Sign of our times? Revis(it)ing the International Symbol of Access

The International Symbol of Access (ISA), used in a variety of specific locations to represent purposely facilitated access, has become ubiquitous throughout the world within just a few decades. Found wherever people move in physical space and needing to navigate environmental barriers, this symbol is among the most widely recognized representations of disability. While it provides daily interactions with issues of accessibility and disability, its purposes and design in different cultural contexts are neither obvious nor uncontested. We sketch the origin, goals and critiques of this prominent symbol and discuss its functions, from way showing to identity construction and advocacy/activism. Finally, we examine current proposals for alternative symbols.     

Masstige model and measure for brand management

The purpose of this article is to reconceptualize the term “masstige” (Mass Prestige) marketing, develop a masstige model for brand management, and extend the use of the Masstige Mean Scale (MMS). The study was conducted based on the data from 600 individuals living in the United States, France, and India using a structured questionnaire consisting of different factors/sources of brand equity, such as mass prestige, brand knowledge, and perceived quality. On the basis of the findings, we establish that the greater the brand's Masstige Mean Index (MMI) value (“MMIV”), the higher the potential customers' top-of-mind brand awareness. Low MMIVs imply that firms have a long way to go to build their brands. We argue that MMI may allow firms to measure brand equity in different regions, within a country or in foreign countries, to derive insights into the popularity of their brands. We posit three theoretical propositions and develop two theoretical models (i) a hexagon model and (ii) a three-stage model for masstige marketing to define, reconceptualize, and explain the phenomenon.     

‘This is a stage’: A study of public relations practitioners’ imagined online audiences

Public relations (PR) practitioners are among those cultural intermediaries who privilege symbols, products, and communication rituals in society. Through interviews (n = 26) and analysis of practitioners’ Twitter accounts, this study considers how members of this field identify their personal social networking site audiences and how these behaviors are implicated in the performance of their online identity. Findings indicate practitioners feel pressure to use personal social media in accordance with field-constrained norms and that an “occupational publicness” pressure requires them to be visible online outside of the workplace. The persistent specter of public criticism from audiences and the prioritizing of organizational interests above their own self-expression limits performances of PR practitioners’ authentic selves online.     

Activism as a pathway to global citizenship

We examined the influence of prior work with activist issues on the antecedents, identification, and outcomes of global citizenship. Participants rated their engagement with activist issues and measures related to global citizenship identification antecedents and outcomes. The results showed that engagement with activist issues predicted global citizenship through the perceptions of one’s normative environment and global awareness. Activism also indirectly predicted prosocial values and behaviors related to global citizen identity through antecedents and global citizenship identification. The results highlight the prosocial outcomes of participation in activist movements.     

Managing the Revenue of Sales Platforms: Insights into Service Fees

Online sales platforms have grown substantially in recent years. These platforms assist sellers to conduct sales, and in return, collect service fees from sellers. We study the fee policies by considering a fee‐setting platform, on which a seller may conduct a sale with a reserve price to a group of potential buyers: the seller retains the object for sale if the final trading price is below the reserve price. The platform may charge two types of fees as in current practice: a reserve fee as a function of the seller's reserve price and a final value fee as a function of the sale's final trading price. We derive the optimality condition for fee policies, and show that the platform can use either just a final value fee or just a reserve fee to achieve optimality. In the former case, the optimal final value fee charged by the platform is independent of the number of buyers. In the latter case, the optimal reserve fee is often a decreasing, instead of increasing, function of the seller's reserve price. An increasing reserve fee may make the seller reluctant to use a positive reserve price and hurt the platform's revenue. In general, the optimal fees are nonlinear functions, but in reality, linear fees are commonly used because of their simplicity for implementation. We show that a linear fee policy is indeed optimal in the case that the seller's valuation follows a power distribution. In other cases, our numerical analysis suggests close‐to‐optimal performance of the linear policy.     

What We Can’t See? Understanding the Representations and Meanings of UAI,Barebacking, and Semen Exchange in Gay Male Pornography

Since the late 1990s, the use of condoms within gay male pornography has been on the wane. Moving from a niche category into more mainstream forms of commercial pornography, unprotected anal sex has become a dominant theme within this sphere of gay male sexual representation. However, while the definition of what constitutes bareback pornography may at first sight appear unproblematic, this article argues that meanings and understandings of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) are not constant across all genres of gay male pornography. Using textual analysis and focus group methods, the authors demonstrate how subcultural understandings of UAI are dependent on a variety of textual factors. These include the age, body type, and racial identities of the performers; the setting, context, and mise-en-scène of the pornographic scene; and the deployment of power relations between the insertive and receptive partners.

The article concludes by suggesting that the recognition of the diverse representations of “barebacking” found in contemporary gay male pornography should influence the ways in which health promotion strategies address discussions of UAI and bareback pornography.     

Letter to the Editor: Respecting Multiple Epistemologies in Social Work

This article is an invited response to “Toward a Learning Environment That Supports Diversity and Difference: A Response to Dessel, Bolen, and Shep - ardson,” by David R. Hodge (Journal of Social Work Education, 47(2), pp. 235-251).