Contemporary Challenges (Asynchronous Session)
Burnout in Media Professionals: Predictive Variables on Exhaustion View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Santiago Gascon
This paper analyzes the variables that contribute to the stress and health of professionals in press, radio, and TV, and designs and applies an intervention. Participants: n = 292): 51.03% women. Mean age = 43.45 (SD: 9.56). Sociodemographic data, Maslach Burnout Inventory, general survey (Maslach, Jackson and Leiter, 1996), and a General Health Questionaire (Goldberg and Williams, 1988) were used, as was the Areas of Work Life Scale (Leiter and Maslach, 1999). Statistically significant and negative correlations between dimensions of exhaustion and health were observed: emotional exhaustion r = -0.645 and cynicism r = -.482. Using linear regression analysis, the variables that contributed to exhaustion were: overload (r= -.945; p ≤ .001), rewards (r = -.655; p ≤ .001) and conflict of values (r = .467; p ≤ .001). The cynicism dimension was explained by low recognition (r = -.306 ; p = .000) and low sense of community (r = -.193; p ≤ .001). Values (r = -.399; p = .000) and rewards (r = -.330; p ≤ .001) contributed to effectiveness. There were statistically significant differences when comparing the means of institutional press employees with respect to other media. Despite showing high rates of overload, the former reported better levels in rewards, p = .020, values, p = .011 and health, p = .088 (sig. <0.001). We designed an intervention project which was applied to one TV, two radio, and two newspapers, focused on the improvement of communication systems, rewards and commitment of values, aimed at managers and employees.
Privacy: What's Happened to It
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ronald Griffin
Contracts disrupt solitude, self-isolation, and folks' right to be left alone. I have watched peers run from the realm of privacy--a space where people make and implemented life plans--to a realm where there is none. This paper takes a stab at answering the question "why" and, in so doing, reclaiming bits of what we've lost. Nowadays, people (too many of them) look like empty vessels; beautiful to look at but monstrous down deep. Some gaze down upon the world with a jaundice eye, and treat civil society's residents with contempt. They are property for hire--props at times, tools, and actors--capable of doing awful things. Ayn Rand wrote about such characters in a book entitled, "Fountainhead." What she saw then is no less true today. Our world is in flux, drifting from a Cartesian way of doing things to a digital world view. And the folks, previously mentioned, have migrated to this new world and established camps (e.g., Facebook, Google, Apple, Hauwei, Disney, and Universal Entertainment). These entities, and those who run them, have undermined a person's sense of self, self determination, and privacy. This paper reviews what we've done to corral them (the Illinois, California, and Canadian Privacy Acts), and highlights what can be done to hackers with the National Stolen Properties Act, Economic Espionage Act, and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Act. Though the paper changes nothing in the physical world, it adds to the font of knowledge about how to cope with problems in the cyber age
The Role of Technology in Organizational Drama View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Allison Vanouse
In *Reframing Organizations*, Terence Deal and Lee Bolman suggest that institutions can operate as a form of theater. Organizational drama, they write, is characterized by a group's internal practice of self-definition: when participating in institutional culture, members collaborate to promote their group's values, and engage in dynamic actions that portray the organization to itself. Deal and Bolman's allegory of the theater has fascinating analogues in the contemporary theater proper, where practitioners like Ariane Mnouchkine (Theâtre du Soleil, Paris) and Anne Bogart (SITI Company, New York) emphasize the degree to which the internal culture of the rehearsal room--and the extension of networks through educational initiatives--serve as primary aspects of dramatic art. Based on this collocation of terminology and concept, my paper explores the function of analogy in the literature of organizational studies, where a fruitful cross-pollination appears exists between the frameworks and vocabulary of creative production, and best practices for business. I investigate this state of affairs by seeking novel approaches to the role of technology in organizational drama, and grounding literature that addresses this form of collaboration—between human and machine actors—in analogues from alternative frames of reference: (1) The tradition of confronting the non-human in dramatic art, with roots that extend, with Aristophanes's *The Clouds* , to the classical Athenian stage. (2) The use of technology to preserve and grow traditional cultures, as introduced in Mikyarra Media's enlightening approach to experimental anthropology, *Phone & Spear* (2019), which shows how smartphones may be put to use in preserving and expanding aboriginal traditions.
(Re)conceptualising the Connections between Organisational Socialisation Content Dimensions, Orders of Knowledge, and Time View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mia Rasmussen
Organisational socialisation is often described as a process of learning and becoming knowledgeable. In order to further develop our understanding of this process, this theoretical paper reconceptualises our view of the intersection between content dimensions of organisational socialisation, when newcomers need to learn about these dimensions, and the level of abstraction at which they need to know about the dimensions at different points in time. Earlier research has focused on how much newcomers should learn about certain topics at various stages of their organisational entry, however it has usually treated knowledge as comprising only one single level. The reconceptualisation offered here nuances our understanding as it includes consideration of four different orders of knowledge, i.e. different levels of abstraction at which a newcomer can be knowledgeable about a content dimension, as well as including the link between time and the dynamic development of newcomers’ levels of knowledge about organisational topics. Thus, this work contributes to the discipline of organisational socialisation through a combination of literature review and critical reappraisal. The theoretical reconceptualisation is visualised as a matrix model of content dimensions, orders of knowledge, and time. The paper concludes with implications for the way planning for organisational entry is approached.
