Category Archives: Strategic Communication

Book showcases benefits diversity brings to the workplace

There exists a sentiment in corporate America that diversity in the workplace can negatively impact the bottom line because hiring people from different backgrounds could spark more internal conflict.

Not necessarily so, writes Donnalyn Pompper in her latest book.

A stack of Pompper's new book, Practical and Theoretical Implications of Successfully Doing Difference in Organizations.The associate professor of strategic communication, who has taught at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication since 2007, has published Practical and Theoretical Implications of Successfully Doing Difference in Organizations with Emerald Group Publishing. The book examines why a conscious and sustained commitment to diversity is needed in organizations.

It’s a hard case to argue, Pompper said, because the benefits, such as building respect among co-workers or enhanced creativity, may be less tangible than financial success or failure.

“Diversity management in organizations remains a highly controversial issue – and valuing all people by providing equal opportunities at work persists as one of the central challenges of the 21st century,” Pompper said.

As a result, she found that diversity programs in organizations “fail to explore root causes of enduring power relations, which perpetually stratify people negatively according to their social identity dimensions.”

Pompper said workplace diversity goes beyond ethnicity and race.

“My book is about how these social identity dimensions are important, but that diversity is much, much more than that one social identity dimension, because each intersects with so many others,” she said, noting that age, culture, gender, physical/psychological ability, faith, sexual orientation, social class and more should all be taken under consideration.

When there’s a solid “business case,” for diverse hiring, Pompper said a company is more likely to take that step. For example, a PR firm may hire a Latina to work on Hispanic business accounts or an ad agency might hire a gay man for its fashion accounts.

“There’s a lot of push-back from employees when they suspect a colleague is hired only because he or she is x,” Pompper said, “because everyone wants processes to be fair and equitable.”

It’s her hope that the findings in her book can help its readers become “future managers and researchers who embrace social identity difference.”

Media contact:
Jeff Cronin
jcronin@temple.edu
215-204-3324

SMC professors earn Provost merit awards

Thirty-nine faculty members from the School of Media and Communication have received awards for meritorious activity from the Temple University Office of the Provost.

Each year, Temple University recognizes faculty for outstanding performance in teaching and instruction, research, scholarship, creative activity and/or service to the university or their individual professions or disciplines. The selection process began in fall 2013, through either nominations by the provost, deans, department chairs and colleagues or self-nominations.

“A merit award reflects our faculty’s continued dedication and commitment to scholarship and students, and highlights the exceptional drive for excellence in teaching, innovation and performance,” Provost Dai said. “Our deans, college and department committees, and department chairs were committed to ensuring that these deserving and distinguished individuals received recognition. I want to thank everyone for their time and diligence in this important process.”

SMC’s recipients are:

Advertising

Brooke Duffy
Jennifer Lovrinic Freeman
Joseph Glennon
Stacey Harpster
Sheryl Kantrowitz
Michael Maynard
Katherine Mueller
Dana Saewitz

Journalism

Fabienne Darling-Wolf
Christopher Harper
Carolyn Kitch
Andrew Mendelson
George Miller
Maida Odom
Larry Stains
Lori Tharps
Edward Trayes
Karen M. Turner
Linn Washington

Media Studies and Production

Amy Caples
Sherri Hope Culver
Jan Fernback
Matthew Fine
Paul Gluck
Peter Jaroff
Jack Klotz
Matthew Lombard
Nancy Morris
Adrienne Shaw
Barry Vacker
Kristine Trever Weatherston
Laura Zaylea

Strategic Communication

Gregg Feistman
Scott Gratson
Donnalyn Pompper
Cornelius Pratt
Tracey Weiss
Thomas Wright
Kaibin Xu

Study finds hints of social responsibility in top Fortune 500 company mission statements

Wal-Mart wants to “save people money.” Chevron aspires to “be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnerships and performance.” Microsoft’s mission statement says the company’s goal is to “help people and businesses realize their full potential.”

A headshot of Donnalyn Pompper

Donnalyn Pompper

In her most recent study, Donnalyn Pompper, associate professor of strategic communication at the Temple University School of Media and Communication, found that the most profitable companies at the top of the Fortune 500 list are balancing financial success with social responsibility better than companies at the bottom.

“It is fairly well-acknowledged that many corporations hesitate to ‘do the right thing’ when it comes to stakeholders [employees, customers, etc.] and the environment if doing so will detract from the bottom line,” Pompper said. “Our study findings suggest that the higher-performing Fortune 500 companies may have found a way to accomplish both aims — to be socially responsible and to turn a profit.”

Pompper, who co-authored the study with Taejin Jung, associate professor of communication studies at SUNY-Oswego, compared the mission statements of the top Fortune 500 companies like Wal-Mart and AT&T with the bottom-tier Fortune 500 companies, such as H&R Block and Electronic Arts.

“The top 20 higher-performing corporations’ mission statements more frequently mentioned non-financial objectives and concern for satisfying shareholders than the bottom 20 lower-performing corporations,” the professors wrote in their paper,  “Assessing Instrumentality of Mission Statements and Social-Financial Performance Links: Corporate Social Responsibility as Context,” which was published this year in the International Journal of Strategic Communication.

Pompper and Jung said it’s important for these companies to work toward the goals in their mission statements in practical ways.

“Corporations with strong public image components in mission statements must periodically evaluate contribution of these image goals against genuine relationships with publics in order to achieve balance and to counterbalance negative perceptions of public relations as a green washing tool when it comes to [corporate social responsibility],” they wrote.

Pompper said the research can be used a catalyst to dive deeper into the relationship between financial success and social responsibility to determine if one causes the other: Do responsible companies earn more money, or does having more money give a company the ability to be more socially responsible?

“With these findings, we discovered that there may be a relationship between being profitable and mission statements,” Pompper said. “Being socially responsible may be a key; one that deserves deeper scrutiny.”

By Jeff Cronin
jcronin@temple.edu
215-204-3324

Seven new faculty members join SMC’s ranks

You might see a few unfamiliar faces around the School of Media and Communication this year, as SMC welcomes seven new professors to the faculty. Here’s your chance to learn a little bit about them before the first day of class.

Murali Balaji, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Specializing in critical media studies, namely political economy and the study of masculinity, Balaji spent the previous three years at Lincoln University, including two as the chair of the mass communications program. A former award-winning journalist, Balaji has written the critically acclaimed The Professor and The Pupil (Nation Books, 2011), which examines the lives of W.E.B Du Bois and Paul Robeson, and has co-edited two others, Desi Rap (Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and Global Masculinities and Manhood (University of Illinois, 2011). He is the co-founder and former executive director of The Voices of Philadelphia, a media education organization dedicated to citizen journalism and media fluency training among marginalized populations within the city.

Guillermo Caliendo, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Strategic Communication

Receiving an MA in communication studies from California State University, Los Angeles, and a PhD in rhetoric with a concentration in media studies from the University of Pittsburgh, Caliendo’s research focuses on discourse analysis dealing with race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality. Besides serving in various editorial boards, he has published numerous book reviews and chapter contributions. Most recently, his article “MLK Boulevard: Material Forms of Memory and the Social Contestation of Race Signification” appeared in the Journal of Black Studies. He is currently working on “Disciplining Sexuality: Milk, Cultural Amnesia, and the Rhetoric of Sexual Containment.” At Temple, he will teach Persuasion, Rhetorical Theory and Political Communication

Joseph Glennon, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Advertising

For the last 15 years, Glennon has been a highly sought after copywriter and creative consultant working with both advertising agencies and directly with clients. He has taught courses in a range of advertising topics, specializing in the art of copywriting. His professional writing career began as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, working with the producers of Cheers, Frasier, Home Improvement and other comedies. His work also included feature films. Glennon is a native of Boston and an unapologetic member of the Red Sox nation.

Stacey Harpster, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Advertising

Since receiving her MBA in marketing from the Temple University Fox School of Business and Management and her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, Public Relations and Advertising from the Temple University School of Media and Communication, Harpster has served a diverse list of clients in industries including: automotive, hospitality and tourism, consumer goods, homeopathy, fashion, higher education, finance and technology. She began her career at the Temple University Small Business Development Center (SBDC), where she founded and led the SBDC Creative Department. After the SBDC, she moved on to hold senior level account management positions in various Philadelphia firms, including Kanter International (now Finch Brands) and Brownstein Group.

Adrienne Shaw, Assistant Professor

Department of Media Studies and Production

Since receiving her PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Shaw has held postdoctoral posts at the Mudra Institute for Communication Ahmedabad, the University of Pittsburgh and Colorado State University. Her research focuses on popular culture, the politics of representation, cultural production and qualitative audience research. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, representations of gender and sexuality and the construction of identity and communities in relation to media consumption.

Kristine Weatherston, Assistant Professor (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Weatherston is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Media, Art and Text program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her interests combine theory and practice in areas of video production including genre studies, screenwriting and literary adaptation, documentary and nonfiction, producing and directing for film and television, as well as editing and post-production design.

Laura Zaylea, Assistant Professor, (Teaching/Instructional)

Department of Media Studies and Production

Since receiving her MFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute, Zaylea has served as a film lecturer in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Zaylea has written/directed a feature film, has created many short films and media art installations and is currently converting her award-winning screenplay into a multimedia digital novel. Her research and creative production interests include experimental film making and media production, LGBTQ media and the process of adapting traditional media into new media forms and formats. Her feature film Hold The Sun was awarded Best Avant-garde Film from the 2010 Amsterdam Film Festival and her screenplay Closer Than Rust was one of the winners of the 2012 Atlanta International Film Festival Screenplay Competition.

 

SCT announces 2012 faculty awards

The School of Communications and Theater honored four faculty members at its May 1 faculty assembly.

Associate Professor Gregg Feistman, Strategic Communication, Service Award

Associate Professor Christopher Harper, Journalism, Creative Award

Associate Professor Donnalyn Pompper, Strategic Communication, Research Award

Associate Professor Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, Theater, Service Award

Professor Cai has article published in Human Communication Research

Professor Deborah Cai, STRC, MMC, is an author of an article in the April 2012 issue (Volume 38, Issue 2) of Human Communication Research. The article is titled “The Effect of Conflict Goals on Avoidance Strategies: What Does Not Communicating Communicate?”; the first and second authors are Qi Wang of Villanova University and Edward Fink of the University of Maryland.

More information is available here.

StratComm professors discuss governmental communications with Guinea official

The minister and chief of cabinet for the president of Guinea was at Temple University Feb. 10 to learn more about managing government and presidential communications from two faculty members in the Department of Strategic Communication at the School of Communications and Theater.

(L-R): Associate Professor Gregg Feistman, STRC; Guinea Minister and Chief of Cabinet Naby Bangoura; and Professor Deborah Cai, STRC. (photo by Ethan Schwartz)

It was part of a two-week visit to the United States as part of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership program. Naby Bangoura is traveling the East Coast, visiting universities such as the University of Maryland, Harvard University and Temple.

For two hours, Bangoura, accompanied by a translator from the State Department, met with Professors Gregg Feistman and Deborah Cai. They discussed strategies for managing government communications to a diverse population that has been ruled in recent history by military regimes.

As the theoretical basis for the rest of the discussion, Cai talked about how to build four dimensions of trust and Feistman discussed media agenda setting. Topics ranged from how President Alpha Condé can build trust with people across the nation to how to manage messages across different types of media—some of which are not available to all areas of the country. They also discussed how to manage communication within the government, which has a large number of ministers, and how to encourage pursuing vision rather than reacting to immediate problems.

Professor Cai named editor of IACM journal

Professor Deborah Cai, chair of the Department of Strategic Communication, will serve as the next editor of the International Association for Conflict Management’s journal, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research. She will serve officially from January 2013 through December 2015, overseeing the publication of volumes six through eight.

“As the association’s official journal, NCMR has established itself as a significant outlet for theoretically driven research representing a variety of academic disciplines,” Cai writes in IACM’s Signal newsletter. “It addresses issues of conflict and negotiation from micro to macro levels of analysis as well as across contexts, ranging from the environmental to the political, from organizational to interpersonal.”

TUJ faculty members examine social media after tsunami

Professor Cornelius Pratt, STRC, along with TUJ Professors Irene Herrera and Ronald Carr, have written a chapter titled “Social Media for Crisis Communication on Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake: A Critical Textual Analysis,” which will be published in The New Media and Public Relations (second edition), New York: Peter Lang, 2012. In it, they write that social media platforms “are redefining Japanese cultural values and assumptions vis-à-vis communications — those that no longer depend solely on conventional outlets and cultural practices, but are being expanded to incorporate alternative media platforms as channels for the public good as well as for public vehemence and outrage.”