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    Global Journeys: Exploring The Communication Strategies Successful Longterm Sojourners Use For Cultural, Language, Identity And Family Adjustment

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    With a growing number of multinational corporations sending workers into new locations, the need for knowledge about how individuals and families successfully integrate and connect to their host country is paramount. This study focuses on the phenomenological communication strategies used for cross cultural adjustment and adaptation of longterm sojourners in a new culture. Longterm sojourners who have lived for three years or longer in two host countries were interviewed to explore their communication strategies of adaptation for meaning making for themselves and for their families. Specifically, perspectives around the experience of cross culture adjustment, language acquisition, and identity shift were explored. Findings show that individuals who approach the experience with openness and non-judgmentalism find greater satisfaction with the host country. Also, those who seek to integrate and deeply embrace the new culture experience acceptance and stay for longer periods. Humor, humility, and perseverance are character traits that predict for satisfactory adjustment. The stresses on marriage and family provide a dialectic experience of strain and closeness. Implications from this study indicate that satisfied longterm sojourners have discovered ways of contending with difficulties that provide knowledge for managing this stressful adjustment. Their experience can inform the expectations of future sojourners. This study emphasizes the need for sojourners to be prepared for the challenges ahead and to engage the process with flexibility

    Leadership Storytelling Event As A Means Of Prompting Organizational Identity Change

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    Leaders are tasked with conveying a new organization’s identity via communication and behavior. Thus, this thesis is guided by the research question: “How can a leadership storytelling event prompt organizational identity change amongst internal stakeholders?” The term “storytelling event” is used to represent a story and the message that precedes or follows the narrative. This thesis examines a leadership storytelling event within a financial firm in which the CEO introduced a new organizational identity. The framing of an organizational identity is contingent upon the meaning produced by the language contained within the leader’s discourse. Using rhetorical analysis to analyze the storytelling event, this paper examines whether the CEO used “sensebreaking” and “sensegiving” rhetoric to prompt organizational identity change. The findings reveal the CEO framed the concept of change positively prior to introducing the new organizational identity attributes through a thematic structure embedded within the storytelling event. Additionally, the CEO did not use negative labels to erode the previous identity; rather, confluence was employed to construct the new identity

    The Power of Shame: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Social and Cultural Expectations Communicated in Media

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    Shame is an inescapable human feeling, and its impacts on human interaction are well documented. This thesis focuses on the power of symbolic shame in media and presents a critical discourse analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012) of three recent public service announcements. As a theoretical basis, the study examines shame from point of view of ritual communication, framing theory, and the symbolic communication of stigma. Although shame is often regarded as an effective means to communicate social and cultural expectations and a tool for balancing behavior in society, shame may also be used to create structures of power and agendas that exclude others, shape our social world, and change our culture. The findings indicate a need for raising critical awareness to help future researchers understand how messages—particularly those that stigmatize certain groups—persuade and threaten our ability to recognize our shared humanity

    Agriculture Career Readiness Handbook

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    Are students and young adults looking to enter the agriculture industry, adequately prepared for such a career? There is continuous research being done on what the job market is looking for from college graduates each year. Addressing the job market as a whole has value, but is the expectations the same within a specific industry or sector? This research is based around what best prepares an individual for work within the agriculture industry. The research was completed using online surveys of individuals currently working within the agriculture industry, as well as phone interviews with human resource professionals or company managers of agriculture industries. The research focused on discovering the more valuable socialization aspects a high school or college student can do in order to prepare themselves for a career within the agriculture industry. Although not getting as large of a response as hoped for, the results of this pilot study were valuable and allowed for the development of an initial college and high school student guidebook titled the Agriculture Career Readiness Handbook. There were also some unexpected results that points future research to be directed a little differently. Continued research in this area as well as some paths that were discovered from this initial research are highly recommended to offer greater understanding of the agriculture industry to students, as well as faculty, education institutions, and even business owners

    The Effectiveness Of Social Media In Advancing Transformational Change

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    The goal of this study is to determine the effectiveness of social media in advancing transformational change. Successfully implementing transformational change in an organization is heavily dependent on the support of key stakeholders. But engaging those stakeholders requires effective communication. Transformational efforts often fail because of the lack of credible communication or a failure to define a vision that can be easily communicated (Kotter, 2007). Researchers say that the key to successful transformational change is embracing a communication based in the realm of conversation where there is genuine two-way dialogue that is focused on listening and probing for more information (Dobbs, 2010). Creating conversations is a key component of social media: a platform of online tools designed to connect people and easily share information (Jue, Marr & Kassotakis, 2010). Social media has the potential to achieve employee engagement, enhance productivity and increase collaboration (Ou, C. J., Davison, R. M., Zhong, X., & Liang, Y.,2010). To determine the effectiveness of social media at driving transformational change a study of existing literature related to transformational change and social media was coupled with a qualitative and quantitative study of organizational users of social media and stakeholders of those organizations. The study employed both a questionnaire and interviews. Results showed a clear preference for the use of social media as an effective form of relationship development and effective communication, but a challenge remains on how organizations can best use social media to create and sustain the relationships required to accomplish transformational change

    Immigration Reform Opponents Framing Propaganda As Fact To Influence Public Opinion

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    Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2005). This study is to see how propaganda is used by a anti-immigrant special interest organization to frame the debate and assist the televised press to set the agenda on the topic. Specifically, the attention of the study was on the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The research explored in this thesis was founded on Shaw’s and McComb’s (1972) agenda-setting theory and Entman’s (1993) process of framing. The study applied an ideological rhetorical analysis to the organization’s recent report called The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer. The results of the study indicate that the authors of the Heritage report used language, stereotypes, and conservative ideologies to craft a message against immigration reform legislation in the United States under the guise of research. Most televised news outlets criticized the report as propaganda and unreliable, but conservative news outlet Fox News legitimize the organization and used report findings to set the agenda against immigration reform. Further studies in this area would focus on how the report affected public opinion or how the media is framing the immigration debate and the correlation with the themes identified in the Heritage report

    NOW 2012-01 January

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    Corpus of News on the Web data for January 2012. The TAR folder contains linguistic data in three formats: Database: This is the format allows for the most robust searches and allows for powerful JOINs across corpus, lexicon, and source tables but requires knowledge of SQL. See Full-text corpus data for more information on how to use the database format. Linear Text: This format provides a textID for each text, and then the entire text on the same line. In this format, words are not annotated for part of speech or lemma. In addition, contracted words like can\u27t are separated into two parts (ca n\u27t) and punctuation is separated from words (eye level . As her). Word, Lemma, Part of Speech: Texts are separated by a line with ## and the textID

    NOW 2012-10 October

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    Corpus of News on the Web data for October 2012. The TAR folder contains linguistic data in three formats: Database: This is the format allows for the most robust searches and allows for powerful JOINs across corpus, lexicon, and source tables but requires knowledge of SQL. See Full-text corpus data for more information on how to use the database format. Linear Text: This format provides a textID for each text, and then the entire text on the same line. In this format, words are not annotated for part of speech or lemma. In addition, contracted words like can\u27t are separated into two parts (ca n\u27t) and punctuation is separated from words (eye level . As her). Word, Lemma, Part of Speech: Texts are separated by a line with ## and the textID

    Wisdom from Warren Buffett

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    This article documents a trip that was made by students from a U.S. University to visit Warren Buffett, a chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and the third richest man in the world at his Global Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. Every year, Buffet invites students from a select number of schools to Omaha to visit with him. In 2011, students from Gonzaga University were fortunate to be invited by Buffet based on new products that they created in an entrepreneurship course. This article discusses the strategy that this university used to get invited to visit Buffet, the activities that occurred throughout the visit, the lessons learned from Buffet. This trip to Omaha entailed visiting two of Berkshire Hathaway\u27s subsidiaries: Nebraska Furniture Mart and Borsheim\u27s Jewelers. The students also participated in a two hour and thirty minute question and answer period with Buffett, went out to lunch with him, and each student and university group had pictures taken with him

    Small Talk : Developing Fluency, Accuracy, and Complexity in Speaking

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    A major issue that continues to challenge language teachers is how to ensure that learners develop accuracy and complexity in their speaking, as well as fluency. Teachers know that too much corrective feedback (CF) can make learners reluctant to speak, while not enough may allow their errors to become entrenched. Furthermore, there is controversy over the effectiveness of recasts (the most common form of CF) in promoting acquisition. This article explores a methodology, ‘Small Talk’, which aims to resolve some of the tensions between the need to encourage truly communicative language use and the need to develop complexity and to bring focus on forms into the syllabus in ways that can be recognized as valid and relevant by both teachers and learners. It presents some preliminary research on the viability of this CF methodology premised on attention to, and arising from the needs of, the individual learner

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