlight the critical importance of geographical location and other organizational variables for web-based accountability practices. Furthermore, the results allow nonprofit leaders to identify common areas in need of improvement for smaller and emerging nonprofits.     

Global movement dilemmas: transnational representation and impact in the World Social Forum

ABSTRACT

Various social movement debates on organizational design have hinged on the possibility and political usefulness of devising post-representational, a-representational or anti-representational spaces. We analyse organizational options and obstacles that the WSF faces. A denial of representational dynamics may leave internal power and structural imbalances unattended. We raise the question whether the WSF process can intersect the current instances of activism across the planet including the climate justice movement. We explore its changing attitudes toward representational decision-making. Finally, we suggest that the relationship between traditional organization-building and internet-mediated decision-making practices developing at the intersection between the local, the global and the virtual could be debated on the road to the next global WSF, likely to take place in Mexico.     

Peak Oil and the Narrative Construction of Unmarked Identities

Resource depletion is usually an ecological or economic issue, but I approach interpretations of peak oil as the interplay between local and cultural knowledge during narrative identity construction. I examine two internet resource depletion blogs finding that bloggers compete for narrative control using identity unmarkers. Identity unmarkers are taken for granted understandings of normativity. I call this process narrative unmarking. I discuss four identity unmarkers that play on everyday sentiments of normativity: doing something, doing rationality, making plausible insights, and proposing solutions.     

Getting Away from It All: The Construction and Management of Temporary Identities on Vacation

When individuals go on vacation they take on a temporary “vacation identity.” Vacationers use props, behaviors, and interactions with traveling companions to define and bound the experience as separate and different from everyday life. Data are drawn from twenty in‐depth interviews and participant observation with sixty international tourists in China during the summer of 2008. Vacationers' participation in rites and routines and impression management techniques helped them construct a personally meaningful, yet short‐lived identity. The results underscore the influence of others in identity construction and point to the importance of a nonpresent other in creating and presenting identities.     

Web presence of universities: Is higher education sending the right message online?

Web sites of the 3738 U.S.-based colleges and universities were sampled and analyzed to determine how higher education employs the internet to communicate to key publics overall and students in particular. Analyses revealed prospective donors are the most often-targeted public followed by faculty/staff. Prospective and current students followed. In better news to students, the five items students most often seek on the Web were the five most common items linked from university home pages.     

World War II and the development of global indigenous identities

The indigenous rights movement emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, establishing a newly conceptualized identity claimed not on the grounds of shared culture, language or ancestry but on shared experience as native peoples marginalized by colonial expansion. This article examines how the Second World War created conditions favouring the emergence of indigenous identity as a global concept. Using a comparative perspective, this paper considers two ways in which war conditions affected indigenous peoples: by highlighting issues of citizenship, loyalty and military service; and by altering how combatant powers evaluated indigenous cultures. While the experiences of particular groups varied widely, the wartime era focused attention on both policies of assimilation and assertions of distinctiveness, creating a fluid context for change. A global, comparative perspective offers insight into the role of the war era in understanding the relationship between indigenous activism and the international order.     

Web power: a survey of practitioners’ World Wide Web use and their perceptions of its effects on their decision-making power

A national e-mail survey investigated how 432 public relations practitioners perceive their World Wide Web use impacts their decision-making power in their organizations. Practitioners’ web use appears to be positively related to three of Finkelstein's [Finkelstein, S. (1992). Power in top management teams: Dimensions, measurement, and validation. Academy of Management Journal, 35(3), 505–538] conceptualizations of power derived from “upper echelons” theory from the strategic management literature—structural, expert and prestige power. “Super users” who use the web more frequently for productivity and efficiency, for research and evaluation, and for issues communication are most likely to perceive the web empowered them to be promoted (structural power). Practitioners who use the web more frequently for productivity and efficiency as well as for issues communication are more likely to perceive the web empowers them as experts in their organizations (expert power) and enhances how others see them (prestige power). Practitioner-owners perceive that greater web use leads to greater expert power than did non-owners.     

Men's Identities and Sociolinguistic Variation: The Case of Fraternity Men

The variation patterns of the variable (ING) in an American college fraternity are explained by analyzing individual men's contextualized discourse. While most of the fraternity men predictably use a lower rate of the 'vernacular' variant in weekly meetings, several men use a higher rate. I argue that all of the men index alignment roles associated with power, but that these alignment roles are powerful in different, specifiable ways. Qualitative discourse analysis shows that the men with high rates of the vernacular variant use (ING) to index working-class cultural models and confrontational stances, as part of identity displays based on physical, rather than structural, power. Thus, the variable has several potential abstract social meanings, but specific interactional meanings can only be constructed in contextualized practice.     

上海世博理念、世博精神和世博经验探讨

中国2010年上海世博会是全球经济、科技和文化成果集中展示的一次盛会,形成了独特的上海世博理念、世博精神和世博经验。上海世博理念不仅传承世界博览会“理解、沟通、欢聚、合作”的基本理念,而且凸显了当今世界的发展趋势、时代诉求和历史使命,将成为引领未来世界城市发展的思想源泉。上海世博精神汇聚全国人民踊跃办博的精神风貌和世界人民热情参与的高尚情怀,展现了中国诚待世界的核心价值和世界信任中国的共同价值。上海世博经验是在世博会申办、筹办和举办的过程中所形成的制度、机制以及所创造具有特色的办法、技巧和心得,并在办博实践中不断应用、不断完善的知识体系。