Public relations and engagement : theoretical imperatives of a multidimensional concept

Engagement has emerged as important concept in public relations, as stakeholders challenge the discourse of organizational primacy and organizations prioritize the need for authentic stakeholder involvement. As a multidimensional concept, engagement offers a foundation for building organizational relationships, and provides a means to facilitate community–organization interaction. This special issue on engagement and public relations presents a body of work that both explicates and expands the theoretical foundations of engagement, and contributes to scholarly understanding of its contexts, processes, and outcomes.

Using textual analysis with Concept Inventories to identify root causes of misconceptions

Engineers must have deep and accurate conceptual understanding of their field and Concept inventories (CIs) are one method of assessing conceptual understanding and providing formative feedback. Current CI tests use Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) to identify misconceptions and have undergone reliability and validity testing to assess conceptual understanding. However, they do not readily provide the diagnostic information about students’ reasoning and therefore do not effectively point to specific actions that can be taken to improve student learning. We piloted the textual component of our diagnostic CI on electrical engineering students using items from the signals and systems CI. We then analysed the textual responses using automated lexical analysis software to test the effectiveness of these types of software and interviewed the students regarding their experience using the textual component. Results from the automated text analysis revealed that students held both incorrect and correct ideas for certain conceptual areas and provided indications of student misconceptions. User feedback also revealed that the inclusion of the textual component is helpful to students in assessing and reflecting on their own understanding.

Double-strand breaks and the concept of short- and long-term epigenetic memory

Double-strand breaks represent an extremely cytolethal form of DNA damage and thus pose a serious threat to the preservation of genetic and epigenetic information. Though it is well-known that double-strand breaks such as those generated by ionising radiation are among the principal causative factors behind mutations, chromosomal aberrations, genetic instability and carcino-genesis, significantly less is known about the epigenetic consequences of double-strand break formation and repair for carcinogenesis. Double-strand break repair is a highly coordinated process that requires the unravelling of the compacted chromatin structure to facilitate repair machinery access and then restoration of the original undamaged chromatin state. Recent experimental findings have pointed to a potential mechanism for double-strand break-induced epigenetic silencing. This review will discuss some of the key epigenetic regulatory processes involved in double-strand break (DSB) repair and how incomplete or incorrect restoration of chromatin structure can leave a DSB-induced epigenetic memory of damage with potentially pathological repercussions

A case study of utilising concept knowledge in a topic specific document collection

The use of ‘topic’ concepts has shown improved search performance, given a query, by bringing together relevant documents which use different terms to describe a higher level concept. In this paper, we propose a method for discovering and utilizing concepts in indexing and search for a domain specific document collection being utilized in industry. This approach differs from others in that we only collect focused concepts to build the concept space and that instead of turning a user’s query into a concept based query, we experiment with different techniques of combining the original query with a concept query. We apply the proposed approach to a real-world document collection and the results show that in this scenario the use of concept knowledge at index and search can improve the relevancy of results.

The silent and apparent neurological injury in transcatheter aortic valve implantation study (SANITY) : concept, design and rationale

Background The incidence of clinically apparent stroke in transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) exceeds that of any other procedure performed by interventional cardiologists and, in the index admission, occurs more than twice as frequently with TAVI than with surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR). However, this represents only a small component of the vast burden of neurological injury that occurs during TAVI, with recent evidence suggesting that many strokes are clinically silent or only subtly apparent. Additionally, insult may manifest as slight neurocognitive dysfunction rather than overt neurological deficits. Characterisation of the incidence and underlying aetiology of these neurological events may lead to identification of currently unrecognised neuroprotective strategies. Methods The Silent and Apparent Neurological Injury in TAVI (SANITY) Study is a prospective, multicentre, observational study comparing the incidence of neurological injury after TAVI versus SAVR. It introduces an intensive, standardised, formal neurologic and neurocognitive disease assessment for all aortic valve recipients, regardless of intervention (SAVR, TAVI), valve-type (bioprosthetic, Edwards SAPIEN-XT) or access route (sternotomy, transfemoral, transapical or transaortic). Comprehensive monitoring of neurological insult will also be recorded to more fully define and compare the neurological burden of the procedures and identify targets for harm minimisation strategies. Discussion The SANITY study undertakes the most rigorous assessment of neurological injury reported in the literature to date. It attempts to accurately characterise the insult and sustained injury associated with both TAVI and SAVR in an attempt to advance understanding of this complication and associations thus allowing for improved patient selection and procedural modification.

Exploring the concept of learner autonomy in cross-cultural research

This research explores how the concept of learner autonomy is understood and used in Vietnamese higher educational settings. Data were collected through interviews in Vietnamese with four university lecturers in Hanoi, Vietnam and then reported in an English language thesis. The problems confronted by the lecturers were in understanding the concept of learner autonomy, the complexities of translation equivalence for the concept from one language to another, and the impact of culture in interpreting the concept of learner autonomy. The paper concludes with recommendations for educators to be sensitive to cultural and linguistic considerations when transferring concepts from one culture to another.

The Games Concept Approach (GCA) as a mandated practice : views of Singaporean teachers

This paper reports on the views of Singaporean teachers of a mandated curriculum innovation aimed at changing the nature of games pedagogy within the physical education curriculum framework in Singapore. Since its first appearance over 20 years ago, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), as an approach to games pedagogy has gathered support around the world. Through a process of evolution TGfU now has many guises and one of the latest of these is the Games Concept Approach (GCA) a name given to this pedagogical approach in Singapore. As part of a major national curricular reform project the GCA was identified as the preferred method of games teaching and as a result was mandated as required professional practice within physical education teaching. To prepare teachers for the implementation phase, a training program was developed by the National Institute of Education in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and well known experts in the field from the United States. For this part of the study, 22 teachers from across Singapore were interviewed. The data were used to create three fictional narratives, a process described by Sparkes (2002a) and used more recently by Ryan (2005) in the field of literacy. The stories were framed using Foucault’s (1980/1977) notion of governmentality and Bernstein’s (1996) notion of regulative discourse. The narratives reveal tales of confusion, frustration but also of hope and enthusiasm.

How Gordon Ramsay appeals to consumers : effects of self-concept clarity and celebrity meaning on celebrity endorsements

How do celebrities like Gordon Ramsay appeal to consumers? This article examines one explanation. We study how celebrities appeal to consumers in the context of celebrity chefs. We examine how a consumer's self-concept clarity (SCC) interacts with their perception of the meaning that a celebrity endorser possesses. An experiment comparing fictional ads endorsed by different celebrity chefs yields the surprising result that consumers with a clear sense of who they are (high-SCC consumers) are more influenced by an ad featuring a celebrity high in meaning (Ramsay), whereas low-SCC consumers are influenced to slightly higher levels by a celebrity with lower levels of celebrity meaning.

Changing influences on the concept of ‘media influence’

The concept of media influence has a long history in media and communication studies, and has also had significant influence on public policy. This article revisits questions of media influence through three short case studies. First, it critically analyses the strongly partisan position of News Corporation’s newspapers against the Labor government during the 2013 Australian Federal election to consider whether the potential for media influence equated to the effective use of media power. Second, it discusses the assumption in broadcasting legislation, in both the United Kingdom and Australia, that terrestrial broadcasting should be subject to more content regulation than subscription services, and notes the new challenges arising from digital television and over-the-top video streaming services. Finally, it discusses the rise of multi-platform global content aggregators such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others, and how their rise necessitates changes in ways of thinking about concentration of media ownership, and regulations that may ensue from it.

The concept of collaboration : a critical exploration of the care continuum

This thesis critically explored the concept of collaboration through an analysis of the experiences of midwives, child health nurses and women in the process of transition from hospital to community care and related policy documents. The research concluded that the concept serves an important social function in obscuring the complexity of social relations in healthcare. Rather than adopt an unquestioning attitude to what is represented as collaboration this thesis argues for a more critical examination of what is occurring, what is potentially hidden and how specific interests are served through its use.

Knowledge unlatched: A global library consortium model for funding open access scholarly books: Full report on the Proof of Concept Pilot 2014

This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works.

Performative digital asset management: To propose a framework and proof of concept model that effectively enables researchers to document, archive and curate their non-traditional research data

This cross disciplinary study was conducted as two research and development projects. The outcome is a multimodal and dynamic chronicle, which incorporates the tracking of spatial, temporal and visual elements of performative practice-led and design-led research journeys. The distilled model provides a strong new approach to demonstrate rigour in non-traditional research outputs including provenance and an 'augmented web of facticity'.

Creative interoperability: A new concept to guide, understand and evaluate innovation by cross-sector collaboration

Creative digital media are increasingly utilized by companies in all industries. Here cases studies of creative media innovations in manufacturing, mining and education were facilitated and evaluated. The cases dealt respectively with designs in manufacturing, visualizing mining data, and developing tools for adult literacy. The difficulties of merging creative media teams into these different contexts were noted and the idea of creative interoperability was developed. Creative interoperability explains how creative teams can connect with other disciplines to bring about innovations.

Bibliometric study of the reverse salient concept

In the development of technological systems the focus of system analysis is often on the sub-system that delivers insufficient performance – i.e. the reverse salient – which subsequently limits the performance of the system in its entirety. The reverse salient is therefore a useful concept in the study of technological systems and while the literature holds numerous accounts of its use, it is not known how often, in which streams of literature, and in what type of application the concept has been utilized by scholars since its introduction by Thomas Hughes in 1983. In this paper we employ bibliometric citation analysis between 1983 and 2008, inclusively, to study the impact of the reverse salient concept in the literature at large as well as study the dissemination of the concept into different fields of research. The study results show continuously growing number of concept citations in the literature over time as well as increasing concept diffusion into different research areas. The analysis of article contents additionally suggests the opportunity for scholars to engage in deeper conceptual application. Finally, the continuing increase in the number of citations highlights the importance of the reverse salient concept to scholars and practitioners.