Communications Regulation

David M. Welborn Governance of Federal Regulatory Agencies (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977— $9.50).

Thomas E. Will Telecommunication Structure and Management in the Executive Branch of Government: 1900-1970 (Dr. Thomas Will, Associate Publisher, Horizon House, 610 Washington St., Dedham, Mass. 02026—$35.00, paper)     

Strategic Management in the Media: Theory to Practice,by Lucy Küng

Abstract

Management has always been about communications. Business strategy in particular can only work, if implemented. Part of the process is communicating strategy to all company's stakeholders. The more team‐orientated a management style the more communications becomes a key success factor. By the same token, there has never been a management discipline for communications in its own right comparable to all the others that have developed over time: Neither Marketing nor HR nor even Finance were part of the original settings as, for example, laid out by Erich Gutenberg in the 1960s. All these “subs”; were initiated by increasing specialisation of business administration and developed to mature disciplines.

This article will argue for yet another management discipline, communications management. The reasons are mainly twofold: on the one hand there are increasing needs on different types of communications even without the world‐wide web (such as financial communications), which must be integrated in one holistic approach. And on the other hand there are increasing new challenges caused by the digital economy (such as customer related communications), which will have to be integrated in an even advanced holistic management approach. This article will combine both reasons, but mainly focus on the first aspect.     

Flowing Networks in the Entertainment Business: Organizing International TV Format Trade

Little is known about entertainment acquisition and production, especially the international format trade, although its worldwide market volume adds up to about 2.4 billion. Format trade is a process along the stages of creating, distributing, producing or reproducing, and broadcasting entertainment programs. Findings of a current empirical research project conducted by means of in-person interviews with managers in Germany and the United Kingdom reveal a phenomenon by which the particular organizations involved (creators, distributors, producers, and broadcast stations) establish structures that are called “flowing organizational networks.” Depending on situational requirements and the respective stages of the format trade process, actors tend to activate different organizational structures.     

The Accuracy of Dixon’s Formula for Obtaining Critical F-Values

The F-distribution approximation suggested by Dixon was investigated at various combinations of alpha and degrees of freedom. Tabled values were compared with values computed utilizing the suggested formula. The results indicate that while the formula is not useful in all cases, the adequacy of the approximation generally increases as alpha, v₁, and v₂ increase. It is suggested that the approximation may be utilized when certain restrictions regarding alpha, v1, and v2 are met.     

Relational maintenance behaviors in the sibling relationship

Beatty, McCroskey, and Heisel (1998) argue that a limitation of current intervention research on communication apprehension is that the experimental designs employed in this research have failed to take into account the effects of testing on participants, among other things. To address this issue, this study employed a Solomon Four‐Group Design, which controls for testing effects, to examine whether systematic desensitization, a widely used procedure for reducing communication apprehension, would reduce communication apprehension beyond the level attributable to repeated testing. These data indicate that systematic desensitization produced a significant reduction in communication apprehension that cannot be explained by “testing effects.” The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings.     

Scaling Up Innovative Technology-Based Mathematics

We report on the initial attempts at evaluating at scale a particular technological/curricular innovation that enables more students to develop deeper knowledge. The methods, issues, and findings of the current pilot experiment speak not only to the success of SimCalc MathWorlds, the focus of our research program, but also to the evaluation at scale of a broad class of representationally innovative technologies and to the merit of long-term investment in design-based research. In particular, we present conditions and findings from a completed pilot experiment involving 21 seventh-grade mathematics teachers from Texas. Pilot outcomes suggest that (a) innovative representational technologies can have an important impact on student learning, (b) considerable impact can be found across a wide range of teachers and conditions, and (c) these gains can be detected even in the absence of other desirable conditions. In particular, detection of student gains does not, in our case, depend on having a long-term context of learning, long-term teacher professional development, or a shift to learner-centered constructivist pedagogy. The full experiment will replicate and extend our experimental design with a wider range of teachers and schools, model the factors that contribute to classroom success with such technology, and explore what happens as research support fades away.     

AN INTEGRATION PROGRAM

This is an account of a teacher education program's attempt to connect with a neighboring community in order to better prepare faculty to teach about the urban context in which their preservice teacher education students practice. Taking a feminist perspective, the two authors discuss their goals—the processes of using a community organization to lead the discussion and obstacles inherent to university settings. Knowledge about urban communities is an area that is often neglected in teacher preparation and one that needs to be more fully considered.     

The path of least resistance: a voice‐relational analysis of disabled students’ experiences of discrimination in English universities

Recent legislation means that it is now illegal to treat a student, for reasons relating to a disability, less favourably than a non‐disabled student unless this is justified to maintain academic standards. However, recent research has identified numerous barriers faced by students with disabilities when they attempt to access the higher education curriculum. This study uses a methodology combining life‐story approaches with a voice‐relational analysis and aims to explore in more detail these barriers by listening to first person accounts from university students with a disability. The students’ narratives suggest that disabled students have to work considerably harder than non‐disabled students to overcome a wide range of physical, attitudinal, social, cultural and political barriers. Students appear to take the path of least resistance by choosing routes where the barriers are least great and it is argued that in this way they are being discriminated against. The research shows that voice‐relational methodology is excellent at producing a thorough account of the phenomenological world of these students without neglecting a materialist and cultural analysis of their environment. These insider perspectives are then used to suggest possible improvements to policy and practice in higher education.     

Service Design in Student Affairs: Blueprinting the Student Experience

Innovative Higher Education - Service blueprinting is a service design technique commonly used by for-profit organizations to illustrate and enhance customer experiences. This article describes an...     

Seasonal training and performance of competitive swimmers

To determine the relationship between prescribed training and seasonal-best swimming performance, we surveyed 24 swim coaches and 185 of their age-group and open-class swimmers specializing in sprint (50 and 100 m) and middle-distance (200 and 400 m) events in a summer and winter season. We expressed effects on training as either multiples of swimmers' standard deviations (effect size, ES) or as correlations ( r ). Coaches prescribed higher mileage and longer repetitions of lower intensity to middle-distance swimmers than to sprinters (ES = 0.4-1.5); as competitions approached, repetition intensity and duration of rest intervals increased (ES = 0.5-0.9), whereas session and repetition distances decreased (ES = 0.4-1.3). The 95% likely ranges of the true values for these effects were about - 0.3. Weekly mileage swum at an easy or moderate pace remained at almost 60% of the total throughout both seasons. Interval training reduced gradually from 40% of total distance in the build-up to 30% at the end of tapering. Older swimmers had shorter rests and swam more miles ( r = 0.5-0.8). After partialling out the effects of age on performance ( r = 0.7-0.8), better performance was significantly associated only with greater weekly mileage ( r = 0.5-0.8) and shorter duration of rest intervals ( r = 0.6-0.7) in middle-distance swimmers. Weconclude that periodization of training and differences in training between sprint and middle-distance events were broadly in accord with principles of specificity. Strong effects of specificity on performance were not apparent, but weak effects might have been detected with a larger sample.