Is saying ‘sorry’ enough? examining the effects of apology typologies by organizations on consumer responses

Apology has been found to be the most effective strategy in times of crises. However, there is a dearth of research on the kinds of apology used and how primary stakeholders, in particular consumers, received them. This study aims to examine consumer responses to the types of apologies offered post crises against the levels of attribution of responsibility. We also assess the potential mediating role of ethical concerns by developing the Perception-Behavioral Model of Crisis Response. An experiment was conducted to ascertain consumers’ impression of the organization post-apology. The results showed that the attribution of crisis responsibility significantly influences complaining, withholding and negative word-of-mouth behaviors. However, a very high degree of apology issued by the organization does not necessarily translate to reduced negative responses from consumers in light of the large attribution of responsibility. Finally, the Perception-Behavioral Model of Crisis Response suggests that ethical concerns can mediate negative behavioral intentions from consumers.     

Failure of apology in American politics: Nixon on Watergate

This article is concerned with the way apologetics aids politicians in maintaining their authority. Using political systems theory, it focuses upon the three types of legitimacies of a political office holder: structural, ideological, and personal. Application of this theory is made to Nixon's 1973 Watergate apologies in an attempt to discover why, in that instance, apology failed.     

Corporate Crisis Communication: Examining the Interplay of Reputation and Crisis Response Strategies

This experiment study used a 2 × 3 between-subjects design to assess two factors in crisis communication and reputation management—prior corporate reputation (good and bad) and crisis response strategies (apology, sympathy, and compensation)—on an organization facing high crisis responsibility. Results indicate that stakeholders prefer apology to compensation response strategies. Organizations with a prior good reputation have better postcrisis reviews that those with a prior bad reputation. Crisis managers facing crises that generate high attribution of crisis responsibility and anger are advised to rely on apology rather than compensation strategy. It would also be advantageous for an organization with prior good reputation to highlight its past achievements when responding to a crisis.     

Asian-Japanese: State Apology,National Ethos,and the “Comfort Women” Reparations Debate in Japan

Recent scholarship on apology has shifted its critical emphasis from the juridical use of apology as a means of self-defense to the moral value of apology as integral to specific reconciliation processes. This article examines the “comfort women” reparations debate in Japan in the 1990s as symptomatic of this change in how we think about apology and reparations. It illustrates how “comfort women” reparation lawsuits disrupted the symbolic economy of political apology in an inter-Asian political context and, thus, transformed the rhetorical force of apology from a past-oriented to a future-oriented technology of care.     

Bibliography,National Bibliography,and National Union Catalog in Italy*

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of national bibliographies—with particular reference to the Italian National Bibliography—as relevant tools for national bibliographic control. In the first part of the article, the historical and scientific context of international standards is summarized. The second part describes the role played by the Central National Library of Florence (BNCF) in the realization of the bibliographic control of Italian publications. The limits and the potential of the Italian National Bibliography produced by BNCF are highlighted and compared with the Italian National Library Service (SBN), which is the most important national collective catalog among Italian libraries.     

National repository initiatives in Europe

This paper aims at clarifying the role of repositories in some European countries in preserving research and other library materials in the country. The functional environment of repositories varies from country to country. Typically, the main actor in preserving national literature and national print heritage is the national library institution. The main means of this for national libraries has been legal deposit legislation, which in some countries is almost as old as printing.While the paper focuses on the development of the National Depository Library in Finland, examples in this paper are also drawn from the repositories in Norway, Estonia, and Ilê de France, Paris. The driving concept behind participating in these repository programs is cost reduction through the rationalization of storage and access on a regional—and even national—level. In this model, the repository creates one collection, which it owns and maintains. This allows the depository to employ deduplication and other strategies to rationalize storage. The role of the repository then is to keep the material available and serve as the library of last resort for many research materials.     

Toward a Theory of Simulated Atonement: A Case Study of President George W. Bush's Response to the Abu Ghraib Torture Scandal

In response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, President Bush delivered an apology that was widely criticized by domestic and international audiences. Nevertheless, the apology succeeded in allowing the President to stop the momentum of negative public opinion following news of the crimes, and to avoid accountability for his role in the crisis. In this essay, I argue that Bush's success stemmed partly from his use of a special subgenre of apologia, simulated atonement. After explaining the strategy in detail, I describe some of the conditions in which it will likely be effective and apply the theory to Bush's statements.     

Audio: The Movie [DVD]. York,PA: Tracer Technologies, 2006

NPR analyst Juan Williams appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and said that he gets “worried” and “nervous” when he sees people in Muslim dress on airplanes. Two days later NPR fired Williams and the day after that Williams issued a serious accusation against NPR: “I was fired for telling the truth.” Criticism of NPR mounted—arising particularly from conservative commentators—and CEO Vivian Schiller disseminated a statement defending her organization. This essay applies the theory of image repair discourse to NPR's CEO Vivian Schiller's apology for firing Williams. Two accusations were in play and they prompted two distinct defenses: Her reaction to accusations that NPR had not followed appropriate procedures for termination Williams employed the strategies of mortification and corrective action and her defense of the firing itself used transcendence, bolstering, and attack accuser. This essay evaluates this defense as a poor example of image repair.     

Structuring and Disciplining Apology: A Structurational Analysis of Health Care Benevolence Laws

Health care benevolence laws, a form of tort reform law, mandate statements of sympathy or apology by health care providers and facilities in cases of medical mistakes. These laws create a shared language and sense of meaning for individuals involved in the legal aftermath of medical mistakes. Structuration theory guides this textual analysis to explore how benevolence laws discursively create and structure shared meaning about apology. This analysis highlights how benevolence laws structure apology and discursively discipline medical practitioners, underscoring the importance of ambiguity in law interpretation.     

International Identity in Theory and Practice: The Case of the Modern American Presidency

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the concept of national identity. In a globalizing world, however, identity is increasingly shaped not only by one's own nation but also by foreign nations. With this in mind, this study theorizes international identity as a communicative process. We propose four features of international identity—that it is distinct, relational, contextual, and stratified—and examine these features in one crucial context: the modern American presidency. Our content analysis of every mention of a foreign entity in 74 years worth of presidential discourse—2480 mentions in all—supports our conception of international identity and begins to identify the parameters of this construct in American political communication.     

Truly Public Apologies: Third-Party Participation in Rwandan Apologetic Rhetoric

Rwanda offers one of the most unique and important cases for understanding the role of apologetic discourse in reconciling communities torn apart by violence and genocide. To help overcome the hatred that led to the 1994 Tutsi genocide, the Rwandan government instituted the gacaca court system, which calls for perpetrators to repent and apologize. This article provides a foundation for understanding apologetic exchanges in Rwanda's gacaca trials and broadens the current theories of apologetic rhetoric by describing the roles (and implications) of third-party participants in Rwandan apologies.     

Media Bias,Public Opinion,and Policy Liberalism from 1956 to 2004: A Second-Level Agenda-Setting Study

This study aims to explore second-level agenda-setting at the national level. In particular, it examines the relationships among the citation bias of the New York Times, national level public opinion, and Congressional policies from 1956 to 2004 in order to better understand mass media's role in national policymaking. In addition, it also tests one important intervening variable of the relationships among the three attribute agendas (the media agenda, the public agenda, and the policy agenda)—the president's policy liberalism.     

论全民阅读志愿者队伍及其支撑作用

[目的/意义]组建一支全民阅读专项志愿者队伍,对全民阅读工程可以起到助推和支撑作用,促进全民阅读工程进入新常态化发展.[方法/过程]基于对全民阅读志愿者涵义及我国志愿者队伍状况的分析,探讨全民阅读志愿者队伍的构建、组织管理和运行方式等,论述全民阅读志愿者队伍的重要作用和价值.[结果/结论]大力开发志愿者资源,组建全民阅读志愿者队伍,使其在全民阅读工程中担当劝读者、帮扶者、宣传者、沟通者、创造者、支撑者等角色,承担宣传和推广全民阅读的责任义务,可对推动全民阅读的发展起到积极有效的作用.     

Evaluating Third World national bibliographies as selection resources

Theoretically, national bibliographies are regarded as important library resources for a variety of reasons. Internationally accepted standards suggest that such compilations are valued for their currency, comprehensiveness and accuracy; all of these attributes indicate that national bibliographies should be particularly useful in the selection process. However, the reality of their content, especially from Third World countries where bibliographic control generally operates under severe constraints, shows that they are less adequate than expected. This may be in part because we apply unrealistic and unnecessarily complex criteria to their evaluation. If these are simplified and tailored to Third World realities, do national bibliographies fare any better? On the whole they rate below average even according to special criteria and at best are marginally acceptable as selection resources—although some exceptions are apparent.     

Comparative Optimism in Online Credibility Evaluation Among Parents and Children

This study investigates comparative optimism—whereby people perceive themselves as relatively invulnerable to risks as compared to others—in the evaluation of online information credibility by children and their parents. Results of a representative national survey of Internet users revealed significant antecedents of children's and parents' comparative optimism, including demographic characteristics, cognitive thinking style, and perceived self-efficacy. Parental optimism was also found to relate to the mediation strategies used to regulate children's Internet use, and comparative optimism in children was associated with tendencies to believe online information and specific evaluation behavior. Findings are considered in terms of their theoretical implications and with regard to the role of parents in children's digital information literacy development.     

Saving some news for later: The making and gatekeeping process of the national TV news filler

This paper follows the news routine of the daily evening news broadcasts of the two Israeli commercial TV channels. It is about a very particular and significant moment in national TV news—the making and gatekeeping process of the national TV news filler, also known by the Israeli news people as the shelf item. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with several Israeli TV news professionals and a textual analysis of a particular TV news item and its shelf potential, findings provide a glimpse at how and for what reasons news stories are prioritized, how gatekeeping is performed in national TV news, and the ways in which the stories that are kept aside and left for later illustrate the overall production of newsworthiness.     

A National Survey on the Professional Role Conceptions of Journalists in Kenya

The professional role conceptions of journalists have for many years remained a central strand in journalism studies. The present research investigates the professional role conceptions that Kenyan journalists perceive to be the most important in their work. Similarly, the professional role they consider the most important is further analyzed in relation to demographics (age, gender, education, contract type, media type, and media ownership). Findings from a national survey of 504 Kenyan journalists indicate that “providing citizens with information” is the most important role (61.3 percent), followed by “advocate for social change” (51.7 percent). The other major roles include to “support official policies” (46.9 percent), “motivate people to participate in civic activities” (45.6 percent), and “act as watchdog of government” (35.3 percent). The most important role—providing citizens with information—is backed across all demographics with a strong mean of 4.4 on a five-point scale ranging from 1 (“not important at all”) to 5 (“extremely important”). However, the difference of means across all the analyzed demographics are not statistically significant.     

Principles for archival information services in the public domain

In 2010, in response to the Australian Government’s November 2009 apology to Forgotten Australians and former child migrants, a scoping study was undertaken by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to assess the options for a national ‘Find and Connect’ service to allow people to locate and access relevant records and have recourse to support services. The scoping study noted that Pathways, a web-based public knowledge space and a product of the Victorian ‘Who Am I?’ research project, was a community-based information resource without equal in the out-of-home care sector in Australia or indeed internationally. The scoping team made the observation that Pathways, due to its quality of content and coherent structure, appeared to be based on a set of principles and wondered what they were. In response the research team set about articulating the principles that underpinned their approach to archival documentation and the use of digital technologies – principles that had emerged through more than two decades of public domain, archive-focussed projects. This paper presents those ten principles and discusses them within the context of Pathways and the ‘Who Am I?’ project. The principles played a key role in FaCHSIA adopting Pathways as the model for the national Find and Connect database and web resource, launched on 15 November 2011. The principles underpin community knowledge building in the fourth or pluralised dimension of the Records Continuum. The paper ultimately argues that all stakeholders (all people and organisations connected with records) should have the ability to contribute to the utilisation of those records through the improvement of documentation and that some archival systems do have a duty of care to ensure they can inter-operate with community-generated knowledge.     

Rethinking Privacy in the Public Library

The past decade has seen the library privacy debate become a kind of ongoing dialogue which endlessly reiterates the prevailing issues of the past — government surveillance and national security — and failing to adjust to the way that changing values and economic forces are redefining privacy. The danger is that by failing to come to terms with the changing nature of privacy, the library community could find itself without a voice. By accepting the existence of new privacy threats within the institution, it becomes possible to see an important new role for librarians.     

Rethinking Privacy in the Public Library

The past decade has seen the library privacy debate become a kind of ongoing dialogue which endlessly reiterates the prevailing issues of the past — government surveillance and national security — and failing to adjust to the way that changing values and economic forces are redefining privacy. The danger is that by failing to come to terms with the changing nature of privacy, the library community could find itself without a voice. By accepting the existence of new privacy threats within the institution, it becomes possible to see an important new role for librarians.