Getting to YES. Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, "culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions"

In today’s world, social media is playing an indispensable role on the learning behavior of university students to achieve sustainable education. The impact of social media on sustainable education is becoming an essential and impelling factor. The world has become a global village and technology use has made it a smaller world through social media and how it is changing instruction. This original study is amongst the few to perform a focalized investigation on revealing the relationship between positive and negative characteristics of social media and the learning attitude of university students for sustainable education. However, this study aims to examine the constructive and adverse factors that impact on students’ minds and how these helped students to share positive and negative aspects with others. It is increasingly noticeable that social networking sites and their applications present enormous benefits for as well as risks to university students and their implications on students’ psychological adjustment or learning behaviors are not well understood. This study adapted the cluster sampling method, and respondents participated from five selected regions. Researchers distributed 1013 questionnaires among the targeted sample of university students with an age range of 16 to 35 years, and they collected 831 complete/valid responses. This study applied the social gratification theory to examine students’ behavior practicing social media usage. This study specifically identified 18 adversarial and constructive factors of social media from the previous literature. The findings revealed that the usage of social media in Pakistan has a negative influence on a student’s behavior as compared to positive aspects. Results may not be generalized to the entire student community as findings are specific to the specific respondents only. This study presents a relationship between antithetical and creative characteristics of social media and exhibits avenues for future studies by facilitating a better understanding of web-based social network use.

The Impact of Social Media on Learning Behavior for Sustainable Education: Evidence of Students from Selected Universities in Pakistan

In 1963, at the end of his 20-year tenure as Editor of The Lancet, Theodore “Robbie” Fox gave a series of three lectures at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The transcripts of those lectures were published as a book entitled Crisis in Communication: The Functions and Future of Medical Journals two years later. In the book, Fox makes a stark prediction: “A day will come when journals will be superseded as a means of publishing new research.” (FOX, 1965). As the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication draws near, it is worth reassessing Fox’s prediction. Will journals be superseded 50 years from now? At first glance that seems unlikely. The first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, was published in 1665. Three centuries later, when Fox wrote Crisis in Communication, there were 6,000 medical journals in existence. Now, Scopus, one of the largest indexes of scholarly output, includes around 21,000 journals in its database: it has indexed 21 million articles published between 1823 and 1996, and a further 33 million records published within the last two decades. Indeed, according to a recent analysis, scientific output continues to increase by around 8-9% per year (BORNMANN; MUTZ, 2014). This increase in the number of articles is often at the expense of quality, with many papers never being cited. According to one estimate, as many as 12% of papers in the clinical sciences, and 27% of papers in the life sciences, are not cited within 5 years of publication (REMLER, 2014). The drivers for this are clear — academics feel pressured to publish as many papers as possible in order to get tenure and to secure new research funding. Furthermore, the huge volumes of papers being published also puts pressure on the academic community in other ways: readers are struggling to keep up with the literature; and many journals are finding it increasingly hard to secure the services of qualified peer reviewers to judge the suitability of papers for publication. The process of doing science is also changing. Not so long ago, single-author papers were considered to be essential for career advancement, as they demonstrated the ability to do research independently. More recently, large-scale collaborations are the order of the day, with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of researchers collaborating on expensive, international scientific studies. Jim Gray, a computer scientist, identified this shift in the scientific method calling it ‘the fourth paradigm’. In his words (GRAY, 2007, p. xix): The world of science has changed, and there is no question about this. The new model is for the data to be captured by instruments or generated by simulations before being processed by software and for the resulting information or knowledge to be stored in computers. Scientists only get to look at their data fairly late in this pipeline. The techniques and technologies for such data-intensive science are so different that it is worth distinguishing data-intensive science from computational science as a new, fourth paradigm for scientific exploration. Even small-scale studies often generate large amounts of data, and making these data discoverable and reusable is becoming an increasingly important priority for the scientific community. The rise of the open science movement, in which both the raw data and final publication are made available for easy access and reuse, has opened up opportunities for scientific-data-hosting companies like Figshare and Dryad, as well as for open-access ‘mega-journals’ like PLoS One and Scientific Reports. However, open-access journals, which generate revenue by charging authors an ‘article processing charge’ (APC) to publish their paper, have the potential to make the problem worse, not better, by making it easier for authors to publish their work. Fox considered journal publishing to be in crisis 50 years ago, but the crisis in communication is arguably far worse now than it was then (FOX, 1965). Funders and academic institutions need to address the current crisis in two ways. First, they need to reward scientists for the quality, not quantity, of the work that they publish; surrogate markers of quality, such as journal impact factors, are widely perceived to be imperfect ways of judging an individual scientist’s research output and new metrics are urgently needed. Second, funders and institutions should encourage their researchers to publish much of their work in repositories. These standardized reports would not necessarily be read by human beings, but rather would hold data and data descriptors in a form that is machine-readable to allow accurate indexing and meta-analysis by computers. There are early signs that such an approach would be feasible, but it will take time to change 350 years of academic culture. How long, exactly, remains to be seen. After all, as Niels Bohr so eloquently put it: “it is very difficult to predict — especially the future” (MENCHER, 1971, p. 37). - Figshare and Scientific Reports, which are mentioned in this article, are part of Macmillan Science and Education, the author’s employer. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Macmillan Science and Education.

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A Crisis in Communication

In the digital era, business-to-business (B2B) salespersons are encouraged to communicate with buyers on social media platforms and shape customer loyalty. However, the effect of social media usage and its mechanism remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how salespersons’ social media usage influences B2B buyers’ trust beliefs and purchase risk, and therefore, customer loyalty.,The authors conduct an online-survey, use partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze the data, and adopt SPSS PROCESS macro 2.13 to test mediation effects.,Salespersons’ social media usage can enhance buyers’ trust beliefs on salespersons’ ability, integrity and benevolence, but only the latter two can improve customer loyalty. Social media usage does not directly affect purchase risk, and only benevolence can reduce purchase risk. Serial mediation models reveal that the effect of social media usage on customer loyalty is mediated by buyers’ trust beliefs on salespersons’ integrity/benevolence and purchase risk.,First, the authors confirm the effect of social media usage on customer loyalty in B2B context and refute the fallacy of social media uselessness in B2B practices. Second, the research shows that buyers’ trusting beliefs on salesperson’s ability and integrity do not significantly influence perceived risk. The finding is different from the stereotypical judgment in B2C scenarios. Third, the authors distinguish differently weighted influences of buyers’ trusting beliefs on salesperson’s ability, integrity and benevolence, and highlight the role of salespersons’ altruism attributes in shaping customer loyalty.

How social media usage influences B2B customer loyalty: roles of trust and purchase risk

Social media and culture in crisis communication: McDonald’s and KFC crises management in China

This study examined a conflict management model in which students’ customer orientation toward education affected their sense of academic entitlement, which led to different conflict management preferences. Participants were 689 undergraduate students. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model and results showed that: 1) students’ customer-orientation influenced their academic entitlement and conflict preferences; and 2) academically entitled students were more likely to engage in distributive bargaining and negotiate with their instructors for a compromise. The findings imply that mitigating student customer orientation and academic entitlement is critical to improving the student–teacher relationship.

Effects of Academic Entitlement on Conflict Management: Implications of a Consumer Culture for the Student–Teacher Relationship

This study examined the effect of student academic entitlement (AE) on student satisfaction. A mediation model was proposed in which AE affects student observation of instructor nonverbal immediacy (NVI), which affects instructor credibility, which in turn affects student satisfaction. Participants were 483 undergraduate students who completed an online survey. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model and results indicated that: (1) one subfactor of AE (i.e., demanding attitudes) had significant negative effects on student satisfaction indirectly, and such effects were mediated through instructor NVI and credibility; (2) NVI had a significant positive influence on instructor credibility, which affected student satisfaction; and (3) neither AE nor NVI directly affected student satisfaction. Finding implications and future research directions are discussed.

Predicting Student Satisfaction: The Role of Academic Entitlement and Nonverbal Immediacy

Diplomatic negotiations between countries involve complex multi-dimensional processes. Negotiators are often locked into bargaining mode by strictly adhering to their list of demands. Often times, these demands involve mutually exclusive positions and pit countries in a win–lose contest. It is however important to keep in mind that policies and priorities for a nation, even in diplomatic stand-off situations, are often reflections of its societal culture. To illustrate this point, the case of an Indian diplomat's prosecution by the US government for visa fraud was analysed and the arguments and the counter-arguments of each side were examined to understand the underlying cultural concerns. The study found that differences in value dimensions such as individualism–collectivism and power distance influenced expectations of the negotiating nations and explained the stands taken by India and the USA. This study demonstrates the need to and value in understanding the underlying value orientations that ...

Culture's role in public diplomacy: predicting and preventing crises

Academic entitlement (AE) in students has been found to be associated with maladaptive practices in the classroom. By experimentally manipulating the content of instructor teaching philosophies, th...

Lin Zhu

Papers

Social media and culture in crisis communication: McDonald’s and KFC crises management in China

Effects of Academic Entitlement on Conflict Management: Implications of a Consumer Culture for the Student–Teacher Relationship

Predicting Student Satisfaction: The Role of Academic Entitlement and Nonverbal Immediacy

Culture's role in public diplomacy: predicting and preventing crises

Customers or Academic Trainees? An Experimental Investigation to Reduce Academic Entitlement in the College Classroom