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.     

What drives a tough call: Determining the importance of contingency factors and individual characteristics in communication executives’ stance decision-making through a conjoint analysis

To further the understanding of how communication executives make tough calls in times of organizational-public conflict, we use a conjoint analysis to identify key drivers for organizational stance decision-making. This is the first-ever conjoint analysis applied to advancing the contingency theory of strategic conflict management by examining the relative importance of key contingency factors as determined by practitioners with varied individual characteristics. This study investigates: 1) the relevant importance of and dynamics between three key contingency factors (i.e., external threats, organizational characteristics, and dominant coalition characteristics); 2) the influence of individual characteristics (e.g., gender, experience, and personal ethics) in stance decision-making process; and 3) how different types of organizational stances (i.e., general stance, action-based accommodation, and qualified-rhetoric-mixed accommodation) are determined by these contingency factors and individual characteristics in different conflict situations. Results generated among our communication executive participants include: individual characteristics (i.e., gender, ethics and social responsibility, whistleblowing tendencies, and over 20 years in the communications field) are influential for their strategic conflict management decision-making. Implications for refining the contingency theory and unearthing complex public relations decision-making processes via novel statistical techniques are discussed.     

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.     

Saints and sinners: Competing identities in public relations ethics

Public relations ethics is confused and often superficial in its approach, relying heavily on traditional theory, with only occasional reference to more recent developments in professional ethics, particularly feminist and global ethical perspectives.     

Vision and state health department public relations practitioners: Prepared to lead?

Visions are important to organizational effectiveness. Although providing vision has been identified as one of the behaviors that best captures organization-wide public relations leadership, little public relations research has focused on vision. Similarly, state health departments have drawn little interest among public relations scholars even though states are a central part of the nation's public health system. This study addressed the perceptions of the top public relations professionals at state health departments concerning vision and their involvement in the visioning process. The practitioners were nearly unanimous in their belief that organizational visions are important. However, results indicate that some top public relations practitioners at state health departments are not prepared to make optimal contributions to the visioning process. In order to take full advantage of opportunities to serve as organization-wide leaders, public relations practitioners should seek out information about visioning in order help chart their organization's future and enhance their careers.     

浅议世界女子高校发展之路——从WEW教师论坛谈起

在崭新的世纪,世界女子高校将有何发展?世界妇女教育组织(WEW)的成立与2011年教师论坛的召开让我们认识到世界女子高校在发展中存在的问题,在坚定了发展女子高校信念的同时,对中国的女子高校亦有所启示。     

Parental income and the fruits of labor: Variability in homework efficacy in secondary school

Research in the sociology of education has shown that noncognitive traits are important predictors of educational outcomes and a mechanism of the intergenerational transmission of status. However, previous research on this topic typically posits that there is a constant effect of these traits with variable prevalences of these traits by socioeconomic status. Using time spent on homework as an example, I analyze income-based heterogeneity in homework efficacy, defined as the individual effect of study time on academic achievement, using a national U.S. probability sample of secondary students. Higher income students gain more knowledge from their homework time than their counterparts in all grades and all subjects except history, with greater group differences for math than for science and reading. These results are confirmed by models accounting for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in the 8th–10th, but not 10th–12th, grade windows. These results imply that increases in the amount of homework assigned may increase the socioeconomic achievement gap in math, science, and reading in secondary school.     

美国《双语教育法》颁布的社会背景研究——基于霍姆斯的四模式分析框架

在美国的中小学校除英语之外讲各种语言的学生,或者说那些不会讲英语的学生,他们的教育需求长期得不到妥善的解决。1968年颁布的《双语教育法》表明,美国联邦政府承认了美国学校体制中长期存在的只能使用英语教学的单语教学问题,如何使教学语言多样性是一个亟待解决的核心问题。以霍姆斯的四模式为分析框架,把颁布《双语教育法》时纷繁复杂的社会背景置于规范模式、组织制度模式、精神状态模式和自然环境模式中进行分析,结果显示:(1)移民人口剧增并逐步扩展到新的区域,给美国公立学校造成了巨大压力;(2)司法判例对所实施的隔离但平等原则的彻底否定催生了新的希望;(3)少数族裔群体谴责主流社会的不公平,他们要求身份认同和获得更多权利的呼声愈来愈大;(4)联邦政府对保障国防安全、消除贫困现象等多重利益的考量,促成了《双语教育法》的颁布。     

上海家庭教育的现状及发展思考

上海家庭教育既表现出典型的现代化趋势，也存在不符合现代家庭教育发展理念的若干问题，主要表现在：家庭治理模式向现代民主型模式转变，但部分家长的教养态度依然不够民主；父母对孩子成长的关注与孩子的心理需求存在较大偏差。父母最关心孩子的学习成绩，而孩子最希望父母关注他们的内心想法；亲子活动较少，孩子与父母的沟通意向不强，网络聊天对孩子的影响对亲子沟通方式提出了挑战。建议通过重新认识家庭教育的独特作用与功能定位；提高家庭教育的文化含量，建设和谐文化；加强家庭教育指导，满足多样化的家庭教育需求；加强平台建设，完善学校、家庭、社会“三位一体”合力育人机制等方式提升家庭教育质量。     

中日“穿”、“脱”动词比较研究

正确使用动词是语言学习中重要的一环,本文以中、日二种文字为对象,选择“穿”和“脱”两个动词,比较其表达方式和使用方式,以加深学习者对日语该类动词的理解,并达到能够正确使用的目的.