This article examines participants' responses to receiving their results in a study of household exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds and other pollutants. The authors study how the "exposure ...experience"—the embodied, personal experience and understanding of chronic exposure to environmental pollutants—is shaped by community context and the report-back process itself. In addition, the authors investigate an activist, collective form of exposure experience. The authors analyze themes of expectations and learning, trust, and action. The findings reveal that while participants interpret scientific results to affirm lay knowledge of urban industrial toxics, they also absorb new information regarding other pollutant sources. By linking the public understanding of science literature to the illness and exposure experience concepts, this study unravels the complex relationship between lay experience and lay understanding of science. It also shows that to support policy development and/or social change, community-based participatory research efforts must attend to participants' understanding of science.
Proponents of homeownership policies often argue that homeowners participate more actively in community life and civic affairs than renters. Although research suggests higher rates of participation ...among homeowners, the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship are unclear. On one hand, the locally dependent financial investments homeowners make in their communities could lead them to participate as a means of protecting their principal investment. On the other hand, homeownership could stimulate participation by increasing residential stability, enabling households to overcome the institutional barriers and to develop the social networks that drive community participation. The failure to differentiate between these pathways muddies our understanding of how homeownership matters for community life. Drawing on the November supplement of the Current Population Survey, this article investigates whether homeowners are more likely to vote in local elections, participate in neighborhood groups and join civic associations. A falsification strategy compares these outcomes to a set of placebo measures to address concerns that the findings are driven by selection. The research identifies an independent role for residential stability and locally dependent financial investments in explaining why homeowners participate in their communities.
Economic changes and the machinations of the treadmill of production have dramatically reduced the number of jobs provided by extractive industries, such as mining and timber, in the United States ...and other affluent nations in the post–World War II era. As the importance of these industries to national, regional, and local economies wanes, community resistance to ecologically and socially destructive industry practices threatens the political power of corporations engaged in natural-resource extraction. Here we argue that to maintain their power (and profits) as their contribution to employment declines, extractive industries have increased their efforts to maintain and amplify the extent to which the "economic identity" of communities is connected with the industry that was historically an important source of employment. We fit this argument within the neo-Marxian theoretical tradition, which emphasizes the roles ideology and legitimation play in maintaining elite rule. We illustrate this theorized process by analyzing the efforts of the West Virginia coal industry, which, through its (faux) "grassroots" front group "Friends of Coal," attempts to construct the image that West Virginia's economy and cultural identity are centered on coal production. Our analysis relies on content analysis of various sources and on experience gained from field research. We find that key strategies of the Friends of Coal include efforts to become pervasively visible in the social landscape and the appropriation of cultural icons that exploit the hegemonic masculinity of the region. These findings have implications for how industries around the country, and the world, work to maintain their power through ideological manipulation.
Building Brands Together Ind, Nicholas; Iglesias, Oriol; Schultz, Majken
California management review,
05/2013, Letnik:
55, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Co-creation is a rapidly emerging area of research. However, there is a lack of understanding as to how organizations use co-creation to build relationships and generate value. How does participation ...emerge and what outcomes does it deliver? To generate insight into the co-creation process, we created an online brand community. Our findings show that people participate in a community because it offers them the chance to find fulfillment, to express their creativity, and to socialize. The findings have significant implications for marketing, branding, and research professionals because the research shows that managers have to see participants as integral to the brand.
Users often interact and help each other solve problems in communities, but few scholars have explored how these relationships provide opportunities to innovate. We analyze the extent to which people ...positioned within the
core
of a community as well as people that are
cosmopolitans
positioned across multiple external communities affect innovation. Using a multimethod approach, including a survey, a complete database of interactions in an online community, content coding of interactions and contributions, and 36 interviews, we specify the types of positions that have the strongest effect on innovation. Our study shows that dispositional explanations for user innovation should be complemented by a relational view that emphasizes how these communities differ from other organizations, the types of behaviors this enables, and the effects on innovation.
Preventing Child Maltreatment: Multicultural Considerations in
the United States is the first book in a concentrated series
that examines child maltreatment across minoritized, cultural
groups. ...Specifically, this volume examines core multicultural
concepts (e.g., intersectionality, acculturation, spirituality,
oppression) as they relate to child maltreatment in the United
States, while the other books take a closer look at particular
ethnic or racial communities in this country. Additionally, this
book examines child maltreatment through the intersection of
feminist, multicultural, and prevention/wellness promotion lenses.
Recommendations for treatment in each book build on a foundation of
prevention and wellness promotion, along with multicultural and
feminist theories. Throughout this book, five case studies, which
are introduced in Chapter One, are revisited to help the readers
make important and meaningful connections between theory and
practice.
Purpose - Given the dramatic technology-led changes that continue to take place in the marketplace, researchers and practitioners alike are keen to understand the emergence and implications of online ...brand communities (OBCs). The purpose of this paper is to explore OBCs from both consumer and company perspectives.Design methodology approach - The study provides a synthesis of the extant OBC literature to further our understanding of OBCs, and also puts forth future priorities for OBC research.Findings - A conceptual framework is provided that extends our understanding of OBCs and consumer engagement. Four key OBC dimensions (brand orientation, internet-use, funding and governance) are identified and three antecedents (brand-related, social and functional) are proposed of consumer-OBC engagement.Originality value - This study is the first to explore key dimensions of OBCs, and the differing but related perspectives of the consumers and organizations involved.
Understanding the mechanisms controlling community diversity, functions, succession, and biogeography is a central, but poorly understood, topic in ecology, particularly in microbial ecology. ...Although stochastic processes are believed to play nonnegligible roles in shaping community structure, their importance relative to deterministic processes is hotly debated. The importance of ecological stochasticity in shaping microbial community structure is far less appreciated. Some of the main reasons for such heavy debates are the difficulty in defining stochasticity and the diverse methods used for delineating stochasticity. Here, we provide a critical review and synthesis of data from the most recent studies on stochastic community assembly in microbial ecology. We then describe both stochastic and deterministic components embedded in various ecological processes, including selection, dispersal, diversification, and drift. We also describe different approaches for inferring stochasticity from observational diversity patterns and highlight experimental approaches for delineating ecological stochasticity in microbial communities. In addition, we highlight research challenges, gaps, and future directions for microbial community assembly research.
Grassroots initiatives for change rely on people with limited power, limited resources and limited ability to influence others. From this position, people acting from the bottom up can change their ...own actions, seek to influence others around them and seek to change the social structures that they inhabit. These acts are invariably conceived, initiated and enacted within communities, and there is an emerging interest from practitioner, policy and academic circles in the importance of community as a space for realising pro-environmental change. In this paper, we ask what role grassroots initiatives can have in creating low-carbon communities. Using a theoretical framework from work on community-based practice change initiatives, we discuss the interplay between grassroots action and community capacity. We then present two cases of grassroots low-carbon community initiatives in light of this theoretical work. We conclude by discussing key themes emerging from the cases, including the potential for grassroots initiatives to build community capacity for low-carbon practices, and the importance of locally crafted solutions according to the structures specific to place.
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