On the discursive contest of an international M&A relationship development process within financial services

The global liberalisation of national regulated financial services’ sectors has opened up a wave of international mergers and acquisitions processes. To succeed with such processes, a positive relationship needs to be developed between involved parties. But actors within and outside involved companies in international mergers and acquisitions may have conflicting interests, not least because of national resistance to changes in domestic financial sectors. In order to study the discourse among such actors, this paper presents a theoretical view based on business relationships, highlighting the concept of legitimacy. The aim is to analyse how different actors communicate in and through the media, in order to legitimise their own actions or to delegitimise the actions of their opponents in the relationship development process. The empirical investigation is a longitudinal study of an acquisition process between two insurance companies from Sweden and South Africa. A discourse analysis shows that the relationship development process is not only a matter of rational arguments. It is rather a struggle between actors drawing on discourses that change over time, as a means to affect perceptions of legitimate behaviours to reach the preferred outcome.     

An Experimental Analysis of Face to Face versus Computer Mediated Communication Channels

Experimental research on Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) has generally focused on democratic groups whose members typically share the same objectives. In organizations, however, there are many situations where groups have a leader who has the power to override the group's recommendation, the objective of the leader may not be the same as the objective of each member, and not everyone may have the same information. This paper reports the results of an experiment in which the groups, having a designated leader, worked on a mixed-motive task. Within this context, we analyze group decision outcomes and processes for groups that use a face-to-face channel of cormnunication and those that utilize computer mediated communication. We compare performance of the leader and members with respect to an objective measure of performance, the efficient frontier. The results indicate that for this task groups using face-to-face channel outperform groups using computer mediated communication.     

Team discourse explains media richness and anonymity effects in audit fraud cue brainstorming

This article contributes by extending media richness (MRT) and media synchronicity theories (MST) to explore how media richness and anonymity influence team interactions and success in audit fraud brainstorming. Sixty-three, three-person teams, with 189 student participants from two Universities, identified fraud risk cues in a SAS 99 audit planning case. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: electronic anonymity (EA; n = 18 teams), electronic identified (EI; n = 28 teams), or identified face-to-face (FtF; n = 17 teams). Compared with teams in the low media richness conditions, i.e., the EA and EI, discussions in FtF teams produced more and better dialog, which resulted in better identification of fraud risk cues. Additionally, compared with the discussions in the EA teams, FtF team discussions evidenced less narcissism and were more focused and inhibited. Mediation analyses of team interactions indicated that the quantity of dialog (team production) completely explains, fully mediates, the effects of media richness and anonymity on risk assessments. Contributions include extending MRT and MST, and using automated content analysis, to explicate the role of media richness, anonymity, and team interactions in explaining audit team fraud identification success. The concluding section identifies the sample, design, and method limitations, and, discusses the potential for group support technologies to enhance or detract from audit team processes, depending on task, context, and technology.     

Do corporate press releases drive media coverage?

We examine the role of voluntary corporate press releases about firms' financial performance as a stimulus for financial media coverage. We find that there is a spike of media articles on the same day and one trading day following firms' press releases. We provide evidence that managers compete for media attention and can use voluntary press releases to increase their firms' media coverage; a firm's issuance of press releases attracts more media articles about the firm leading to greater abnormal returns and trading volumes. Our results are robust to controlling for firm characteristics, different model specifications as well as regular earnings announcements, which have been the focus of prior literature. We also show that our inferences are not sensitive to managers' duty to disclose material information to investors. Collectively, our findings suggest that media coverage decisions can be influenced by a firm.     

广东经济发展与媒体创新

政治及经济力量、社会变革都会影响传播活动。广东经济发展引发了媒体创新并形成了良性互动。媒体创新体现在媒体数量的增长,媒体对社会的影响力,对受众的引导等。广东媒体创新的动力是经济发展,创新的路径与一般的创新类似,诸如体制与机制创新、技术创新等。广东媒体体制创新与机制创新对全国其他媒体的改革影响巨大。广东经济发展也带动了知识沟的缩小,反过来,知识沟的缩小又引导媒体创新的进一步发展。     

新机遇与新挑战——“三网融合背景下的媒介经营和营销论坛”综述

＂三网融合＂是中国媒介产业发展进程的一个标志,也是一个关键转折点,它带来了无数的变化,也带来了众多的挑战,更带来了无限的机遇。三网融合带来的种种变数必将对中国媒介产业的发展与转型产生深远影响,也将为企业的广告投放和营销带来全新的机遇与挑战。     

Press media coverage effects on destinations – A Monetary Public Value (MPV) analysis

The present study examines the extent, source and nature of reporting about Spain as a tourist destination among Swiss German language newspapers. By testing a method based on the Monetary Publicity Value (MPV) the media coverage is quantified in order to arrive at a positive image of Spain among German Swiss print press. Results confirm that: a) familiarization-trips account for an important volume of positive news; b) culture and travel news are predominantly positive, a trend not pointed out by journalist researchers because generally they focus mainly on political or disaster reporting; c) effectiveness of destination image management among print media can be measured and therefore targeted.     

Electronic support for large groups

One of the key challenges in applying information technology to improve group performance lies in matching the capabilities of technology to the needs of the situation. Groups can choose meeting styles that use solely electronic communication, solely verbal communication, or a combination of both verbal and electronic communication. This paper reports on a series of ten case studies of large groups performing information generation tasks. For these groups and tasks, meeting styles with a greater proportion of electronic communication were found to result in higher perceived effectiveness, efficiency, and participant satisfaction. Qualitative evidence suggested that in this situation, the parallelism, direct access to the meeting memory, and anonymity offered by pure electronic communication outweighed its reduced media richness.     

The impact of pre-commercial break announcements on audience identification of official Olympic sponsors: a case study

Research has demonstrated the importance of media context as a situational factor in advertising effectiveness. This preliminary study investigated the impact of a previously overlooked television context factor, the pre-commercial break announcement, during televised coverage of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games in the USA. Broadcast advertising is not part of the official Olympic sponsorship package and advertisers must negotiate television schedules in addition to sponsor fees. During the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, the official US television network, NBC, included numerous pre-commercial break mentions spotlighting official sponsors as well as other advertisers who purchased commercial time during the event. This study investigated the impact of pre-break announcements on viewers' ability for distinguishing between official sponsors and regular programme advertisers. It was determined that these announcements do influence recall and increase the likelihood that any advertiser will be identified as a sponsor, thus compromising the value of an Olympic sponsorship.     

Financial characteristics of Australian initial public offerings from 1994 to 1999

A variety of financial characteristics of Australian initial public offerings (IPOs) for the period 1994–1999 are explored. A number of previous Australian studies have investigated the initial day underpricing and longer term underperformance of IPOs and this study updates those papers. This paper partitions the IPO data into no liability/limited liability; share option/no share option; underwriter option/no underwriter option and dividend reinvestment/no dividend reinvestment characteristics to better understand the types of IPOs that list on the Australian Stock Exchange. The data supports the findings of previous studies in that IPOs are underpriced at the time of listing and underperform the market in the first year following their listing.