Disciplined freedom,branded authenticity,and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity?structure, authenticity?marketability, and independence?interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.     

Relational turbulence and perceptions of partner support during reintegration after military deployment

The transition from deployment to reintegration can be stressful for returning military personnel and at-home partners, and support plays a key role in their ability to transition effectively. We draw on relational turbulence theory to advance predictions about how parameters of the relationship between returning service members and at-home partners predict their perceptions of their partner’s support during the post-deployment transition. We surveyed 235 individuals (117 returning service members, 118 at-home partners) who had experienced the transition within the past 6 months. Findings consistent with the theory indicated that relational turbulence partially mediated the negative associations that relational uncertainty and interference from a partner shared with partner support. Partner uncertainty was a direct negative predictor of partner support as well. We consider how these results extend theory, research, and practice.     

Institutional policy process improvement: using structurating activity theory to inform practice

Organizational communication scholars are increasingly called upon to use theoretical knowledge to address problematic processes in public institutions. This article reports a process improvement project focused on a university conflict of interest (COI) policy as an example of how scholars can engage theory to improve ongoing policy processes. The project team included communication scholars and research administration staff who designed, implemented, and evaluated the mixed-methods project guided by structurating activity theory. Baseline survey results were used to design the process improvement project. Results of the follow-up survey indicate that researchers who participated in some aspect of the process improvement project (i.e. attending a policy café, using the redesigned website, or reading the new Quick Reference Guide) reported higher levels of policy communication and knowledge and more positive attitudes toward the COI policy than researchers who had not engaged with process improvement efforts. We offer theoretical and practical implications of results for organizational communication scholars and practitioners.     

The Information Nature of Culture

This paper explores the information nature of culture. It is represented as an extragenetic and nonorganizational information process and system. Information is regarded as a universal property of matter that is essentially associated with development processes and realizes various forms and ways of storage and circulation at various development stages of global evolution. The socio-cultural principle of exogenous accumulation, transmission, and transformation of information is analyzed in the context of the continuing growth of the information content of material systems on the superhighway of global-universal evolution. It is noted that the information concept of culture evolves into a new area of cultural studies, that is information and cultural studies, advancing our understanding of the nature of culture and cultural genesis.     

Why Users Share the News: A Theory of Reasoned Action-Based Study on the Antecedents of News-Sharing Behavior

Social media have become an integral part of online news use, affecting how individuals find, consume, and share news. By applying the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), this study investigates the effects of motives, attitude, and intention on news-sharing behavior among German social media users (n = 333). Findings show that news-sharing attitude and subjective norms have a positive effect on news-sharing intention, which in turn has a positive effect on actual news-sharing behavior. Taken together, we see that a new media behavior in the early phases of its societal diffusion—like social media news sharing in Germany in 2015—can mainly be explained by a rational choice logic and is rooted in the motives of socializing and information seeking. This finding thus reflects the double nature of social media as a means for both information retrieval and social grooming.     

Social Comparisons and Need Fulfillment: Interpreting Video Game Enjoyment in the Context of Leaderboards

This study examines how social comparison information provided by video game leaderboards may influence players’ retrospective judgments of autonomy, competence, and relatedness need fulfillment. Participants played a video game and were randomly assigned to receive no postgame feedback or were shown a leaderboard that placed them in the top or bottom quartile of players. Results indicate downward social comparisons increase enjoyment by increasing competence and relatedness perceptions. However, upward comparisons did not have an opposite effect, nor did either type of social comparison influence players’ autonomy perceptions. Implications for applying Self-Determination Theory to video game enjoyment in the context of social comparison feedback is discussed.     

Reasons for Student Engagement in Extra-Class Communication

This study extends instructional communication research on extra-class communication (ECC) by presenting an integrative analysis comparing the explanatory utility of student- and instructor-oriented reasons for student engagement in frequent ECC. Results from 495 college students suggested that student-oriented reasons, specifically the relational and functional student motives, were the only significant, positive predictors of students’ perceptions of frequent ECC engagement. Other student motives (excuse making, participation, sycophancy) and perceptions of instructor approachability did not significantly predict perceived frequency of ECC engagement.     

A comparison of two approaches for measuring interdisciplinary research output: The disciplinary diversity of authors vs the disciplinary diversity of the reference list

This study investigates the convergence of two bibliometric approaches to the measurement of interdisciplinary research: one based on analyzing disciplinary diversity in the reference list of publications, the other based on the disciplinary diversity of authors of publications. In particular we measure the variety, balance, disparity and integrated diversity index of, respectively, single-author, multi-author single-field, and multi-author multi-field publications. We find that, in general, the diversity of the reference list grows with the number of fields reflected in a paper’s authors’ list and, to a lesser extent, with the number of authors being equal the number of fields. Further, we find that when fields belonging to different disciplines are reflected in the authors’ list, the disparity in the reference list is higher than in the case of fields belonging to the same discipline. However, this general tendency varies across disciplines, and noticeable exceptions are found at individual paper level.