社会需求视角下地方高校行政管理本科的课程设置

地方高校行政管理专业的课程体系普遍存在课程设置结构比例失调,教师知识背景影响课程设置以及课程设置的市场化与功利化倾向等问题。因此,为了有效回应社会的人才需求变化,地方高校管理者和教育者必须积极优化课程设置结构比例,加强与其他学科间的渗透交融以及提升课程的实用性,以期通过重构课程体系,培养适合区域经济发展所需要的人才。     

Social network and family business: Uncovering hybrid family firms

What does it mean for a private enterprise in China to be embedded in a family? Our purpose here is twofold: (1) use social network analysis to describe what it means for a firm to be embedded in a family, (2) reveal from the application a new kind of firm, not family, yet akin to family. Armed with data on a large probability sample of private enterprises — a third of which meet ownership and employment criteria of being family businesses — we uncover a category of “hybrid family firms” that look modern in the style of firms that exclude family, but operate socially in ways similar to family firms. Our conclusion from summary statistics on the sample is that there are no differences in average performance level or network advantage for the three categories of businesses: family firms, hybrid family firms, and family-excluded firms. The fact that CEOs of family firms and hybrid family firms more often turn to family as key business contacts is a fact about network composition that raises no question about network mechanisms. Whether the CEO turns to more or fewer family contacts, government help is more likely with stronger political connections, and business success and survival are more likely with a large, open network. That said, the look-modern, act-traditional hybrid family firms stand alone in prospering with a CEO embedded in a closed business network. Recognition of hybrid family firms adds to the literature’s illustrations of social network analysis used to distinguish types of businesses and business people, and extends the population of organizations within which governance and strategy are likely to be better understood when viewed through a family logic.     

The arithmetic of outcome editing in financial and social domains

Outcome editing refers to a set of mental rules that people apply when deciding whether to evaluate multiple outcomes jointly or separately, which subsequently affects choice. In a large-scale online survey (n = 2062) we investigate whether individuals use the same outcome editing rules for financial outcomes (e.g., a lottery win) and social outcomes (e.g., a party with friends). We also test the role of numeric ability in explaining outcome editing. Our results show that people’s preferences for combining or separating events depend on whether those events are in the financial or the social domain. Specifically, individuals were more likely to segregate social outcomes than monetary outcomes, except for when all outcomes were negative. Moreover, numeric ability was associated with preferences for outcome editing in the financial domain but not in the social domain. Our findings extend the understanding of the arithmetic operations underlying outcome editing and suggest that people rely more on calculations when making choices involving multiple financial outcomes and more on feelings when making choices involving social outcomes.     

How to keep Rosie the riveter from contracting VD: A case study of how U.S. social reformers used public relations during World War II

Much of public relations historiography on World War II focuses on the government uses of the function. This study fills a gap in the literature by exploring how a non-governmental organization called the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) used persuasion communication efforts to enlist the aid of management, labor, and local communities in the United States in the control of venereal disease (VD) rates. The case study advances a more diverse understanding of how activists have utilized public relations and found that the social reformers’ use of persuasive communications strategies and activities aligned with the view of public relations as the strategic and intentional participation in the social construction of meaning to achieve a planned outcome.     

‘What you need to do is …’: social work students’ reflections on an advice giving audit exercise

This paper reports on qualitative research investigating the advice giving behaviours of social work students. Second-year students, who were enrolled in an interpersonal communication skills course, were required to undertake an ‘advice-giving audit’ exercise across 6 days, with the aim of strengthening their awareness of the interactive nature of advice giving. Students then wrote a diary entry about the frequency of their everyday advice giving behaviour, its intent and reception. Nineteen students provided these reflections for analysis. Findings included three themes pertaining to advice-giving: (i) Giving advice as a natural, comfortable and unconscious way of communicating; (ii) Power and position influences advice dissemination, and (iii) Withholding advice opens, deepens and confuses norms of communication. A fourth theme pertained to the insights that students reported from engaging with the exercise. These findings illustrate the complex interactional process associated with professional advice giving. The research also suggests that experiential activities, which are conducted outside of the classroom, have significant potential to promote the critical examination of embedded communicative practices.     

Spatial effects on individual social capital: Differentiating the constraints of local occupational structures

Recent studies have paid more attention to how position-generated social capital varies by an individual’s characteristics, and less to how geographical distributions of occupations may constrain position-specific connections. By integrating two national surveys from the United States, we differentiate the extent to which individual social capital fluctuates by occupational compositions at the county, metropolis, and state levels. Multilevel analyses show that when more people at all three levels work in education, training, and library occupations, residents have a greater chance to gain access to professional-type resources. Similar spatial effects on farming and production resources, however, are more apparent at the county level. Not only does the association between individual social capital and local occupational structures vary across different occupations, but the magnitude of such spatial effects also differs by the scope of the geographical areas. The findings underscore how contextual factors and geographical location may contribute to building occupation-specific network resources.     

Working and disability expectancies at older ages: The role of childhood circumstances and education

The ability to work at older ages depends on health and education. Both accumulate starting very early in life. We assess how childhood disadvantages combine with education to affect working and health trajectories. Applying multistate period life tables to data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for the period 2008–2014, we estimate how the residual life expectancy at age 50 is distributed in number of years of work and disability, by number of childhood disadvantages, gender, and race/ethnicity. Our findings indicate that number of childhood disadvantages is negatively associated with work and positively with disability, irrespective of gender and race/ethnicity. Childhood disadvantages intersect with low education resulting in shorter lives, and redistributing life years from work to disability. Among the highly educated, health and work differences between groups of childhood disadvantage are small. Combining multistate models and inverse probability weighting, we show that the return of high education is greater among the most disadvantaged.     

Utilizing social media for social work: insights from clients in online youth services

ABSTRACT

This study explored and conceptualised service users’ experiences in online outreach projects supported by the Hong Kong SAR government. Fifteen active users were interviewed. The study used thematic analysis to explore service users’ experiences that might not have been possible without technology. Participant utterances were non-mutually-exclusively tagged with a specific theme. Each utterance reflected an aspect of user experience which combined a technical component with a service-need component. Six themes were identified, including: (i) Personalised newsfeeds help identify service information and news, (ii) Online status indicators improve service accessibility, (iii) Online communications enable a disinhibition effect, (iv) Asynchronous communications facilitate continual feedback loops, (v) Incomplete communicative modalities may cause misunderstanding and (vi) Asynchronous communication may disrupt conversations. The findings reveal that there are middle-level concepts between broad social work concepts and ever-changing technology. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy: Towards a “new” cult of personality

This study examined how Turkey uses social media as a tool for public diplomacy and how the state’s soft-power efforts have recently changed on the global stage. The researchers constructed a dataset of 2769 Twitter posts by the Turkish government’s most influential public diplomacy accounts. The analyses revealed that the focus of Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy has become concentrated on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and is thematically focused on the political values embodied by the Turkish president. The findings suggest that public diplomacy remains to be the diplomacy of the government, not of the public, and social media is used as just another tool for propaganda, not as a means of engagement with foreign publics. Further, the findings indicate the emergence of a “new” cult of personality in public diplomacy and point out the instrumental role of social media in changing the dynamics of leader-follower relationship. The study contributes to public relations theory and practice by advancing the burgeoning public diplomacy scholarship at the intersection of social media and relational approaches.