The Corporate Side of the Blogosphere: Examining the Variations of Design and Engagement Among Fortune 500 Blogs

Using design and communication principles, this study uses a content analysis design to evaluate all active blogs from the 2011 Fortune 500 list (n = 125). The results indicate that corporate America has only modestly incorporated the dialogic principles into their blogs. Current corporate blogs are well-designed as far as making them searchable and easy to navigate; however, the blogs are mostly being used to provide information in a one-way manner rather than creating an open dialogue with consumers. While blogging can enhance relationships with stakeholders, corporate communicators must strive to develop legitimate conversations with their blog readers.     

How Online Product Reviews Affect Retail Sales: A Meta-analysis

A growing body of research has emerged on online product reviews and their ability to elicit performance outcomes desired by retailers; yet, a common understanding of the performance implications of online product reviews has eluded us. Scholars continue to navigate an array of studies assessing different design elements of online product reviews, and various research settings and data sources. We undertake a meta-analysis of 26 empirical studies yielding 443 sales elasticities to examine how these variables relate to retail sales. Building on well-established meta-analytical methods, we address the following questions: How does review valence influence the elasticity of retailer sales? What about review volume? For which product types and usage situations do online product reviews have a greater impact on retailer sales elasticity? Which types of online reviewers and websites exert the greatest influence on retailer sales elasticity? Our study answers these important questions and provides a much needed quantitative synthesis of this burgeoning stream of research.     

Brand personality appeal: conceptualization and empirical validation

A substantial literature stream indicates there are benefits to having a favorable brand personality, such as enhanced brand attitudes and purchase intentions and higher levels of consumer trust and loyalty. Contemporary advertisements and promotional activities by a host of firms demonstrate a managerial belief in the value of establishing a brand personality that mirrors that of branding scholars. Yet extant research has yet to fully evaluate the perceived appeal of brand personality to consumers. This issue is important to managers because it is precisely this level of appeal that influences target consumers’ purchase decisions and helps to sustain the endurance of a brand’s perceived personality between promotional cycles. This article conceptualizes, develops, and validates measures for assessing a consumer’s perception of brand personality appeal (BPA). Three dimensions of BPA (favorability, originality, clarity) emerge and are empirically demonstrated to directly and positively impact consumer purchase intentions.     

The Impact of Families on Juvenile Substance Use

This paper examines the effect of family composition on juvenile substance use and drug sales using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. The results underscore the importance of having a father figure in the household in deterring juvenile smoking, marijuana use, and drug sale. However, the extent to which father figures affect juvenile substance use and drug sales varies according to their biological link to the youth and the youth's gender. Results further indicate that siblings and their involvement in substance use and drug sales significantly influence youths' own exposure to these delinquent practices. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Agricultural Subsidies and Farm Consolidation

Although agricultural subsidies were begun during the New Deal to provide enough income to enable farmers to continue operating, their net effect has been to raise the price of farmland and to squeeze many owner‐operated farms out of existence, leaving mostly large‐scale operations that are often tied to agribusiness. Numerous efforts have been made, with limited success, to mitigate this problem by limiting the subsidy to small or mid‐size farm operations. The 2014 farm bill, adopted by the U.S. Congress, made the situation worse. Rather than imposing stricter limits on subsidies to the largest farms, the legislation removed existing limits, ended direct payments, and increased subsidies for insurance against crop losses and income risk. The new law not only provides a windfall to owners of very large farms, it also encourages plowing of fragile soils, since the risks of crop failure are now borne primarily by taxpayers. The article concludes by offering recommendations about how to correct these problems     

Emergent Leadership in Self-Managed Virtual Teams

The issue of leadership in virtual teams is an increasingly important one for many modern organizations, because these teams – typically project-based with a finite lifespan and specific deliverables – are frequently self-managed, having no designated leader within the team (Yukl 1998). While such teams may have increased flexibility in setting goals and achieving them, the virtual context may hinder team members' abilities to coordinate activities and influence others (Manz and Sims 1993). Longitudinal data were collected over the course of a semester from virtual teams, comprised of students from three North American universities. Our results suggest that high performing self-managed virtual teams displayed significantly more leadership behaviors over time compared to their low performing counterparts. Specifically, these teams displayed significantly more concentrated leadership behavior focused on performance (i.e. “Producer” behavior) and shared leadership behavior focused on keeping track of group work (i.e. “Monitor” behavior) than the lower performing teams. Interestingly, these behaviors emerged strongly during the first half of the groups' lifespan, and stayed throughout the life of the groups, but steadily dissipated in strength over time.     

Pedagogies of Cultural Change: The Rotary International Youth Exchange Program and Narratives of Travel and Transformation

Every year, Rotary International sends thousands of American teenagers to live in foreign lands. Rotary is responsible for teaching students about travel and culture and for preparing teens for their year-long intercultural experience. Rotary International Exchange Students are ‘embedded tourists’, living in their host countries in order to ‘acquire’ a binational subjectivity. Rotary International's Program is a pedagogical site, where students are taught how to think about and consume cultural difference and are given ways of conceptualising tourism, travel, cultural adaptation, and personal transformation. Based on over three years of ethnographic research with Rotary clubs in the US Midwest and New England, this paper explores the narratives utilised by Rotary International as they socialise American teenagers for study abroad. The paper asserts that Rotary's narratives employ many of the tropes utilised in Euro-Western tourist and travel accounts. At the same time, the Rotary International Youth Exchange Program sees its students as cultural change agents and thus helps to cultivate in these students a sense of global citizenship by fostering a commitment to cultural diversity and an interest in intercultural communication. Hence, Rotary International's Youth Exchange Program is intentionally designed to bring about cultural change.