Tag: week of 6/8

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Expanding the Canon, Unit 1, Week of 6/8, Toni Salisbury

Challenging the dialogic promise: how Ben & Jerry’s support for Black Lives Matter fosters dissensus on social media

Erica Ciszek & Nneka Logan

Full article here

In summary:

This article’s purpose is to advance dialogic theory by presenting an agonistic orientation toward dialogue, concluding that public relations research is enriched by a postmodern approach, recognizing dissensus as an important concept and consequence when organizations advocate on behalf of contested political and social issues. Erica Ciszek (PhD Communication & Society, University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication and Assistant Professor, Stan School of Advertising and Public Relations) & Nneka Logan (PhD Georgia State University and Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Virginia Polytech University) ascertain how Ben & Jerry’s social media support for Black Lives Matter functions as an ideological reservoir for a variety of competing perspectives about race in the United States and the role of a corporation in these conversations. Though they are challenging consensus-driven orientations of dialogue within digital landscapes by analyzing Ben & Jerry’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the subsequent public response, the findings of this study elucidate the utility and implications in a public relations context in a company’s communication in corporate political advocacy. Situating value-drive over profit imperative in organizational life. I agree that by maintaining that public relations needs to continue to theorize how dialogue contextualizes these issues, it’s worth considering an instance in which an organization takes relational risks by engaging in corporate political advocacy.

Note: This article was Received 01 Dec 2017, Accepted 18 Jun 2018, Published online: 08 Aug 2018. I include these dates, as it seems important and powerful to note on Ben & Jerry’s behalf, that this was not in response to the protests going on today in 2020, but rather separate, yet all too similar, issues four years ago!

On October 6, 2016 Ben & Jerry’s posted on their website not just that Black Lives Matter, but WHY black lives matter to them.  They spoke out about how “Systemic and institutionalized racism are the defining civil rights and social justice issues of our time.”

They ask their customer base to join them in not being complicit. Illuminating a simple objective “to ensure justice-loving people act toward justice, with all evidence, and that we stand together and act from a place of power and love, rather than out of fear and anger.”

Ben & Jerry’s goes even further, educating their public on how systemic racism is real, within their own company website.

https://www.benjerry.com/whats-new/2016/systemic-racism-is-real

Today, in response to the murder of George Floyd, brands and companies are taking Ben & Jerry’s lead and speaking out against Racism, such as Nike and more effectively Viacom.  However, Ben & Jerry’s seems to always go a step further with their alliship, advocacy and calls to action, with statements on Twitter such as:

Maybe it’s because they sell Ice cream that Ben & Jerry’s can speak out so openly regardless of possible stakeholder and public alienation, and without seemingly risking the life of their organization?  Does what you sell, what business you are in, what kind of company you are, make a difference in the role you can have in corporate political advocacy? And that according to Ciszek & Logan, even while continuing to address that scholars have continually used dialogic principles to examine whether social media is dialogic, and the significance of three of the key areas to public relations theory and practice; how within digital landscapes, can there still be a mode of inquiry in line with critical theory, that is also concerned with the flow and play of power through public discourse?

Why this? While I couldn’t find information on how any minority employees at Ben & Jerry’s might feel going to work each day (as originally intended), and as a white person I can not even begin to assume anything about this; what I can say is that, Ben & Jerry’s has proven that it is possible for organizations to take relational risks by engaging in corporate political advocacy, regardless of dialogical theory, and I appreciate that they don’t let anything like that deter them.

 

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Discussion Prompts on TED Talks

  1. Raneta Salecl started her TED talk off by introducing 3 quotes. I took interest to the first one by Samuel Johnson which was, “When making your choice in life, do not forget to live.” I believe this was a great tactic to immediately pull the audience in, because right from the start I found myself engaged with the speaker. Raneta then proceeded to link these 3 quotes which she shared to the “sweet anxiety of choice,” so this transition was very well done in my opinion. In terms of rhetoric, Raneta also used real life examples including her friend Manya and the woman she encountered at the wedding reception so by explaining these stories to the audience, we are provided with the knowledge that she actually lived through seeing others making choices and has great knowledge on this topic. In order to explain her ideas, Raneta additionally mentions other sources such as philosophers and professors from several universities to build off of her points. Several statements that Raneta made throughout her talk such as how self critique may often lead to self destruction, how many people have a passion for ignorance rather than knowledge, and that choice leads to individual and social changes are extremely raw and natural subject topics that I’ve never been confronted with. So for this reason, I believe Raneta presented her arguments in such a passionate way that really appealed to me.
  2. Building off of Raneta’s TED Talk, I believe she used evidence in various ways. Raneta uses outside sources to her advantage as a way of providing the reader with credibility that she’s well educated on what she speaks about. For example, the evidence of her personal encounters (such as Manya) gave Raneta leeway right into discussing how humans rarely make rational choices. Another specific example of this is when she told the story of the young woman at the wedding reception. This story wasn’t told for any specific reason; it was to emphasize her point that choice is linked to risks and unpredictability.  An argumentation tactic that I found very effective was Raneta asking the audience questions. Rather than just providing the listeners with facts on top of facts, this way of presenting her subject matter forced the audience to take short moments of silence and actually think deeply about the questions. For example, a time when this happened to me was when Raneta asked, “We’re often choosing by guessing, what would other people think about our choice?” I thought that the strategy behind this question and connecting it to always having our decisions needing to be socially acceptable was very clever.
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Unit 1 Assignment – Dominique

Although we have read about diversity in abilities, we have not read an article specifically targeted at schools. This topic is important to me because my major is inclusive elementary and special education teaching, so it is important for me to understand diversity in the classroom. I believe that this topic is essential for everyone to understand because differences should be accepted and valued in society. In order to expand the canon, I decided to include an article about neurodiversity in the classroom called “Valuing Differences: Neurodiversity in the Classroom” which was published by Phi Delta Kappa International, an organization for educators. This article was written by Barb Rentenbach, Lois Prislovsky and Rachael Gabriel who wrote about their experiences as students and educators. This article is different from the others that we have read because the authors have disabilities, so they are writing using their experiences as people in the neurodiverse community. In this article, the authors list different ways that teachers can help students who have disabilities to succeed. The purpose of this article is to inform educators, and other people who work with those who have disabilities, and also to show them that there are things you can do to help your student or coworker succeed. In the beginning of the article, the authors explain neurodiversity. The rest of the article is broken down into three sections (Autism, ADHD, and Dyslexia). In each section, the authors list practical implications and explain what these implications mean, and how to use them. The reason that someone may need to apply these things is because they want their students or coworkers who have disabilities to feel valued. Some people may believe that the best way to help people who have disabilities is to “fix” or “cure” them. However, people who are neurodiverse need to know that they are valued, accepted. They also may need accommodations that will allow them to succeed. All students should feel welcome and respected in the classroom, and this article explains exactly how to do that. In order to support what I have said, and learn more about neurodiversity, I have decided to include a YouTube video in my post. This video is by a woman named Amythest Schaber who has autism, and her thoughts on neurodiversity. Schaber says, “To put it simply, neurodiversity states that everybody on the planet has a different brain and that’s ok”. I like this video because Schaber has autism, so she has experienced some of the hardships that people with disabilities go through when others do not accept them. The purpose of this video is for Schaber to raise awareness, and offer advice based on her experiences. This video relates to the article that I chose because it gives a little background by explaining neurodiversity, and the movement that goes along with it.

Link to article: https://www-jstor-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/stable/pdf/26388229.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6ff9e5192877af6900911459ca04e5c9

Citations

Rentenbach, B., Prislovsky, L., & Gabriel, R. (2017). Valuing Diversity: Neurodiversity in the Classroom. Retrieved June 11, 2020, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26388229

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unit 1 blog DRAFT

The author of my article is named Aaron Hicks, and he, with the help of four individuals who he acknowledged from the University of Richmond, published “Religion and the Workplace : Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership.” Aaron is a professor with an undergraduate degree and graduate coursework in economics, a Master of Divinity degree, and a Ph.D. in religious studies. The author’s religious tradition is Presbyterian (Protestant, Christian). Before he began writing Chapter 1 of this book, Aaron clarified his opinion to the reader by stating how faithful Christians should have no interest in imposing their beliefs or practices upon others and they should want to receive no advantage in public life or the workplace because of their religion. “Religion and the Workplace: Pluralism, Spirituality, Leadership” is structured into 3 parts, where I will be writing about Part 2 (Chapters 5-7). The author’s objective in this section of the text is to offer distinctions, concepts, and comparative examples that demonstrate how religion is present in contemporary workplaces. The audience of this text includes scholars in favor of secular workplaces and supporters of spiritual leadership and Christian preferences because they will be actively challenged in their beliefs, but the audience also includes individual employees of any religion, or those who do not identify as religious or spiritual. 

Aaron’s purpose is to analyze current realities in the workplace in relation to religion and spirituality, and he does so by first pointing out how individual and institutional expressions of religion differ. That is, most approaches to religion and spirituality in the workplace often underemphasize religious diversity. Religion in the workplace is often seen as religion of the workplace, and the author makes an important point that the corporate leader cannot play the role of a spiritual guide or guru to his or her workforce. If a single company sponsors or promotes one specific kind of religion, this is questionable. One quote by the author which supports his reasoning and argument on why companies can’t openly express one religion over any other is “It may be easy for Christians to downplay the significance, for example, of subtle messages in the workplace that convey the privileged status enjoyed by Christian symbols, ideas, or holidays, but for Jewish, Muslim, and atheistic co-workers these messages are overtly present and reinforce their experience of marginalization.” (Hicks, 2003, p. 133) Additionally, public life impacts the workplace as the article explains. Religion plays many roles in American society, and many employees who are Christians have admitted that they receive or have received preferential treatment at work and in society. These current discussions of spirituality tend to marginalize those who are atheists or adherents of many religious backgrounds, causing those who feel pressured by society to divorce their religious / spiritual commitments from all aspects of their public lives.

I decided to include this photo for statistical reference. It is from library.cqpress.com from an article titled “Should employers allow more religious expression?”

http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libezproxy2.syr.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAwMHhuYV9fMTIwNTM2X19BTg2?sid=69c92641-5cec-4578-a000-a5aa855c2117@sessionmgr4008&vid=3&format=EB&rid=2

 

 

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6/8-Discussion Questions (Mikayla)

  1. While watching Heffernan’s talk, one thing that is noticed is how she speaks on the future and the unlearned traits of the world. In her rhetoric argument she talks about how we should use our minds and imaginations to explore the problems of the world and how technology is setting us back in time. I find it interesting how she depicts modern day problems and shows the audience how they were solved by using ingenuity and imaginative solutions. She leaves the audience something to ponder on and every time she asks them a question she answers it. She indicates the talent and potential that could be implemented if we simply use our skills. However, if we hone our abilities we have the power to turn the future into whatever we wish. She notes how many problems the world has today but shows us that we have the potential to accomplish anything. Not only was this an inspirational speech but she tapped into the audiences capacity for improvement and tells them that not only has she seen change happen before but she knows that they are capable of it.
  2. In Jason Fried’s speech makes an argument on how although offices are created in order for people to come and do work it isn’t the space in which the most productive work is done. He presents his findings on how the best work productivity is never done in the office because there is never enough time to create new ideas or complete tasks well. He provides evidence on this and explains how he asked a group of people where they get the most work done and they all either said at home, in an airplane or even at a coffeeshop but none of them said at work. He compares trying to complete a full day of work to being interrupted in the middle of sleep, you cannot fully complete the task if you are always being stopped halfway. I find it very interesting that he presents this question and then he provides 3 tactics on how to avoid these interruptions and increase productivity within each office.
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Responses for Week of 6/8

  1. For this weeks assignment, I am choosing to focus on Salecl’s talk about choice, and how paralyzing it can be. In terms of her rhetorical approach, she engages the audience by starting with a few quotes. These quotes are relevant to the rest of her speech as she incorporates them throughout her talk by ending by talking about one. She ended with restating that she had then choice to include the quote by Samuel Johnson, and she is choosing to end with the same quote. She also engages the audience by retelling a series of stories that while humorous at times, drove home her overarching message of how we as individuals have the choice to change things not only for ourselves, but our environment. Each story played a different role in her topics,  as she touches upon how we are often paralyzed by the looming choices and we tend to overthink. As humans, we often take choices too seriously which may induce anxiety and think that what we do now will affect the future, or the choice we make now may contradict what we choose later on in life. I thought her argument was eloquently put together as she related experiences of others and herself to many feelings that the audience may have. She incorporated relevant examples, of taxing the rich or wanting a healthier lifestyle, that the listener can relate to themselves in order to completely understand her points. Her ability to generalize then personalize her message I believe was the most significant part of her delivery, and even made me reevaluate how seriously I take choices and how I too become paralyzed.
    3. I choose to do Jason Fried’s Ted Talk on why work does not happen at work to add to the body of knowledge we already have from organizational culture. Jason Fried is a writer and entrepreneur who created the software company basecamp who offers three possible to solutions to why work does not get done at the workplace. He offers the view of how working in an office can allow for short bursts of time to do work, instead of focused uninterrupted time to truly let the creative brain take over. He also touches upon how working from home allows for voluntary distractions, when someone needs a break, compared to the involuntary distractions of working in the office, where someone may approach you and ask you to do something other than what you are already doing. He poses the idea that managers and meetings are the true issue as they are place holders and distractions that add to the inability to work in an office. In order to counteract this, he gives three suggestions to remedying this deficit. I saw a connection between what we have been learning about organizational culture and his solutions for a better work environment. Below, I have detailed them in a Venn diagram to physically show the connections that can be drawn while also highlighting the differences that I have noticed.
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6/8 discussion

  1. The presentation Margaret Heffernan gave felt very passionate, her use of strong phrasing and deliberate personal connections helped solidify her point of view and she was able to deliver quite a powerful TEDtalk about a topic I had yet to fully address. Humans worldwide are racing toward the future, although no one can really predict what we are racing to. Heffernan uses experiments conducted in nursing homes, supermarkets, and professional sports teams that provide solid evidence for the ideology that efficiency has become more dangerous than prosperous as we keep pushing ourselves toward the future. Many of the statements made by Heffernan resonated with me, including “What all of these technologies attempt to do is to force-fit a standardized model of a predictable reality onto a world that is infinitely surprising. What gets left out? Anything that can’t be measured — which is just about everything that counts.” Humans can use technology to make many advancements for our race, although when we start to place our own future into the hands of technology to lead us we are giving up the idea that humans and our lives are naturally unpredictable. I believe the statement resonated with the whole audience since it received an applause; it addresses human lives as being the center of attention as they should be, and something our capitalist world isn’t good at doing at all. With all the emotion flowing through the 8 billion people on this planet we must focus on creating a welcoming future, rather than creating the first future we can get to.
  2. Jason Fried’s approach to the idea of reforming the standard business office system is fueled with the idea that while we are working with efficiency in mind many businesses could be unknowingly slowing down productivity because of interruptions that only occur in the office. He speaks to the audience with a tone of someone who has been in the unproductive office setting that many know, and by listing examples of everyday occurrences he changes the perspective on what is actually helping people work and what only looks like it is helping people work. Fried talks about the question he has asked many people, “where do you go when you really need to get something done?” The answers vary, but all stray from the office; typically, individuals work the most efficiently when they are alone. This idea is completely offensive to the way offices work, they’re designed to be an open environment that is meant to make an organization operate together without physical boundaries separating the workforce, Fried makes this very evident in his statements. Using words like “toxic” and “poisonous” to describe a meeting, but when he breaks his opinion down into the fact that a one-hour meeting with 10 individuals is actually a 10-hour meeting, you can see how his perspective has solid points. When standards are put in place and enforced by a manager, you take away the control someone has on their specific task, forcing a team to stop what they are doing and turn their attention to a meeting only one person has on their mind can completely wipe away the deep workflow people find themselves in when they are left alone.
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Unit 1 Assignment Draft

Throughout this unit, we have dived into the specifics of diversity and inclusion in the workplace using numerous readings. While it really opened my eyes, I have still yet to really see how the LGBT community faces these challenges, particularly in sports where not many individuals within that community fit the norm. The article I picked is titled “Between Homohysteria and Inclusivity: Tolerance Towards Sexual Diversity in Sport,” which does a great job at explaining what is currently happening in the industry of sports with this community as well as giving evidence from the study they did. The researchers are Joaquin Piedra, Rafael Garcia-Parez and Alexander G. Channon and the article was published in April of 2017. These researchers are experts in the field and have done numerous studies about homophobia and Homohysteria in all facets. The goal of this particular article is to broaden the knowledge of Individuals who might not know much about it and create a new way of thinking for ones who often neglect people just because of their sexual orientation.

The article begins by stating how there are a small number of openly gay and lesbian people in top flight sports which raises the question about wether sporting or social context makes it easy or difficult for these people to come out. There have been studied about tolerance to towards sexual diversity in sport which is why the researches wanted to write this article in which h they analyze metacognitive profiles of two different cultures, relative to the concept of homohysteria. Ever since sports were created, it has always been very male dominant, but even more specifically a site of hegemonic masculinity. Gender and sexual diversity has always been ignored and the sexual minorities have been stigmatized for quite some time now. In order to understand the complexity of changes in the sport, you must know the broader theory of inclusive masculinity the authors state. This can be defined. as “the fear of being socially perceived as gay.” The fact that in todays society people are still not accepting of this is an issue. From this statement alone, we learn a lot and why this is a great example of diversity and inclsuion. Not only in sports, but in a lot of areas in America, the LGBT community is discriminated against and while it has gotten much better over the years, there are still areas of improvements. One of them is in sports which is why I found an article in the are and I think it would be a great addition to expand the canon. Furthermore, In this article, the authors go on to state a bunch of statics showing how these individuals have been discriminated against and then actually proving how openness on a team is actually very beneficial for not only the individual, but the team as a whole. The authors do a really great job at defining terms that may be new to a lot of people which makes this a really informative article for any type of affiance to read. Whether you know a lot about the topic or know nothing at all and just want to learn about it, it will be very beneficial to everyone.  Attached I have a video that explains even in further detail about LGBT inclusion in sports.

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Dan discussion week of 6/8

  1. The Presentation “Why work doesn’t happen at work” by Jason Fried incorporates many good argument techniques. The main purpose of his talk was to speak about how companies are hindering employee productivity by involuntarily creating a distracting workplace. He starts off by discussing a question that he has posed to many people over the years. The Question is “Where do you go when you need to get something done?” This is a powerful question as it forces the audience to think about their own answer. He then makes his point that almost nobody’s answer to the question is “the office”. Jason uses light humor to get the audience laughing through choosing examples that they can relate to. An example of this is his statement that true distractions are the M&M’s (Meetings and Managers) and not often social media. During one part of the presentation, he made the connection that work is like sleep as it happens in phases. He states that just like sleep, people need long hours of uninterrupted time to get meaningful work done. He then engages the audience directly by asking them to raise their hands if they have had 8 hours of uninterrupted time at the office (which of course they have not). The very last thing that Jason did in this 15 minute presentation was make three suggestions to remedy these productivity problems. He placed what he says in the final three minutes of the video. This is the last thing that his audience will remember, and his suggestions will be strong as the audience was very engaged in the discussion at this point.
  2. I noticed the presenter in the TED Talk “The human skills we need in an unpredictable world” used a few very strong techniques in persuading her audience. Margaret Hefferman initiates her speech by telling a story of a company that attempted to increase efficiency by automatically allocating tasks down to the minute. The point of her story was that this resulted in an inefficient process as the technology could not account for needy customers and other unexpected occurrences. Starting off with an example made it clear for her audience to understand the problem she is addressing. She then made some examples of important “inefficient” company processes such as a vaccine company who is developing many vaccines that could possibly be useful in case of a global pandemic. (Apparently there is not enough of these companies). Another example she provided was how banks are now holding more capital than they have in the past in case of market crashes. Though it is inefficient to hold too much cash, she explains that it is robust and a good safety net in case of economic emergencies. She then leads her audience by posing a question of how do we change our company models of efficiency? She uses examples of how this has been done such as in hospitals in Netherlands where nurses have more responsibility to tend to the needs of the individual patients. After a few more examples she adds in her point that we need to become less dependent on technology that is focusing on efficiency and become more interdependent with each-other. She also makes the powerful point that if we continue to let machines think for us, we will lose our ability to think for ourselves at all.
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Unit 1 Summary, Aaron

In the book “What Universities Can be”, Robert Sternberg (a psychologist and psychometrician at Cornell University)  devotes a chapter to diversity in higher education. He begins this chapter by saying rather frankly that people learn better and learn more if they are mixed in with people who don’t look and think like them. He says “You cannot be an active concerned citizen if your only concerns are for people you view as like yourself” (Sternberg, 73).

This is an anecdotal claim at this point, and he uses it to identify with the readers because it is sort of a no brainer concept if you think about it. Our social and educational experience can only benefit if we have variety in our peers. Sternberg than uses a few study examples, one being done in rural Kenya. This study pooled Kenyans and asked them to identify herbs that would help heal with different ailments. They all did a great job with this, but when the objective changed and they tested these same people in more academic tests, the results weren’t as good. This study is used to illustrate his point that there are different types of knowledge and intelligence. One group of people (mostly western, white people in this case) can be better at testing and doing well in standardized settings, while the other group of people might not do so well in that area but excels in the area of experiential knowledge, of being able to identify and do things in the real world outside of the classroom.  Another example is using Alaskan Yup’ik peoples, who are able to do things like ride a dog sled over vast areas and hunt animals and identify that storms may be on the way by examining their kill. These sorts of things are unimaginable for most students or people who aren’t part of that culture.

This goes further into what Sternberg calls implicit theories of intelligence- folks ideas of what they consider to be smart. The same idea is very prevalent in high school and college testing, where white people who tend to be more affluent do better on these exams and end up in a better situation for college and life afterwards, and minorities who may not do as well on these exams are slighted, yet they excel in other areas of intelligence such as in the social realm.

This chapter from the book has an academic style to it, yet the messaging to the audience could be more broad than someone who is in one of his psychology courses. He uses studies to back up his arguments about diversity and also brings personal experience to identify with the readers easier. What we can take from this chapter is that diversity and inclusion are important to the whole picture of academic life, and we benefit as a whole from participating in it. There is more than one cog in the wheel when it comes to intelligence so it serves us better to include as many of them as we can.

 

I have included a link for further reading from Forbes that addresses the new changes in college admission testing since the pandemic, and how the lack of using these exams may be helping expand diversity in colleges:http:// https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/04/27/sat-act-policies-may-improve-diversity-at-colleges-and-universities/#4eb2b3f83bd5

j.ctt20d890h.8       This is the link to the pdf file of my article I summarized