Symbols can be used to mask or embellish firms’ exploitative labor practices. The present study defines exploitative firms’ abuse of symbolic management using legitimate symbolic terminologies to ...embellish their demanding working conditions as symbolic framing and examines it in the Japanese context. Because of strong social criticism for exploitative practices, firms are under pressure to avoid giving an exploitative impression to stakeholders, particularly job seekers in recruitment. This study argues that exploitative firms respond to these pressures by embellishing their descriptions of the hard-working conditions at the firm, using certain symbolic expressions. To test this argument, this study examined recruitment advertising of 1238 Japanese firms between 2006 and 2017 and analyzed their ideal candidate profile (ICP) statement—a description of personal attributes that align with the firms’ working conditions—based on topic modeling. The results showed that exploitative firms tend to frame their working conditions in the ICP statement as ‘challenging work,’ which acknowledges the demanding work environment but frames it positively. This tendency was strengthened for firms with younger employees. The results provide the current literature with new insights regarding the dark side of symbolic management.
Coronavirus popularly known as COVID-19 is a pandemic that stormed the globe and rendered strong nations helpless and even the world powers, powerless. Initially, the Nigerian government was ...reluctant to put measures in place or lock its borders until a returnee was diagnosed after
he had infected some people. This necessitated several measures including total lockdown, social distancing and improved personal hygiene to forestall its spread. Moreover, Nigerians believe that the state of the nation is even worse than this pandemic and, thus, have developed mastery, especially
via satire in weathering any kind of storm. It is therefore, not surprising that the Facebook has become a veritable platform where Nigerians evoke humour while exposing human foibles in their linguistic disposition, with the intention to improve the society. This study, therefore, examined
the satirical devices in the Facebook posts of Nigerians with the aim of teasing out the ideologies portrayed in relation to the existing social, economic and political attitude of the people towards the pandemic. Consequently, 22 Facebook posts were purposively selected for analysis, drawing
input from Horatian's approach to satire and Fairclough's (1995) sociocultural approach to Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis reveals various satirical elements deployed as a subtle and effective alternative to contest power abuse, social injustice and propagate change.
The study also reveals the wittiness and absurdity of satire that makes it a ready tool to unbridle people's feelings; laden with different ideologies with the aim of relaxing tension and catalysing transformation in the society. Moreover, the import of weathering the storm becomes bare
as an essential make-up of Nigerians; the tinge of humour intended in the posts relieves perceived tension and reminds the readers to take life easy, thus, making the study quite engaging.
George Wither, a notoriously controversial poet of the 17th century, wrote in the introductory text to his Collection of Emblemes in 1635 that he was adding a “harmless … recreation”, referring to ...the lottery game he included in his book, which contains two hundred emblems. Wither goes to great length to claim that his lottery is merely an innocent pastime that was added to the work to make it less “over-solid and serious”, but a careful examination of the game in relation to the rest of the volume reveals a more complex rhetorical and aesthetic purpose. The lottery game is allegorically represented in the middle of the frontispiece on the first page of the book, an intricate engraving by William Marshall representing the pilgrimage of life on the paths of virtue and vice, where the pilgrims draw their metaphorical lots from an ewer under the supervision of Fortune personified. As the frontispiece can be read as an emblematic representation of the volume, this mise-en-abyme contradicts the poet’s assertions about the lottery’s incidental nature, and therefore raises questions on its true place in the work. Through his game, Wither establishes a close, personal, often tongue-in-cheek and multi-faceted relationship with his readers, addressing them directly and creating the impression that the broad and general advice provided in the emblems is in fact tailored to their very personal needs. It is an original vector for social criticism and satire, and mirrors the author’s own religious and philosophical ambiguities with respect to notions such as free will, personal responsibility, and fortune. It grants the emblems a theatrical, dynamic, and social dimension that testifies to Wither’s profound understanding of the rhetorical possibilities granted to him both by the emblematic genre and by the nature of a game.
Most of the literary works contain a message, and the poets and writers try to convey the message in different ways to impress their readers. Hassan Ghezelji, the Kurdish writer, sought to express ...the message through using a unique, concise, and influential technique: satire. He attempted to inform the society of undesirable events through his satirical stories. This study aims to investigate satire and its presentation in Hassan Ghezelji's collection of stories Laughter of the Beggar. Apart from the introduction and conclusion, this research consists of two parts. The first part focuses on the concept and definition of satire in literature and the second part eaddresses the role of satire in Kurdish literature. Then, the role of satire in Ghezelji's stories in Laughter of the Beggar has been practically investigated. Finally, the significant results and findings are presebted.
Spiritedly inspired by the well-known, nonsensical children’s stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, this satirical narrative describes common academic experiences ...within a fictitious frame. Many children’s stories present a foundational basis for the early life lessons of justice, truth, fairness, and how power corrupts. Therefore, regression to a simpler understanding of complex social interactions potentially frees one’s thinking, which frequently becomes muddled in adult-acquired ego, hubris, and sense of status. So, when adults act illogically (or like children), sense can be made of unreasonable juvenile actions by re-storying irrational episodes through the logical lens of adolescent literature and satire; thereby, establishing a safe distance for examining emotional issues and tapping into imagination for making meaning of taxing experiences. This deliberately playful narrative explores how in academia, the projection of privilege and power often generates troublesome challenges that lead down a political rabid hole of unsolvable riddles.
This paper examines the issue of time and history in Kevin Barry’s 2011 novel City of Bohane, a mix of dystopia and satire in which post-Celtic Tiger, post-2008 “bust” Ireland is thinly disguised. ...That imaginary, dystopian world seems arrested in an eternal present, having reduced the historical past to the status of mere traces, the origin of which has been lost, while the future is jeopardized by entropy. However, the novel is not a critical dystopia in that the inhabitants of Bohane do not show any sign of protest or rebellion, numbed as they are by the pleasures of consumption of drugs or other material goods. The second part of the chapter analyses the different elements of the parody of contemporary Ireland and of the way neoliberalism has reduced the sacred cows of history—republicanism, nationalism, Catholicism—to devaluated signifiers. City of Bohane is comparable to visual artist Seán Hillen’s series of photomontage Irelantis, in which the incongruous, preposterous superimposition of a mythologized past with an equally artificial, implausible future is meant to set the onlooker aback, in the image of the sudden and unforeseeable transformation of an archaic, conservative, backward society into a globalized, multicultural vanguard of Western neo-liberalism.
Waste of Space by Gina Damico (review) Bush, Elizabeth
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books,
07/2017, Letnik:
70, Številka:
11
Journal Article, Book Review
Chazz Young, CEO of DV8 media productions, has been riding high on a string of crowd-pleasing reality shows, and now he has an idea to blow his former work out of the water: recruit and sign a crew ...of teens, chosen of course for physical traits and personality quirks that promise to ramp up the drama, send them into space, and see what happens....that relationship between media feast and media consumer lies at the heart of Damico's satire.
Satirical news and its effects on outcomes such as appreciation and persuasion have gained considerable currency as a topic of research in mass communication studies. Through the framework of ...construal level theory, we investigated whether different levels of spatial distance influence these effects. In a between-subjects experiment, participants in the United Kingdom (UK; n = 282) and New Zealand (NZ; n = 370) read a satirical or non-satirical news text summarizing a study reporting on the negative impact of increased digital device screen time on young children. Depending on condition, the texts referred to entities and locations in either the participant's own country (spatially close) or a foreign country (spatially distant). Results showed significant main effects of satirical news on audience perceptions, emotions, and attitudes. While there were no significant interactions between article type (satirical vs. regular news) and spatial distance (close vs. distant), our results indicated that satirical news was associated with higher perceptions of spatial distance for both the UK and NZ participants as well as higher perceptions of social distance for the NZ participants. Exploratory indirect-effects analyses found several indirect effects of satirical news through increased perceptions of spatial and social psychological distance on audience emotions, text perceptions, and attitudes. We take these results as initial evidence suggesting spatial and social distance are potential variables to consider in future investigations of satirical news.
Where do democratic political practices originate? This issue has long concerned republics, but few historians have studied the process by which people learn the skills of rights-based government. In ...this illuminating history, Amy Wiese Forbes addresses these origins by analyzing how republicanism took shape through the political satire that flooded French newspapers, theaters, courtrooms, and even academic life in 1830. Forbes shows that satire was the chief source of the critical spirit of republicanism that erupted in the 1840s and sustained the Republic in the 1870s and argues against the notion that satire had no lasting political impact. This book will speak to historians of French politics, republicanism, popular culture, the July Monarchy, satire and political humor, class and gender formation, and legal history.
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