Suchergebnisse

Purpose
Most of the research on children's consumer behavior focuses on pre-purchase processes, with brand choice typically being the last stage investigated. This paper aims to examine the outcome of children's purchase decisions, with an emphasis on dissatisfaction and outcome resolution. Of particular interest was the comprehension level of the corporate communication and the extent to which clear, understandable communication influenced children's ultimate satisfaction.


Design/methodology/approach
Eighty-seven children wrote authentic letters of complaint to manufacturers about a recent product purchase. The study examined what happened after the children complained – i.e. how companies responded to children, and how satisfied children were with the resolution and the overall complaint handling process. Two widely regarded readability formulas were used to measure the complexity of the written correspondence.


Findings
The present study suggests that child complainants are the most concerned with the bottom-line results of their communication efforts. Like adults, they want the problem corrected. Unfortunately, the majority of children did not feel fully satisfied with the corporate complaint handling process. Over one-third of the companies in the sample did not even bother to respond to children's legitimate complaints, despite the fact that each child specifically asked the company to write back. Those firms which did were more likely to respond with a letter only than with a letter plus add-on. And the corporate letters, by and large, were written at an educational level which would preclude full understanding by the child.


Research limitations/implications
Because consumer complaint behavior is not randomly distributed in the population, the use of probability sampling was precluded. Published studies which have used consumer complaint letters as the data collection method have relied primarily on convenience sampling. In the present study, judgmental sampling was used to select children participants. Three criteria were applied. Children had to be aged between 10 and 13 years. Children had to have experienced dissatisfaction with a product purchase made over the previous six months. Children could not have taken any public action to resolve their dissatisfaction. But they had to be willing to write a letter of complaint at this point. It was considered of utmost importance that the letters used in this study be authentic. They had to be composed and penned by the children themselves. This criterion, coupled with the fact that the complaints were legitimate, avoided the obvious ethical dilemma associated with the use of fabricated letters.


Practical implications
It seems ironic that in the present era of consumer consciousness, corporations do not place greater emphasis on truly communicating with their customers, where communication is viewed as a process of establishing shared meaning. How can there be shared meaning when the message sender fails to consider the characteristics of the receiver – characteristics such as age and cognitive development? Businesses may argue that their corporate communication policies and practices are based on a concern for cost efficiency. This argument carries little merit, unfortunately. Even the federal government, through the Plain Writing Act of 2010, acknowledges the importance of using common, everyday words and plain English in all written documents.


Social implications
On the surface, American businesses state that they welcome customer feedback. The comments of children are more sought after now than ever before, particularly in the area of advertising and new product development. But the results of this study show that companies have a long way to go before they can claim to be truly receiver-oriented in their managerial communication policies. Perhaps this is why consumers – certainly child consumers – are only beginning to believe that when kids complain, companies will respond.


Originality/value
The vast body of complaint research focuses almost exclusively on adults. Despite their sophistication and marketing literacy, children are not miniature adults. It is not known whether the same models and findings with respect to adult complaint behavior apply to children. Unfortunately, there are very few studies of children's complaint behavior and corporate responses.

The 'Australia-Indonesia Attitudes Impact Study – Historical' was conducted by Dr. Agnieszka Sobocinska of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. The study, funded by the Australia-Indonesia Centre, analysed data from the 1940s until the present day to determine trends in Australian attitudes towards Indonesia, and the extent to which they affect bilateral relations. It combines over six decades of polling data with qualitative research from the humanities and social sciences, analysis of theoretical literature examining the impact of public opinion on foreign policy, as well as interviews with key figures from government, academia and policy thinktanks. What resulted is a holistic analysis of what Australians think about Indonesia, why they hold these attitudes, and how popular perceptions are politically significant in Australian-Indonesian relations. The study was published in November 2015 and Dr Sobocinska presented the findings at the Australia-Indonesia Attitudes Seminar, hosted by Monash University in May 2016.

Thirty years after the return to democracy, Argentina and Brazil are still facing challenges to democratize communications. In both countries, a commercial approach to culture and communications prevails, with high rates of ownership concentration in few private firms, irrespective of the negative consequences this has for the existence of a diversity of media voices, particularly from underrepresented groups. Nevertheless, since the arrival to power of left wing governments in 2003, both countries have been experiencing changes that question this situation; for example, Argentina introduced a new audiovisual communication services law in 2009 regulating the radio spectrum and stimulating NGO media; whereas Brazil has been funding different cultural and free media networks through cultural policies. Yet, research has paid little attention to the processes of emergence of these media projects that try to depart from the for-profit culture and communication model of non-Western countries. In this context, this work offers a conceptual framework to understand the key dimensions that shape how nongovernmental audiovisual media projects striving for social transformation challenge a predominant commercial approach to culture and communication. The conceptual framework divides the analysis into three levels: media system, policy discourses and the specific media cases under analysis. The first one considers the historical changes in the structure and actors of the media system in both countries, which help to comprehend the contemporary problems of ownership concentration and the most important actors. The second level examines the main and counter policy discourses in competition to change the existing media system, while the third level focuses on key dimensions that have been shaping (both enabling and restricting) the projects of new media experiences in both countries. In particular, it takes into account the important role of the specific discourses that these experiences create to challenge a for-profit communication model, which introduces context specific interpretation schemes and visions on how communications, culture, and more generally society, ought to be. Apart from the discursive dimension, the third level considers the potentials and limits that technologies put on new projects, together with the constraints that quality patterns have in new media cases. Furthermore, the framework considers different types of violence from incumbents that the cases have to withstand, which is a relevant dimension to understand why these cases do not spur as fast as expected. Additionally, the conceptual framework proposes ways to study participation and the reception of content by audiences. Finally yet importantly, the conceptual framework incorporates a resource view of power to research about the different strategies for acquiring and mobilizing resources that media projects employ to keep in operation. This conceptual framework builds on empirical data gathered in Argentina and Brazil covering both levels of interest. On the one hand, interviews with former and current policy makers span the policy discourse level, plus the analysis of policy documents and other sources. On the other hand, the empirical data of the four selected case studies was collected mixing both participant observation and the material generated by and about each experience. In particular, in Argentina the thesis considers the first co-operative channel and the first Mapuche indigenous community channel under the new audiovisual communication services law. Moreover, the research covers a preexisting alternative media channel operating in a factory recovered by its workers, which was legalized after the law had been passed. As regards Brazil, the thesis builds the argument on the experience of a media collective, Midia NINJA, which represents practices of the collaborative economy advanced by a network of cultural agents operating across the country. In sum, this work makes empirical and theoretical contributions, stressing the importance of communication to the aims of the international development agenda, and its importance to open up spaces for different visions and perspectives. This is not only academically relevant, but also practically for Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries that are experiencing similar media change processes.

The issue of privacy is constantly brought to the spotlight since an ever increasing number of services collects and processes personal information from users. In fact, recent advances in mobile communications, location and sensing technologies and data processing are boosting the deployment of context-aware personalized services and the creation of smart environments but, at the same time, they pose a serious risk on individuals' privacy rights. Being situated in the realms of legal and social studies, the notion of privacy is mainly left, concerning its protection, to legislation and service providers' self-regulation by means of privacy policies. However, all laws and codes of conduct are useless without enforcement. Based on this concept, this paper presents a framework conceived on the basis of privacy legislation. It uses a semantic model for the specification of privacy-aware data access rules and a middleware system which mediates between the service providers and the data sources and caters for the enforcement of the regulatory provisions.©2008 IEEE.

This book explores, from a transnational viewpoint, the historical relationship between war veterans and fascism in interwar Europe. Until now, historians have been roughly divided between those who assume that 'brutalization' (George L. Mosse) led veterans to join fascist movements and those who stress that most ex-soldiers of the Great War became committed pacifists and internationalists. Transcending the debates of the brutalization thesis and drawing upon a wide range of archival and published sources, this work focuses on the interrelated processes of transnationalization and the fascist permeation of veterans' politics in interwar Europe to offer a wider perspective on the history of both fascism and veterans' movements. A combination of mythical constructs, transfers, political communication, encounters and networks within a transnational space explain the relationship between veterans and fascism. Thus, this book offers new insights into the essential ties between fascism and war, and contributes to the theorization of transnational fascism

This engaging new study focuses on the role of assemblies in later Anglo-Saxon politics, challenging and nuancing existing models of the late Anglo-Saxon state. Its ten chapters investigate both traditional constitutional aspects of assemblies - who attended these events, where and when they met, and what business they conducted - and the symbolic and representational nature of these gatherings. Levi Roach takes into account important recent work on continental rulership, and argues that assemblies were not a check on kingship in these years, but rather an essential feature of it. In particular, the author highlights the role of symbolic communication at assemblies, arguing that ritual and demonstration were as important in English politics as they were elsewhere in Europe. Far from being exceptional, the methods of rulership employed by English kings look very much like those witnessed elsewhere on the continent, where assemblies and ritual formed an essential part of the political order

Concerning land routes, the study aims to document some crucial barriers, which are relatively easy to address but potent enough to expand trade between India and Pakistan. Using field research, this article examines the factors that impede trade between India and Pakistan through land-border crossings—Attari–Wagah border in Punjab and, Chakkan da Bagh, Poonch, and Salamabad Uri, Baramulla, the two land-border crossings in Jammu and Kashmir. Semi-structured questionnaires are administered to traders and unstructured interviews are held with other stakeholders. The findings such as security issues, inadequate banking facilities, inadequate physical infrastructure, communication lacunae, excessive paperwork, and lack of arrangements for traders' meets are documented as some of the prominent impeding factors in overland trade between the two nations. The prominent barriers perceived by the traders concerning Attari and Cross-the Line of Control (LoC) trade are excessive documentation, complex procedures, and nonavailability of banking facilities.

This study uses the National Geographic as the research sample, and focuses on the analysis of the visual image of the environmental risk issue of "plastic pollution". Not only does it classify and sort out which image symbols used in media risk reproduction, but also discusses how the text uses, invokes and activates image information, combines "illustrations" with textual discussions, and analyzes its meaning production process and framework. The research conclusions show that public communication on plastic pollution issues in National Geographic by means of visual media representation and symbol construction, mainly using photojournalism and design creation to expose the social aspects of risks (phenomena and problems) to the public. Also, it presents and tells readers the reality (source and essence) of risks in a scientific and simple manner, and inform the public of the ideal aspects of risks (practical methods), and guide the public to engage and participate in environmentally friendly actions.

Ideological differences in Congress are often presented as disagreement over what the government should do, but no study has systematically measured the policy instruments in bills. This article uses an original data set of policy instruments in all substantive House bills from 2007 to 2012 to test an argument about the kinds of instruments that most divide the contemporary ideological/partisan coalitions and uses an exploratory factor analysis of policy substance (combinations of instruments and topics) that lawmakers support to reveal the structure and content of the policy space. The analysis shows that disagreement over whether to increase or decrease taxes and spending are more divisive than disagreement over regulations and communication. Policy ideologies are characterized by a dominant economic dimension that is highly correlated with NOMINATE's first dimension, but with lower polarization and explanatory power. A second dimension that is conceptually similar to NOMINATE's second, and many smaller, issue‐specific dimensions also exist.

The communications surrounding Taiwan's recent pursuit of membership of the World Health Assembly (wha) provides an opportunity for a wider discussion about Taiwan, its public diplomacy, and its motives for pursuing inclusion within important international governmental organisations. To this end, this article argues that the island's recent interest in the wha is primarily motivated by a broader desire to keep Taiwan's diplomatic marginalisation on the international agenda against the backdrop of China's 'unfair' vetoing. However, the article also makes the wider conclusion that the use of morals and ethics within international affairs are as much about the internal self as they are about the external world in which we reside, and that there exists a selective adherence to these codes, dependent on social circumstances. In this view, contestable moral standards become a struggle in which different actors either attempt to alter the debate to fit themselves or propagate their observance of the prevailing codes.

Is bias in responsiveness to constituents conditional on the policy preferences of elected officials? The scholarly conventional wisdom is that constituency groups who do not receive policy representation still obtain some level of responsiveness by legislators outside of the policy realm. In contrast, we present a theory of preference‐induced responsiveness bias where constituency responsiveness by legislators is associated with legislator policy preferences. Elected officials who favor laws that could disproportionately impact minority groups are also less likely to engage in nonpolicy responsiveness to minority groups. We conducted a field experiment in 28 US legislative chambers. Legislators were randomly assigned to receive messages from Latino and white constituents. If legislators supported voter identification laws, Latino constituents were less likely to receive constituency communications from their legislators. There are significant implications regarding fairness in the democratic process when elected officials fail to represent disadvantaged constituency groups in both policy and nonpolicy realms.

The study investigated the effectiveness of Multimodal Counselling Therapy (MCT) in managing intimate partner violence such as all forms of wife battering, whether physical, psychological or emotional and marital rape. The study adopts pretest, post test, and control group quasi experimental design using a 2x2 method. Participants for the study included (10) identified married couples (20 subjects) experiencing domestic violence. They were randomly assigned into MCT treatment group and the control. Participants in the MCT group received treatment on multimodal therapy while the control group received placebo. Components of the MCT therapy include: empathy, rapport, anxiety management self-control, conflict resolution skills, effective communication skills, assertiveness and social skills training. Findings reveal that MCT was very effective in reducing intimate partner violence. It was also discovered that participants with higher educational level yielded more to treatment effects than their counterparts with low educational level. Recommendations were made based on the findings of the study.

Does european community law make any requirement as to the language in which the terms of consumer contracts are to be expressed?At the outset, I need to explain that the significance of this question (and its answer) will differ according to what is meant by the word 'language' itself. A first meaning is found where one refers to English, French, or Chinese as a 'language', that is, to quote theOxford English Dictionary, 'a system of communication used by a particular country or community'. A second meaning of 'language', again as explained by theOxford English Dictionary, refers to 'the manner or style of a piece of writing or speech'; so, for example, one may describe a piece of prose as being written in simple or elaborate, verbose or laconic, language. To avoid confusion in the following discussion, I shall refer to these two different significances as 'language type' and 'language style'.

The movement towards common principles of European contract law has been described as inevitable. In the words of one of its foremost proponents, 'it is a historic law that this unification is going to happen sooner or later'. It has been difficult to ignore in recent years the volume of work discussing developments in this area of law. One might note, in particular, the Private Law in European Context series published by Kluwer Law International and the Cambridge University Press Common Core of European Private Law project. Further, the publication of Communications by the EC Commission in 2001, 2003 and 2004 has served to promote an ongoing discussion on the nature and quality of theacquis communautaireand the 'opportuneness' of any form of non-sector-specific instrument in the area of European contract law. Such intervention, it has been said, forms 'the riggings of a ship which is about to set sail'.