Research

Through creating shared value (CSV) initiatives, companies have attempted to contribute to solving social problems that the public sector cannot address alone, such as migration, health, climate change, and job losses due to automation. Companies are also using CSV as business opportunities to develop their competitiveness. Only a few studies, however, have examined how organizations can develop and implement CSV programs, and the outcomes of those programs. We conducted a case study on how a multinational company, Yuhan-Kimberly, a joint venture of Kimberly-Clark and Yuhan, developed and implemented its CSV program, and created win-win, mutually beneficial impacts, in response to an increasingly aging society in Korea. South Korea is the world’s most rapidly aging society with the highest poverty and suicide rates among older adults. Yuhan-Kimberly’s CSV initiative includes fostering small-sized senior care businesses, creating jobs for older adults, changing the negative perception of older adults, and ultimately creating a market ecosystem for the older adult care industry. We used triangulation through company documents, including annual sustainability reports (N = 10), news reports (N = 623), company-conducted survey results (N = 80), and in-depth interviews (N = 14) with employees and members of other organizations and publics. The results reveal how the company developed and implemented a CSV program to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships and shared value for the company, older adults, other organizations, and society. The results indicate that CSV programs can be powerful relationship cultivation strategies to create mutual benefits both for society, by providing sustainable and feasible solutions, and for organizations, by enhancing their competitive advantages.

Corporate social advocacy (CSA) has emerged to promote change on social issues in response to publics’ expectations and demands, but how different publics might respond to CSA differently is little understood. Grounded in Du et al.’s (2010) corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication framework, social judgment theory (SJT), and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), we conducted an online survey (N = 505) to examine whether publics perceived CSA differently depending on their existing stance on an issue and whether the existing stance interacted with their attitude toward the company and news credibility. The results showed that individuals’ reaction to the CSA differed in light of their existing stance on an issue. Furthermore, when an individual's stance was undecided, attitude toward the company and news credibility were significantly related to change in issue stance, attitude toward the CSA campaign, and skepticism toward the company’s motives. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

Organizations, such as universities, face a variety of adversities, challenges, or disruptions that call for resilience to be enacted. Resilience is an important communicative process that relies on organizations and their stakeholders to collaboratively make sense of and respond to a given adversity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to identify the shared characteristics that organizations use in their communication surrounding adversity, we completed a genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year. Through our analysis we uncovered commonalities that make organization-stakeholder resilience discourse distinct—(1) defining a shared relationship, (2) detailing steps to regain a sense of normalcy, and (3) describing the outcome of enacting resilience. Based on these findings, we propose a genre of organization-stakeholder resilience by highlighting the role of communication in cultivating resilience through the emphasis on discursive relationships that exist between organizations and stakeholders.

This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication. We reviewed and analyzed 206 articles published in 40 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2020 to April 2021. Our review identified key study characteristics and overall themes and trends in this rapidly expanding field of research. Our review of health communication scholarship during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that health communication scholars have risen to the challenges and interrogated important issues in COVID-19 communication at the individual, group, organizational, and societal levels. We identified important gaps that warrant future research attention including experimental research that seeks to test the causal effects of communication, studies that evaluate communication interventions in under-served populations, research on mental health challenges imposed by the pandemic, and investigations on the promise of emerging communication technologies for supporting pandemic mitigation efforts.

Book abstract: 

This book provides an inside look at the discipline of Communication. In this collection of chapters, top scholars from a wide range of subfields discuss how they have experienced and how they study the crucial issues of our time.

The 2020s opened with a series of events with massive implications for the ways we communicate, from the COVID-19 pandemic, a summer of protests for social justice, and climate change-related natural disasters, to one of the most contentious presidential elections in modern U.S. history. The chapters in this book provide snapshots of many of these issues as seen through the eyes of specialists in the major subfields of Communication, including interpersonal, organizational, strategic, environmental, religious, social justice, risk, sport, health, family, instructional, and political communication. Written in an informal style that blends personal narrative with accessible explanation of basic concepts, the book is ideal for introducing students to the range and practical applications of Communication discipline.

Book abstract: Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape-from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America.

These granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of contemporary religious piety and practice.

When President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2018, many Democrats initially opposed him. He became a much more controversial nominee when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford brought forward accusations that he sexually assaulted her in 1982. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh’s rhetorical style of predatory white masculinity was supported and encouraged by a chorus of Republican senators. Kavanaugh’s articulation of predatory white masculinity made white men victims, used women as pawns in white men’s innocence narrative, and enacted a partisan agenda to justify rage and nostalgia for a time when white male privilege was less scrutinized. But with the Kavanaugh confirmation, predatory white masculinity shifted norms and conventions about judicial temperament. His rhetorical style produced a shift in temperament, which augmented rage and grievance as the ideal temperament for men in power, especially when echoed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and then-President Trump.

This qualitative feminist study analyzes Egyptian women journalists’ articulations of their shifting roles, struggles, and resistances to the political, legal, socio-economic, and professional challenges in a shifting, hybrid, and digitalized journalistic field. Through analyzing 16 interviews with women journalists representing different media affiliations, experiences, and demographics, this study explores their varied perceptions of the shifts in journalistic professionalism and press freedom in Egypt, their equally shifting professional roles and struggles, and their varied resistance mechanisms. On the one hand, this study unpacks the multiple challenges facing them, such as restricted journalistic autonomy, limited access to information and technology, sexual harassment, lack of job security, and other forms of professional discrimination, in a male-dominated profession and a patriarchal culture. On the other hand, it investigates the parallel resistance mechanisms they deploy to overcome these challenges. We argue that the amalgamation of these cyclical, push-and-pull dynamics gave birth to a new “differentiated media landscape” (Schroeder 2018), representing a third space between mainstream media and citizen journalism, the online and the offline, and the old and the new, in a rapidly evolving journalistic field.

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed the context of higher education during the Spring 2020 semester. As the virus began to spread across the United States, colleges and universities canceled in-person classes and activities, closed campus, and moved all operations online. Within the communication discipline, introductory communication course (ICC) administrators and instructors were not only dealing with these challenges, but they were also navigating the transition of large multi-section, often standardized, courses online at large institutions. This research project used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 18 ICC administrators from institutions located in 14 states across the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, Southeastern, and West Coast regions of the U.S. to explore how they engaged in relationship management with their instructors and how their approach to relationship management informed their transition to remote learning due to COVID-19. The analysis results in four emerging themes: (1) rhetorical approaches to relationship management, (2) relational approaches to relationship management, (3) relationship management → positive outcomes, and (4) relationship management as central to navigating COVID-19. Based on these findings we suggest a rhetorical/relational goals approach to course administration and offer practical implications ICC administrators can implement to engage in successful relationship management during times of crisis.

As a detailed case study, “Listening Leadership: An Academic Perspective” explores the use of listening-centered leadership strategies by University of Maryland President Darryl Pines and his leadership team to develop the UMCP strategic plan for moving forward in a time of continued challenges.