Public relations practice in ASEAN nations: local, regional, global visions

 This thesis examines the views, concerns and outlooks of public relations practitioners in six countries of South East Asia, seeking to understand the extent to which their views about their work and their world correspond with those of practitioners in the developed countries of the west. It reveals a range of distinctive issues and concerns requiring greater recognition in international public relations literature.

Indonesian approach to ASEAN Plus Three financial cooperation: power relations, domestic politics, and regulatory regionalism

 This study examines Indonesia’s responses to financial regionalism within ASEAN Plus Three cooperation. It derives largely from the discussions, debates and empirical findings on how the Indonesian financial agencies exercise their authority and mandates, formulate policy coordination with international counterparts, and internalize and execute policy options into domestic financial regimes.

Industrial relations climate, employee voice and managerial attitudes to unions: an Australian study

This article examines how employee voice arrangements and managerial attitudes to unions shape employees’ perceptions of the industrial relations climate, using data from the 2007 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey (AWRPS) of 1,022 employees. Controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, regression analyses demonstrate that employees’ perceptions of the industrial relations climate are more likely to be favourable if they have access to direct-only voice arrangements. Where management is perceived by employees to oppose unions (in unionized workplaces), the industrial relations climate is more likely to be reported as poor. These findings have theoretical implications, and significant practical implications for employers, employees, unions and the government.

Gender and public relations: critical perspectives on voice, image and identity

Although there is a small body of feminist scholarship that problematizes gender in public relations, gender is a relatively undefined area of thinking in the field and there have been few serious studies of the socially constructed roles defining women and men in public relations. This book is positioned within the critical public relations stream. Through the prism of 'gender and public relations', it examines not only the manipulatory, but also the emancipatory, subversive and transformatory potential of public relations for the construction of meaning. Its focus is on the dynamic interrelationships arising from public relations activities in society and the gendered, lived experiences of people working in the occupation of public relations. There are many previously unexplored areas within and through public relations which the book examines. These include: • the production of social meaning and power relations. • advocacy and activist campaigns for social and political change. • the negotiation of identity, diversity and cultural practice. • celebrity, bodies, fashion and harassment in the workplace. • notions of managing reputation and communicating policy. In extending the field of inquiry, this edited collection highlights how gender is accomplished and transformed, and, thus how power is exercised and inequality (re)produced or challenged in public relations. The book will expand thinking about power relations and privilege for both women and men and how these are affected by the interplay of social, cultural and institutional practices. Winner of the Outstanding Book PRide Award, awarded by the National Communication Association (NCA).

Employer expectations of public relations graduates’ transmedia storytelling proficiency

The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies presents challenges for public relations educators as they seek to develop pedagogical approaches that balance theoretical concepts with a practical or ‘working’ knowledge of new media platforms. The incipient practice of transmedia storytelling in public relations contexts offers a timely example of this pedagogical flashpoint. In this study, the authors explored the incorporation of transmedia storytelling within current public relations practice and employer expectations of the transmedia storytelling proficiency of recent public relations graduates.The study took a qualitative approach with findings based on 15 semi-structured interviews with senior public relations professionals from four Australian states and five industry sectors. Findings suggest transmedia storytelling campaigns of varying complexity are a common characteristic of contemporary public relations practice, and that digitally literate graduates who can provide evidence of a solid theoretical knowledge and practical skills in relation to transmedia storytelling are highly sought after by the practitioners who took part in the study.

Gender relations in elite coeducational schools

Coeducational schools have long been regarded as ‘risky’ environments for girls. This ethnographic study of three elite coeducational schools in Melbourne, Australia found that while gender relations continued to be complex, girls and boys worked together as colleagues and friends and the traditional gender hierarchies were disrupted at many points.

Construction and aggregation of preference relations based on fuzzy partial orders

In group decision-making problems it is common to elicit preferences from human experts in the form of pairwise preference relations. When this is extended to a fuzzy setting, entries in the pairwise preference matrix are interpreted to denote strength of preference, however once logical properties such as consistency and transitivity are enforced, the resulting preference relation requires almost as much information as providing raw scores or a complete order over the alternatives. Here we instead interpret fuzzy degrees of preference to only apply where the preference over two alternatives is genuinely fuzzy and then suggest an aggregation procedure that minimizes a generalized Kemeny distance to the nearest complete or partial order. By focusing on the fuzzy partial order, the method is less affected by differences in the natural scale over which an expert expresses their preference, and can also limit the influence of extreme scores.

A Spatial-Temporal Downscaling Approach To Construction Of Rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency Relations In The Context Of Climate Change

This paper proposes a spatial-temporal downscaling approach to construction of the intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relations at a local site in the context of climate change and variability. More specifically, the proposed approach is based on a combination of a spatial downscaling method to link large-scale climate variables given by General Circulation Model (GCM) simulations with daily extreme precipitations at a site and a temporal downscaling procedure to describe the relationships between daily and sub-daily extreme precipitations based on the scaling General Extreme Value (GEV) distribution. The feasibility and accuracy of the suggested method were assessed using rainfall data available at eight stations in Quebec (Canada) for the 1961-2000 period and climate simulations under four different climate change scenarios provided by the Canadian (CGCM3) and UK (HadCM3) GCM models. Results of this application have indicated that it is feasible to link sub-daily extreme rainfalls at a local site with large-scale GCM-based daily climate predictors for the construction of the IDF relations for present (1961-1990) and future (2020s, 2050s, and 2080s) periods at a given site under different climate change scenarios. In addition, it was found that annual maximum rainfalls downscaled from the HadCM3 displayed a smaller change in the future, while those values estimated from the CGCM3 indicated a large increasing trend for future periods. This result has demonstrated the presence of high uncertainty in climate simulations provided by different GCMs. In summary, the proposed spatial-temporal downscaling method provided an essential tool for the estimation of extreme rainfalls that are required for various climate-related impact assessment studies for a given region.

March 2007: United States Foreign Relations

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Relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection in telecommunications, electricity and water supply

The purpose of this article is to discuss the relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection these relations in three key sectors of Brazil’s infrastructure: telecommunications, electricity and water supply. A study of the literature points to two general principles. First, the need for consumer protection depends on the “degree of sovereignty” enjoyed by consumers, defined in terms of the cost of consumer organization, consumers’ ability to evaluate services, and the level of competition in each sector. Second, the less sovereignty consumers enjoy the more consumer protection institutions are involved with regulation agencies. The evidence for the Brazilian case apparently corroborates these points. In addition, it is important to stress that consumer complaints in regulated sectors seem to have increased more intensely than in others. The article is divided into three sections. Section 1 presents theoretical elements and aspects of the relations between regulation, competition policy and consumer protection evidenced by international experience. Section 2 analyzes the Brazilian experience and in particular the available statistics on consumer complaints about telecommunications, electricity and water supply, submitted to Fundação Procon-SP during the nineties. The last section points to possible configurations of the institutional relations between competition policy, regulation and consumer protection, showing how the existing configuration of these areas in the three infrastructure sectors discussed confirms that the theoretical framework proposed has reasonable predictive power.

The network of intertextual relations in Naipaul's half a life and magic seeds

Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor.