Let’s give them something to talk about: Global brands’ use of visual content to drive engagement and build relationships

This longitudinal content analysis of 1,393 Facebook posts made by the top 100 brands provides empirical evidence that leveraging visual communication is not enough for brands to solicit engagement. As brands adapt and adjust their Facebook visual content strategy to capture the attention of their publics in crowded News Feeds, they also need to employ text-based engagement strategies that get users to engage and interact with brand content. Once users start interacting with brand content, it is more likely that other users will engage with the content as well, igniting a conversation. The combination of brand posts with visuals and text-based messages gives brand publics something to talk about and ultimately can lead to stronger relationships.     

Defining the Scope of Aid Reduction and Its Challenges for Civil Society Organizations: Laying the Foundation for New Theory

Much of the literature on local civil society organizations and foreign aid focuses on the short-term consequences of funding cycles and contract conditions, but treats foreign aid at the macrolevel like a largely stable condition, as though countries receiving foreign aid will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Empirical evidence of aid reduction, however, suggests that this approach neglects long-term phenomena. This article examines aid patterns on a global scale and explores their potential consequences for civil society organizations. Working from World Bank data, we identify general patterns in country-level aid reduction. We examine the frequency of country-level aid reduction, the magnitude of reduction, its duration, and whether aid reduction tends to be rapid or gradual. Mapping these patterns establishes that country-level reductions in aid are a regularly occurring, global phenomenon. Moreover, even as global ODA levels increase, instances of country-level aid reduction are also increasing. Our findings lay the foundation for building new, generalizable theory about aid reduction and allow us to identify pressing questions about the consequences for civil society organizations in need of further research.     

‘For the sake of the family and future’: the linked lives of highly skilled Indian migrants

ABSTRACT

While in Western literature, migration is generally considered an individual or (nuclear) household phenomenon, Indian context adds the strong presence of parents and extended family to the constellation. This paper addresses how significant others shape the life course events and the migration trajectories of highly skilled Indian migrants to the Netherlands and UK. We employ a qualitative approach to the life course framework to highlight the linked lives that can alter the migration decisions. Our findings are drawn from 47 semi-structured biographic interviews. The results underscore how further migration decisions are often informed by the implications of the different life stages of the linked lives, the key elements being care-giving by and for the parents. Furthermore, we also illustrate how migration provides space for negotiating social norms and expectations: due to the geographical distance between migrants and their parents, the local (non-Indian) context plays a bigger role and thus the need for and timing of conformity with norms can be postponed. The understanding of family life in transnational settings will be enriched when individuals are embedded within the cultural background and linked lives are extended beyond the immediate nuclear family.     

Black Men Down: An Assessment of Experts’ Quotes on Deadly Encounters with Police

There is growing concern about conflict between police and black urban residents. Police-involved shootings of African American males have become a hot topic in the national discourse on race and policing. Despite this concern, there is still a paucity of research on the depiction of such incidents in the news and the implications for media and crime research. To address this gap, this study presents an exploratory content analysis of experts’ quotes from newspaper articles based on three separate incidents involving the death of unarmed black men at the hands of police. The findings show that articles quoted state managers much more frequently than intellectuals. Quotes were generally not favorable toward the actions of the police (most were neutral). However, they contained very little regarding evidence-based strategies for improving police–community relations in communities of color. The implications for research on media and crime are also discussed.     

Barriers to a healthy lifestyle post gestational-diabetes: An Australian qualitative study

Background

Overseas-born-women from certain ethnicities are at high risk of type-2 diabetes and related metabolic disorders. This study explored the barriers and facilitators to long-term healthy lifestyle recommendations among Australian-born and overseas-born-women who attended health promotion sessions at a tertiary Australian Hospital for gestational diabetes 3–4 years previously.

Using Contingent Markdown with Reservation to Profit from Strategic Consumer Behavior

We examine a contingent price markdown (CM) mechanism with guaranteed reservation under which a retailer sells multiple units to forward‐looking consumers who arrive over time according to a Poisson process. During the early part of the selling season, each arriving consumer can either purchase a unit by paying the regular price or reserve a unit at the discount price. Reserved units can only be claimed later when the number of guaranteed reservations meets a pre‐specified threshold, or at the end of the selling season, whichever comes first. Immediately after the number of guaranteed reservations meets the pre‐specified threshold, the retailer will reduce its selling price to the discount price so that all subsequent arriving consumers can take immediate possession by paying the low price. We study the consumer purchasing behavior in equilibrium when the retailer adopts such a selling mechanism, and compare the performance of our mechanism against two benchmarks: fixed price (FP) and pre‐announced discount (PD). Through an extensive numerical analysis, we identify market conditions under which CM dominates both FP and PD in terms of the retailer's revenue and consumer's surplus. Finally, through a fluid approximation to the stochastic model, we simplify the computation of the equilibrium strategy and the optimal revenues, and verify that the key insights obtained from the stochastic model still hold.     

Public opinion towards workfare policies in Europe: Polarisation of attitudes in times of austerity?

Increasing wage inequality, strong labour market divides and welfare retrenchment are widely believed to result in more polarised public opinion towards the welfare state. The present study examined if attitudes towards workfare policies have become more polarised in Europe over recent decades. To achieve this aim, the study analysed public opinion data from the European Value Study (EVS) from 23 European countries in the years 1990–2008, using multi‐level regression analysis. It is found that individuals who are most affected by workfare – the unemployed, the poor and the young – most strongly oppose workfare concepts. Against expectations, there was no evidence of an increasing polarisation of attitudes in Europe. Attitudinal cleavages based on employment status, income and education have remained stable. Differences between age groups have even dissolved because younger cohorts increasingly favour strict workfare policies. The results suggest that warnings of increasing social conflicts and an erosion of solidarity in European societies are exaggerated.     

Emerging from below the social radar: Incipient evaluation in the North West of England

This paper investigates the social meaning of post‐nasal [ɡ]‐presence, a dialectal variant characteristic of North Western varieties of British English that is claimed to have local prestige. Using a matched‐guise approach, this study reveals the absence of a community‐wide norm with respect to how [?ɡ] clusters are evaluated as well as diachronic change in the level of awareness speakers have of this variable. Older subjects are not sensitive to the dialectal status of [?ɡ] and as a result do not evaluate it differently from [?]; the local form is more accessible to evaluation among younger subjects, for whom the northern indexicality is stronger, but at this incipient stage of social meaning there is no agreement on what the content of this evaluation should be. The results speak to questions regarding the development of shared norms, their role in the speech community, and the granularity of social meaning more generally.