Anonymous Workblogging and Organizational Coping Strategies

2012 ◽  
pp. 1496-1514
Author(s):  
Abigail Schoneboom
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Employment Law ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Negative Publicity ◽  
Workplace Surveillance ◽  
Potential Opportunity ◽  
Rights Issues

In recent years, the rise of blogging has led to debate about whether employees should be free to talk about their employers on the Internet, and whether they should be able to blog on company time. Several high-profile cases of fired bloggers between 2002 and 2006, drew attention to important labor and civil rights issues that led to debate among human resources and employment law experts in the mainstream media. The negative publicity surrounding the cases of fired bloggers has given rise to an alternative management strategy – a cautious embrace of blogging by employers, who saw the practice as a potential opportunity for marketing and professional development. However, efforts by bloggers to retain their right to blog anonymously signify continuing tensions, revealing the contradictions between workplace surveillance and an “enlightened” management doctrine based on openness and trust, indicating a refusal by some employees to align their blogging endeavors with the interests of their employer. This chapter examines the workblogging phenomenon as an intersection of organizations, technology, and trust, and makes some tentative connections between Guerra et al.’s (2003) concept of “trust-tension” and the critical management literature.

Anonymous Workblogging and Organizational Coping Strategies

2010 ◽  
pp. 210-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Schoneboom
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Employment Law ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Negative Publicity ◽  
Workplace Surveillance ◽  
Potential Opportunity ◽  
Rights Issues

In recent years, the rise of blogging has led to debate about whether employees should be free to talk about their employers on the Internet, and whether they should be able to blog on company time. Several high-profile cases of fired bloggers between 2002 and 2006, drew attention to important labor and civil rights issues that led to debate among human resources and employment law experts in the mainstream media. The negative publicity surrounding the cases of fired bloggers has given rise to an alternative management strategy – a cautious embrace of blogging by employers, who saw the practice as a potential opportunity for marketing and professional development. However, efforts by bloggers to retain their right to blog anonymously signify continuing tensions, revealing the contradictions between workplace surveillance and an “enlightened” management doctrine based on openness and trust, indicating a refusal by some employees to align their blogging endeavors with the interests of their employer. This chapter examines the workblogging phenomenon as an intersection of organizations, technology, and trust, and makes some tentative connections between Guerra et al.’s (2003) concept of “trust-tension” and the critical management literature.

scholarly journals The Len Brown Affair: The roles of new and old media in a New Zealand political sex scandal

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Grant Hannis
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Local Government ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Sex Scandals ◽  
The Media

The power of online media to influence New Zealand local government politics was made clear in 2013 when a blogger revealed that Len Brown, the popular mayor of Auckland, had conducted a two-year, extramarital affair. The mainstream media picked up the story, Brown’s popularity collapsed and in late 2015 he announced he would not stand again for mayor. This media scandal was, in part, driven by the fact that Brown was a celebrity. Unlike several high-profile sex scandals involving politicians overseas, Brown’s career did not survive the controversy, perhaps because the public came to regard him as a practised liar. The media itself engaged in self-serving scandalous activity during the controversy. Today’s shock bloggers are similar to the proto-journalists of the 17th century. Members of new and old media researching the scandal treated their secret sources very differently. The existence of the internet means such scandals can now exist in perpetuity. If the Len Brown Affair was an example of the media fulfilling its watchdog role - by exposing a lying politician - it was also an example of journalists furthering their own ends - political and commercial - by appealing to their audiences’ purient interests.

Transcending the Veil

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-228
Author(s):  
Natasha V. Christie ◽  
Shannon B. O’brien
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Rights Issues ◽  
Selection Of

This work examines how Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks used various rhetorical techniques to strategically maneuver his rhetoric to address racial issues and represent African American concerns. The results of a content analysis of a selection of Obama’s speeches and remarks confirm that Obama and his speechwriters favored the use of statements of color-blind universalism. However, when making certain remarks regarding civil rights issues or perceived racial issues, the pattern shifted, presenting a rare glimpse of the unbalanced representation of African American concerns. These findings suggest that Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks performed double-consciousness; they used universal, balanced, and targeted universalism rhetorical techniques as a genuine, congruent political style for representing African American concerns as a “raced” politician.

scholarly journals Claiming Credibility in Online Comments: Popular Debate Surrounding the COVID-19 Vaccine

Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Ruth Breeze
Keyword(s):  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Internet Age ◽  
Online Comments ◽  
Sources Of Authority ◽  
Reader Comments ◽  
Public Demand

At times of crisis, access to information takes on special importance, and in the Internet age of constant connectedness, this is truer than ever. Over the course of the pandemic, the huge public demand for constantly updated health information has been met with a massive response from official and scientific sources, as well as from the mainstream media. However, it has also generated a vast stream of user-generated digital postings. Such phenomena are often regarded as unhelpful or even dangerous since they unwittingly spread misinformation or make it easier for potentially harmful disinformation to circulate. However, little is known about the dynamics of such forums or how scientific issues are represented there. To address this knowledge gap, this chapter uses a corpus-assisted discourse approach to examine how “expert” knowledge and other sources of authority are represented and contested in a corpus of 10,880 reader comments responding to Mail Online articles on the development of the COVID-19 vaccine in February–July 2020. The results show how “expert” knowledge is increasingly problematized and politicized, while other strategies are used to claim authority. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of sociological theories, and some tentative solutions are proposed.

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gun Carrying ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Black Panther

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

scholarly journals Don’t just sit there shouting at the television, get up and change the channel

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
John Hill
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Statistical Model ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Communication System ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Mainstream Media

Understanding political communication using a networked model is not simply a case of opposing linear with nonlinear communication, of mainstream media with social media, or television with the internet. Rather it is about seeing the whole of the communication system as complex, unstable and indeterminate. Networked communication includes within it both broadcast and dialogue but does not separate them out. Each part of the system has the capacity to determine the potential of the other, with meaning a product of the change they effect on the system as a whole. Understanding broadcast as existing within a networked model reopens the potential for invention that the statistical model of information must foreclose in order to function.

Radical isomorphism and the anti-authoritarian diffusion of leaderless organizations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana M. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Word Of Mouth ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Institutional Isomorphism ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Organizational Forms ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Central Organization

Social movements are interested in the creation of alternative social practices, but must rely upon previous ideas and actions for a starting place. Ideally, anarchists seek to borrow good ideas and avoid bad ideas. This is challenging given anarchist movements’ horizontalist structures—tactics and organizational forms must be transmitted non-hierarchically in order to remain legitimate, as there is not central organization managing, authorizing, and dictating to new anarchist organizations. They key means for institutional isomorphism—how organizations tend to have comparable characteristics—with anarchist movements, is mimicry. This chapter analyses the creation and founding iterations of four “anarchistic franchise organizations”: Anti-Racist Action, Critical Mass, Earth First!, and Food Not Bombs. These tactics and organizational forms have spread through networks of activists and organizers (mainly via word-of-mouth and first-hand experience) and media (especially the Internet, as well as activist press and sometimes mainstream media).

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