Paris 2024 Olympic Hospitality Houses as a means of promoting national image

The following article originally constituted the second half of a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Together with the lead-up article, which appeared in the most recent issue of this journal, this article introduces and discusses a conceptual framework for the analysis of nation images and applies it to a case study. In the first paper it was argued that globalized media and the growing importance of a nation's reputation for economic progress are increasingly driving nations to manage their image. In this context the concepts of nation image and nation image management and their relationship to the media were examined. It was found that the existing concepts on nation image and nation image management can be put together into a conceptual framework that will, in this article, function as an analytical tool for a case study. Findings show that there is a differentiation to be made between a nation's actual image and the image it believes to have. The importance of this differentiation will be discussed in this article, which using the conceptual framework and empirical data gained through two expert interviews delivers a detailed analysis of Kazakhstan's image troubles caused Sacha Baron Cohen's ‘mockumentary’.

This paper is centered on the issue of national image which is of utmost interest to any nation craving for national development and global partnership in the 21st century. There is no country without national image at any point in time. And so, at any time, the behaviour and activities of the people of any nation go a long way in defining their national image. Regrettably, Nigeria is a country that many right-thinking individuals agree has image problem borne out of some of her people’s penchant to do the wrong things for the “right” results. Many Nigerians have serious “valuechoice” problem that has contributed to tarnishing our national image. This paper does not seek to examine all the issues relating to national image. Rather it focuses specially on the link between culture, communication and national image in the context of Nigeria. It attempts to highlight the impact of culture and communication on national image from a sociological perspective, with a view to establishing how the inculcation of the right cultural values can help transform Nigerians and cause a national rebirth that can bring about a better national image for Nigeria. The last part of this paper is on the summary of the discussions, recommendations and the conclusion. Keywords: Culture, Communication, National Image.

The following paper originally constituted the first half of a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts. Together with the follow-up paper, to appear in the upcoming issue of this journal, this paper introduces and discusses a conceptual framework for the analysis of nation images and applies it to a case study. In this first paper, it is argued that globalised media and the growing importance of a nation's reputation for economic progress are increasingly driving nations to manage their image. In this context, the concepts of nation image and nation image management (NIM) and their relationship to the media are examined. It is found that the existing concepts on nation image and NIM can be put together into a conceptual framework that may function as an analytical tool for future case studies. In this regard, another finding shows that there is a differentiation to be made between a nation's actual image and the image it believes to have. The importance of this differentiation will be discussed in the follow-up paper titled ‘The Borat Effect’, which, using the conceptual framework, delivers a detailed analysis of Kazakhstan's image troubles caused by Sacha Baron Cohen's ‘mockumentary’.

This article argues that the concepts of ‘State’ and ‘Nation’ should be treated as separate from one another, hence, more than one image of the nation is possible at one given time. During the early days of the January 2011 Egyptian revolution, a contestation emerged between Mubarak’s state and the protesters in Tahrir Square over the image and notion of the Egyptian nation. Both the state and the protesters attempted to exclude one another from their respective discourse of the Egyptian nation. While reflecting back on a number of women’s voices who joined the early days of the Tahrir Square protests and using qualitative fieldwork interviews with Cairo-based feminist and political activists, this article points to the complexity of a newly forged image of Egyptian nationhood. In Tahrir Square, this image appeared to be largely framed within gendered criteria where notions of manhood and hyper visible gender equality were intrinsically linked to the broader objective of removing Mubarak and his regime. This raises the question of whether new gender paradigms of equality can continue to exist beyond Tahrir Square’s imagination of a ‘new’ nation.

The purpose of this study is to explore how national images are reflected in translations of crime fiction. This genre is chosen because it is rich with national images as well as cultural specificities of the space where a crime took place. Five Korean translations of Sherlock Holmes are analyzed. Passages reflecting national images are chosen for comparison between the source text and the target texts. The results revealed that although most national images were retained in translations, some were modified or eliminated. This shows that the translators and publishers felt the need to intervene for some national images in the source text. In particular, the translations targeting children had far more national images modified or eliminated compared to those for adult readers, reflecting educational purposes. In other words, national stereotypes described in the original text were changed or deleted, so as not to impart such stereotypes to children. Overall, in the five translations where national images are modified or eliminated, stereotypes and negative national images in the ST are alleviated or changed as attributes of individuals rather than nations, or are altogether eliminated. This study was an attempt to arouse interest in interconneting translation studies and imagology; the latter has recently gained much attention worldwide, but not yet delved into in translation studies in South Korea.

The division of the Korean peninsula involved many neighbouring countries in the Korean War. The relations with those countries have since been reorganised due to active exchange. This study examined how the quantity and quality of contact with traditional alliance (US and Japan) and strategic partner (China and Russia) countries affected their national images. To this end, this study analyzed the relation with the national image by measuring the quantity and quality of contact of an individual with each country. The quantity of contact included an evaluation of the individual's subjective amount of contact, contact path, and contact status, and the quality of contact was measured as an evaluation for the pleasure, competitiveness, intimacy, spontaneity, and necessity when contacting each country's culture. A total of 387 participants were divided into two groups based on the presence of direct contact and the quantity and quality of their contact and national images were examined. The participants were followed by a completion of the self-questionnaires including the Culture Experience Questionnaire, National Image Questionnaire, and demographic information questionnaire. The results of this study are as follow: first, regardless of the type of country, the national image was highly correlated with the degree of subjective contact evaluated by individuals, but there was a weak tendency with contact quality. Second, there was no significant interaction between the country type and contact status for national image, however, different national images for each country were detected. In other word, for contact quantity, contact groups showed more positive national images compared to non-contact groups in Russia, but not Japan, China, and the US. For contact quality, the positive contact experience group showed more positive national images compared to the negative contact experience group, but only in traditional alliance countries. This study highlights the importance of implementing different strategies for countries to maintain peaceful international relations.

Building the national image is the core of building China's soft power. This paper used the survey data of the PEW Research Center as the data for evaluating China's national image, and used the foreign direct investment (OFDI) data from 2009 to 2019 to empirically analyze the relationship between OFDI and the improvement of China's national image and the mechanism by which OFDI affects the national image. The research results show that OFDI plays an important role in promoting the improvement of China's national image, and the robustness test further verified related conclusions. In the mechanism verification, it was found that OFDI contributes to promoting the improvement of China's national image through the promotion effect of economic and social development, the effect of social responsibility, and the improvement of public opinion. According to additional analysis, OFDI's effects on improving the national image include ‘heterogeneous investment motivation’, ‘investment stage’, and ‘investment contracts and political affinity’, and ‘time effect’ and ‘distance effect’ on improving the national image. The research results of this paper are expected to contribute to providing the basis for standards and decision-making for building and improving China's national image, and to make a policy contribution to improving China's external image and deadlocked Korea-China relations.

The Olympic Games are a world-renowned sporting event, including the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics. Most countries in the world participate in them and show their national images. In this paper, we analyze the contents released by mainstream media and athletes during the Winter Olympic Games. We believe that different platforms and media constitute multiple information subjects, and the national image disseminated through those subjects is pretty influential. Among them, mainstream media, athletes, and self-media convey the national image presented in the media events of the Winter Olympics. Self-media makes the audience another information source, which improves information transmission by processing and creating information, so that the national image represented by the Winter Olympics and related information influence the audience in multiple directions. Overall, the communication mode of multiple subjects strengthens the audience's ability to perceive the national image and makes the audience accept the national image conveyed in the events by interaction, authority, and other ways.

Medals, media and myth of national images: How Chinese audiences thought of foreign countries during the Beijing Olympics

Effects of the above project for Taekwondo, informed as a world-wide sport, would be various like this, but this study has focused on the national image because we live in the society, which stresses on image, so that it can be said that we live in the society of image. In case of impressing others with positive image, they also respond positively, while in case the appearances seen to the public are positive and satisfying then the organization, group, company and country also would have positive images. Image is considered more important in case of country. Since many countries put efforts to improve their images as more people get thinking that national image is national competition. Based on precedent studies about national image, this study is to see how foreigners think of Korean image and how Taekwondo awareness influence on the image. The purpose of this study is to see what is needed to create positive image of Korea out of the drawn data, and to offer basic data to get a more efficient way to improve Korean image in the international society. To reach the purpose of this study, foreign and interchanging students of K, Y and S university in metropolitan area were chosen as a population, and samples were extracted by Convenience Sampling Method among them. Data were processed by Frequency Analysis, Factor Analysis, Reliability Analysis, Independent Sample T-Test, Post-Hoc, Correlation Analysis and Multiple regression analysis, with SPSS/PC+ 17.0K Version for Window users. As a result of the study, comprehensively seeing the influences on the national images followed by Taekwondo awareness as external factors, the more they trained the better image they had. In evaluating factors for national image, the more the recognized about Taekwondo the more positive it was found out to influence on the national image. In the field of future-oriented factors of the national image, the more recognized and trained about Taekwondo the more they were found out to influence on positive image of the country. In the field of negative factors for the national image, the more recognized and trained about Taekwondo the more they were found out to influence on negative image of the country.

With the advent of the era of globalization and the rise of the wave of the information revolution, international public opinion and national image have become necessary considerations for a country to realize its national interests in the international community. The outbreak of the global epidemic in the past two years has pushed China to the center of public opinion again, threatening China's national image. This once again reminds us that we should use public diplomacy to carry out the long-term strategic task of building an excellent national image. My country has used national image propaganda films to shape the image of a peaceful, open, and friendly big country. Some of these experiences are worth learning from, and some problems are worth reflecting on and discussing. Taking the Chinese national image propaganda films "Character" and "Angle" as examples, combined with Lasswell's 5W theory, this paper discusses the advantages and difficulties of using national image propaganda films to shape national image in China's public diplomacy. We provide some constructive solutions to the difficulties and problems encountered by our predecessors, look to the future, and look forward to the development direction of shaping China's national image.

Country branding in post-truth Era: A configural narrative

The broader setting for this research is the increase in willingness of governments of all political hues to stage sports mega-events. The paper starts from the observation that many states have and do instrumentalise sport to promote their country's image or ‘brand’ and attempt to gain prestige. This paper argues that Germany employed a deliberate leveraging strategy to improve their nation's (poor) image abroad. How did Germany do this? This study focuses on three aspects that were central to Germany's leveraging tactics: a series of long-term, carefully co-ordinated campaigns; the focus on a ‘fan-centred’ approach to the organisation of the event and the creation of a ‘feelgood factor’ around the tournament. More broadly, the article seeks to contribute to the nascent literature on leveraging sports mega-events by employing Chalip's 2004 model of leveraging legacies as an organising principle and focusing on strategies to improve a nation's image used by Germany.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, China was the largest source country in Japan’s inbound tourism market. The middle class, with its high consumption desire, was the main contributor of Chinese tourists to Japan, an important force driving the Japanese economy and influencing the spread of Japan’s national image in China through the Internet. For this study, I collected 4,785 text data from Japan travelogues on two major Chinese travel websites between January 2016 and March 2022, conducted data mining and content analysis, and combined the texts to reveal the basic characteristics of Chinese middle-class tourists to Japan, as well as their perceptions and evaluations of Japan’s national image. The results show a change in the travel needs of the Chinese middle class from shopping, etc., to diverse, specific, and individual travel experiences and an obvious willingness to revisit. Regarding their perceptions and evaluations of Japan's macro national image, Japan’s national capacity is mainly reflected in its culture and economic technology, while its national characteristics are mainly reflected in hospitability. Although most impressed with Japan’s environmental management, mainly its infrastructure and natural resources, the macro sentiment of the tourists is influenced by historical Sino-Japanese relations and reveals reservations about Japan. Japan’s micro national image, as perceived by the tourists through tourist attractions, mainly relates to activities, while their perceptions of the tourist environment are the richest, focusing on popular attractions and landscapes. Their perceptions of tourism facilities cover various aspects such as catering, accommodation, transportation, entertainment, and services. Furthermore, their micro-emotions are mainly reflected in their satisfaction and praise of the destination environment. These results have several implications for tourism marketing and national image promotion in the post-pandemic era, when outbound tourism has fully recovered.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and investigate the role of Romanian post-communist witness literature for contemporary historiography in outlining national and social (self-)images. This type of literature, written mostly by former political detainees, is perceived by literary criticism as a specific borderline segment partly relevant as historical documents and partly as literary texts. Applying the conceptual pattern coined by Giorgio Agamben. in his analysis based upon the national socialist concentration camp, to post-communist depositional literature reveals two focal directions of imagological relevance: on the one hand, the points of similarity and difference of totalitarian practices in creating stereotypes, cultivating the sense of absolute antagonist otherness and promoting distorted ethnic, social and national images and. on the other hand, the particular contributions and limitations posed by the post-totalitarian depositional discourse in (re)-creating national and social (self-)images.