scholarly journals GC Insights: Scientists as Marketers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain S. Stewart

Abstract. Motivated by pressing planetary concerns, scientists are  increasingly taking their work into the public arena, but it  remains uncertain whether current science communication  practices are appropriate for tackling complex and contested  societal issues. A fresh perspective emerges from the  business sector, and from the contrasting marketing  paradigms of ‘make and sell’, ‘sense and respond’, and  ‘guide and co‐create’. The newly emergent guide‐and‐co‐ create paradigm – purpose‐driven, interdisciplinary,  participatory, and reflexive – would seem to offer the best  template for science communicators addressing long‐term  geo‐environmental concerns.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Stewart

Earth scientists have a critical role to play in communicating to the public and policy makers what we know about looming societal threats including climate change, extreme natural events, resource conflicts and the energy transition. But whilst geoscientists are being encouraged - and, increasingly, trained - to ‘go public’ with our science, what is less clear is to what extent our current geo-communications are effectively addressing the long-term planetary concerns that confront society.In this paper we argue that scientists are the interface between the research organisations that produce knowledge and the wider public who could use that knowledge, and, in that regard, are akin to marketers in the business world. Drawing from the dominant paradigms that shape business marketing, we re-consider the prevailing models of science communication and their consequent sense of purpose. We identify three dominant approaches of marketing-led science communication: ‘make-and-sell’; ‘sense-and-respond’; and ‘guide-and-co-create’. We judge the first two to be incompatible with delivering long-term sustainability, in contrast to the emergent guide-and-co-create mode - purpose-driven, interdisciplinary, participatory, and reflexive - which we contend is best placed to tackle long-term geo-environmental concerns through having a clear wellbeing- focused objective whilst co-creating the path to achieving it.We conclude with the contention that adopting a guide-and-co-create approach to science communications will require not only rethinking communication practice within universities but also radical institutional regime change towards universities becoming purpose-driven organisations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 522
Author(s):  
Anna Beniermann ◽  
Laurens Mecklenburg ◽  
Annette Upmeier zu Belzen

The ability to make evidence-based decisions, and hence to reason on questions concerning scientific and societal aspects, is a crucial goal in science education and science communication. However, science denial poses a constant challenge for society and education. Controversial science issues (CSI) encompass scientific knowledge rejected by the public as well as socioscientific issues, i.e., societal issues grounded in science that are frequently applied to science education. Generating evidence-based justifications for claims is central in scientific and informal reasoning. This study aims to describe attitudes and their justifications within the argumentations of a random online sample (N = 398) when reasoning informally on selected CSI. Following a deductive-inductive approach and qualitative content analysis of written open-ended answers, we identified five types of justifications based on a fine-grained category system. The results suggest a topic-specificity of justifications referring to specific scientific data, while justifications appealing to authorities tend to be common across topics. Subjective, and therefore normative, justifications were slightly related to conspiracy ideation and a general rejection of the scientific consensus. The category system could be applied to other CSI topics to help clarify the relation between scientific and informal reasoning in science education and communication.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen Shi ◽  
Changfeng Chen ◽  
Jie Xiong ◽  
Haohuan Fu

Though scientists have achieved consensus on the severity and urgency of climate change years ago, the public still considers this issue not that important, as the influence of climate change is widely thought to be geographically and temporally bounded. The discrepancy between scientific consensus and public’s misperception calls for more dedicated public communication strategies to get climate change issues back on the front line of the public agenda. Based on the large-scale data acquired from the online knowledge community Quora, we conduct a computational linguistic analysis followed by the regression model to address the climate change communication from the agenda setting perspective. To be specific, our results find that certain narrative strategies may make climate change issues more salient by engaging public into discussion or evoking their long-term interest. Though scientific communicators have long been blaming lack of scientific literacy for low saliency of climate change issues, cognitive framework is proved to be least effective in raising public concern. Affective framework is relatively more influential in motivating people to participate in climate change discussion: the stronger the affective intensity is, the more prominent the issue is, but the affective polarity is not important. Perceptual framework is most powerful in promoting public discussion and the only variable that can significantly motivate the public’s long-term desire to track issues, among which feeling plays the most critical role compared with seeing and hearing. This study extends existing science communication literature by shedding light on the role of previously ignored affective and perceptual frameworks in making issues salient and the conclusions may provide theoretical and practical implications for future climate change communication.


Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 2479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takahiro Endo

Groundwater protection, which is effected by multiple actors at multiple levels using multiple instruments, is commonly termed “groundwater governance”. Although the concept has attracted increasing attention since the 1990s, several of its associated measures remain to be fully implemented. Most are still inchoate strategies and improvement is expected to be a gradual, long-term process. The Gakunan Council for Coordinated Groundwater Pumping (CCGP), which was established, in 1967, in Fuji City in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, is an exceptional case. The Gakunan CCCP was created to deal with a common-pool resource problem where massive groundwater pumping caused seawater intrusion in the city’s coastal area due to the low cost of extraction and incomplete groundwater ownership. The Gakunan CCCP succeeded in recovering elevation of groundwater tables by connecting efforts between the public and private sectors, including information sharing, legal authority to regulate groundwater, investment in alternative water supplies, internal subsidies between groundwater users, and charge for water disposal. Previous studies have iterated that the fostering of participation from various stakeholders and dividing labor between them appropriately are key elements of successful groundwater governance. This paper investigates these factors, explores the importance of the metagovernor as coordinator, and offers a fresh perspective on the significance of groundwater governance.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (03) ◽  
pp. A04 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Rios ◽  
Aquiles Negrete

Science is part of our everyday live; so is art. Some art installations that link the two require the active presence of the spectator. Thereby they help to raise the awareness, promote understanding, and generate an emotional response from the public. This project rests on the public participation model that seeks to explore the connection between art installations and science communication through experiential learning. In order to test the effectiveness of an art installation communicating science two groups were contrasted. The first was exposed to a list of scientific facts; the second participated in the creation of an art installation. The results of this research suggest that art installations do promote long-term fact retention. Therefore, the use of art installations can be considered an interesting method of conveying science in an attractive, reliable, and memorable way.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence De Clippele ◽  
Madlaina Michelotti ◽  
Charlotte R. Findlay ◽  
Amy Cartwright ◽  
Qing Fang ◽  
...  

To increase awareness of the current challenges facing the marine environment, the Future of Our Seas (FOOS) project brought together the expertise of scientists, public engagement experts and creatives to train and support a group of marine scientists in effective science communication and innovative public engagement. This case study aims to inspire scientists and artists to use the FOOS approach in training, activity design and development support (hereafter called the ‘FOOS programme’) to collaboratively deliver novel and creative engagement activities. The authors reflect on the experiences of the marine scientists: (1) attending the FOOS communication and engagement training; (2) creating and delivering public engagement activities; (3) understanding our audience; and (4) collaborating with artists. The authors also share what the artists and audiences learned from participating in the FOOS public engagement activities. These different perspectives provide new insights for the field with respect to designing collaborative training which maximizes the impact of the training on participants, creative collaborators and the public. Long-term benefits of taking part in the FOOS programme, such as initiating future collaborative engagement activities and positively impacting the scientists’ research processes, are also highlighted.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096366252110051
Author(s):  
Zheng Yang

This article explores science communication and discussion about genetically modified food on Zhihu, the biggest Chinese knowledge-sharing social network, through the methods of online ethnography and discourse analysis. The long-term online ethnography finds a new group emerging: citizen science communicators – those members of the public without a professional scientific background who actively assume the role of communicators. The discoursal and behavioural characteristics of citizen science communicators effectively eliminate the boundaries between scientists and the public, scientific discourse and that of non-scientists, as well as the ‘exclusive legitimacy’ of science and scientists in the online science communication process. By eliminating boundaries and ‘exclusive legitimacy’, the authority of Chinese scientists has also been challenged and deconstructed in online science communication on Zhihu.


2022 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elana Kimbrell ◽  
Gemima Philippe ◽  
Mary Catherine Longshore

Scientists’ engagement with society on critical environmental and health issues is essential to reaching positive and equitable long-term outcomes. We argue that stronger institutional support for public engagement is necessary and that inclusive practices should be built into public engagement training and relationships. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)’s Center for Public Engagement with Science and Technology provides a model of support for scientists that we believe other scientific institutions can replicate and expand on. This model prioritizes representative and accessible science communication training, resources (e.g., funding and staff and peer support), opportunities to practice engagement, and rewards and incentives for doing engagement. We describe our programs in each of these areas and reflect on how well each builds scientists’ engagement skills and institutional capacity, and whether each embodies and models thoughtful, accessible, and representative engagement. Through these various approaches, the Center communicates to other scientific institutions that engagement by scientists should be valued, celebrated, and supported, and builds capacity for individual scientists to do effective engagement. We argue that these supports can be applied by other scientific institutions to reflect and incorporate society’s diverse needs and concerns, thus truly serving the public and making science and scientific institutions stronger for it.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Md Mostafizur Rahman ◽  
Mahmud Uz Zaman

Pharmaceuticals agglomerations consistently use their brand image and versatile product portfolios to consolidate their position in the financial sector, which is evident in their continuous profit making and expansion in market share. This paper explores the short-term and long-term investment attractiveness through ‘consumer centric decision’ approach in two selected pharmaceutical companies, Renata Limited and Orion Pharma Limited, of Bangladesh over the last three years’ period. This research adopts a systematic approach which primarily addresses the various concerns of investors to illustrate the decision-making process of the existing and future investors. Using primarily domestic transaction data, this study explores how the leading pharmaceuticals companies of Bangladesh effectively use the wide array of drug portfolios mix with appropriate branding techniques to increase their financial profit and market share simultaneously. Both SWOT analysis and Porters Five Forces Model explore the business analysis of Renata Limited in compare to Orion Pharma Limited that provides a conclusion regarding investors’ decision to invest in Renata Limited. Considering the financial analysis, Renata’s financial liquidity is not very satisfactory and could have been improved further if management is prudent on financial strategy settings. Findings of the business analysis indicate that Renata Limited would be a good investment choice for existing and prospective shareholders based on its opportunities for long term and short term growth and further expansion in developing the market. The results suggest that even lower liquidity coupled with higher interest borrowings can be balanced by posing positive picture to the public shareholders by returning the positive dividend to them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-102
Author(s):  
Muhammad Husnul Maab ◽  
Shadu S. Wijaya ◽  
Zaula Rizqi Atika ◽  
Denok Kurniasih

The emergence of rural community owned enterprises khown as BUMDes has been in line with evolution of public administration pradigm, from OPA to NPM who implemented in local government. Local potency development becomes a substantial aspect to improving local competitiveness. Hence, BUMDes formation is one of the models financial capacity to develop local potency in rural level. The aim is comparing traditional and public enterprise based management in local potency management. The results show that there is a fundamental difference in the management of local potency in rural level. Consequently, We argue that has been on the right track, the evolution of the government business model to the public enterprise for the management of local potency in rural level. Evolution of BUMDes is from a bureaucratic to the business sector model, but as a social business not profit maximizing businesses.


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