Formal Messages Research Articles

A.P. Chekhov A life in letters – Correspondence (1891 – 1904)

"A. P. Cehov A life in letters - Correspondence (1891 - 1904)" (volume II), neat edition, selection, translation from Russian and notes by Sorina Bălănescu, is not just a book - it represents a gesture of intellectual nobility by Mrs. Sorina Bălănescu, theater critic, literary historian, university professor who left her ma4rk on many generations of students of UAIC (where she taught Russian language and literature for 42 years) and UNAGE Iași, member of the founding team of the Doctoral School of theater, translator of esteemed professional status to these we will add a membership that she proudly declares: member of the "Dostoevsky Society of Academic Studies" - an international, elitist club with only (about) 120 members. In a world of truncated, short and (mostly) formal messages; the epistolary genre reminds us of the need for confession, the sharing of joy and sadness, and (especially) of the word needing meaning and emotion. 74 themes, 317 texts - 317 fragments of life, which we can understand better thanks to the translator's care to give us her work and spirit."

THE LINGUISTIC ASPECT OF MILITARY-DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE IN ARABIC

The article analyses the language of military diplomatic communication. It examines the distinctive linguistic peculiarities of Arabic military diplomatic document processing. A comparative analysis is made of official diplomatic and military-diplomatic foreign-language correspondence, highlighting their characteristic and distinctive features. The article demonstrates the composition and design of military official letters, formal messages, combat orders and directives, using examples of field materials in Arabic collected by the authors. The authors explore the role of diplomatic correspondence in building military-diplomatic relations and highlight the role of the military diplomatic correspondence in the formation and development of these relations. By examining official diplomatic correspondence, it is possible to visualize a state's foreign policy, the level of its relations with other states, and the demonstration of friendship or hostility. Experience shows that inaccuracies or misunderstood expressions can aggravate relations between different national cultures and linguistic groups, and even result in outbreaks of tension between states. However, diplomatic correspondence can clarify misunderstandings and the apologies it contains can prevent clashes and wars and restore peace and harmony. Considering not only the historically established diplomatic relations between states and social groups, but also the tense socio-political situation in the Arab East nowadays, we can conclude that official diplomatic and military diplomatic correspondence significantly affects international relations and their development in general.

Offenders convicted of child sexual exploitation material offences: characteristics of offenders and an exploration of judicial censure

Research on the discernments of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM), particularly delivered by judicial officers, is limited. Sentencing remarks can disseminate formal messages about the offender’s character while censuring crime. This study aimed to: obtain a deeper understanding on the characteristics of CSEM offenders and explore the censure sentencing judiciary impart. An exploratory content analysis conducted on sentencing remarks of 29 offenders across a 10-year period in Australia found all offenders were male, mostly middle-aged, with diverse employment and education. Most possessed and/or accessed CSEM involving: children under three and the most severe category (sadism/bestiality). Characteristics and censure involved: offender’s motivations and explanations for offending (sub-themes included poor mental health and substance abuse, downplay or denial, and addiction); CSEM offences are not victimless crimes; and disparities in the offender’s public versus private life. This study’s findings are valuable for law, psychology and social work disciplines across Australia and internationally.

‘What are you doing for your kids?’ Exploring messages and Canadian parents’ Decisions and perspectives in children’s sport and free play

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore messages, formal (e.g. campaigns) and informal (e.g. parenting networks), heard by Canadian parents within children’s sport and free play and to understand their perceived role in parents’ experiences and decision making in these leisure contexts. Guided by interpretive description, twelve interviews were conducted with sport parents of children in middle childhood. The transcribed interviews were analysed and interpreted using a sociological lens. Our findings, which included three themes: 1) The ‘best’, 2) ‘That’ parent, and 3) Message confusion, suggested that messages from various levels of influence affect parents’ decision making within children’s sport and free play. Informal messages from parenting networks, community norms, and popular parenting labels (e.g. helicopter, over-protective) were influential. Formal messages were found to play less of a direct role. Parents’ perspectives of ‘good parenting’, current parenting ideologies, and the impact of messages are discussed.

Seven Dirty Words: Hot-Button Language That Undermines Interprofessional Education and Practice.

An increasingly common goal of health professions education is preparing learners to collaborate with the full range of members on a health care team. While curriculum developers have identified many logistical and conceptual barriers to interprofessional education, one overlooked factor threatens to undermine interprofessional education and practice: language. Language reveals the mental metaphors governing thoughts and actions. The words that faculty members and health care providers use send messages that can-consciously or not-undermine explicit lessons about valuing each member of the care team. Too often, word choices make visible hierarchies in health care that may contradict overt messages about collaboration.In this Perspective, the author draws on his experience as an outsider coming to academic medicine, noticing that certain words triggered negative responses in colleagues from different professions. He reflects on some of the most charged (or hot-button) words commonly heard in health care and educational settings and suggests possible alternatives that have similar denotations but that also have more collaborative connotations. By exploring seven of these dirty words, the author intends to raise awareness about the unintended effects of word choices. Changing exclusionary language may help promote the adoption of new metaphors for professional relationships that will more easily facilitate interprofessional collaboration and reinforce the formal messages about collaborative practice aimed at learners.

Instant Messaging in Dental Education

Instant messaging (IM) is when users communicate instantly via their mobile devices, and it has become one of the most preferred choices of tools to communicate amongst health professions students. The aim of this study was to understand how dental students communicate via IM, faculty members' perspectives on using IM to communicate with students, and whether such tools are useful in the learning environment. After free-associating themes on online communication, two draft topic guides for structured interviews were designed that focussed on mobile device-related communication activities. A total of 20 students and six faculty members at the University of Birmingham School of Dentistry agreed to take part in the interviews. Students were selected from years 1-5 representing each year group. The most preferred communication tools were emails, social networking, and IM. Emails were used for more formal messages, and IM and social networking sites were used for shorter messages. WhatsApp was the most used IM app because of its popular features such as being able to check if recipients have read and received messages and group work. The students reported that changes were necessary to improve their communication with faculty members. The faculty members reported having mixed feelings toward the use of IM to communicate with students. The students wished to make such tools a permanent part of their learning environment, but only with the approval of faculty members. The faculty members were willing to accept IM as a communication tool only if it is monitored and maintained by the university and has a positive effect on learning.

The Visioning of Policy and the Hope of Implementation: Support for Graduate Students’ Teaching at a Canadian Institution


 
 
 
 Graduate students teach within the complex higher education environment of financial constraint, greater student diversity, and growing graduate enrolment (e.g., Austin, 2003). Teaching roles offer financial support and skill development while multiplying responsibilities (Price, 2008). Across the national working papers and institutional reports, policies, and websites that we analyzed, support for graduate students was linked to their roles (e.g., teaching assistants). Formal messages about responsibility varied; national documents pointed to institutions, while institutional documents pointed to departments, courses, and individual graduate students. Most supports for graduate students reported were already existing piecemeal supports with limited implementation, despite policy recommendations for broad, flexible, open-ended, and recognized programming. Future research is needed to further clarify the pathways from vision to action.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

‘HIV is an enemy of childbearers’: the construction of local epidemiology in rural Malawi

In the sub-Saharan African AIDS epidemic there is no shortage of formal messages about HIV distributed through health clinics, NGOs and the media. These messages, however, do not always address the issues that are of most importance for people living in the epidemic and learning how to navigate it safely. In rural Malawi, one message that has been absent concerns the implications of HIV for childbearing. Using data from in-depth interviews, this paper argues that rural Malawians socially constructed their own belief system and came to believe strongly that pregnancy and childbirth would negatively impact the disease progression of HIV-positive women. Through the recursive processes of selective observation, interpretation of formal public health messages and discussion within social networks, rural Malawians concluded that HIV and childbearing did not go together. In an uncertain world, social constructive processes such as these that are fluid and responsive to local circumstances are particularly important for making sense of the seemingly senseless and for developing tools to navigate unsettled times.

Building Organizational Identities Through Discursive Practices

Identity-building processes have gained increasing role in scholarly approach to organizations from the past two decades of the 20th Century. Globalization, information society developments and the dynamic of social change have brought about cultural diversity of organized action, encouraging theoretical and practical approaches to organizations as cultures. Research in organizational cultures differ in their focus and methodology, drawing insightful conclusions by comparing different nations, departmental structures or professions. We propose a comparative approach to identity building processes through the lens of these perspectives.Leaders are cornerstones of identity-building in their organizations. A discourse analysis of leaders’ formal and informal messages by looking at “presentational rhetoric” and “operational rhetoric” (Van Maanen and Schein 21) gives us a clue on the type of culture they are keen to build.

The AIDS-related activities of religious leaders in Malawi

The AIDS-related activities of religious leaders in Africa extend far beyond preaching about sexual mortality. This study aims to quantify the involvement of religious leaders in the fight against AIDS and to identify key predictors of the types of prevention strategies they promote. Using data from a random sample of Christian and Muslim leaders in Malawi, I use logistic regression to predict six types of AIDS activities, which correspond to three distinct types: formal messages (i.e., preaching), pragmatic interventions (monitoring the sexual behaviour of members and advising divorce to avoid infection) and the promotion of biomedical prevention strategies (promoting condom use and testing for HIV). Preaching about AIDS is the most common prevention activity and promoting condom use is the least; sizable proportions of clergy promote testing and engage in pragmatic interventions. Denominational patterns in the type of engagement are weak and inconsistent. However, inquiries into the motivation for leaders' activities show that discussions with members about AIDS are the most consistent predictor, suggesting that religious leaders' engagement with HIV prevention is primarily a demand-driven phenomenon.

Car Keys, House Keys, Easter Eggs, and Curricula

The hidden curriculum has become a topic of high concern within our colleges of pharmacy. Despite our efforts to map the curriculum to competency statements and our painstaking development of lectures and syllabi, students probably learn more about becoming a pharmacist from the unplanned, hidden curriculum than from our carefully designed formal presentations. It has been said that “The hidden curriculum is not simply found, one must go looking for it.”1 My efforts to go “looking for it,” lead me to conclude that our hidden curriculum is found in ways similar to how we find everyday things. Portions of the hidden curriculum might be compared to a misplaced set of car keys. Undoubtedly we have all spent time searching for car keys. In our hurry through our daily routine, we unconsciously drop our keys in unlikely places. In our curricula the “car keys” are passing conversations and nonverbal cues. Often our interactions with each other and our nonverbal communication are inconsistent with our more formal messages. Students receive didactic lectures espousing the importance of interprofessional teamwork. When they hear pharmacists belittle the efforts of other team members, they are unlikely to retain the right “take away” message. White coat ceremonies focused on the importance of core values, including respect for others and empathy, are unlikely to have the lasting impact we desire, if followed by an introductory pharmacy practice experience (IPPE) during which students hear health care professionals make derogatory remarks about a patient. Role modeling plays a critical part in developing future practitioners. Students learn by example. They not only learn specific skills, but also “cultural norms.” Faculty members who support each other, show empathy for patients, and create an inviting learning environment are likely to foster the development of future colleagues who are supportive, empathetic, and lifelong learners. On a different note, the hidden curriculum might be compared to house keys hidden under the doormat. The house keys are purposefully hidden, but their location may be more obvious than intended. The house keys in our curriculum are the powerful messages sent by our institutional policies and the allocation of our resources. Policies that allow students to attend professional meetings and funds that support their travel send messages that the institution values their participation in professional organizations. Promotion and tenure guidelines that reward excellence in teaching imply that the organization values teaching. Flexible work schedules for faculty and staff members may send the message that the organization is family friendly. These “keys” may not be in plain view, but their effect is evident. Finally, the hidden curriculum might be compared to an Easter egg hunt. Some messages we send in our curricula are expertly hidden, disguised in ways that one might never find without continually hunting. These are messages about our own shortcomings that we hide from our students, hoping that they will not be discovered. Perhaps we do not want students to realize that we do not have all the answers or that we make mistakes. We may worry that our students will recognize that transformation from resident or postdoctoral fellow one day to faculty member the next does not make us expert teachers overnight. We may avoid discussions that make us uncomfortable. After all, how do we teach a student how to deal with the death of a patient for whom he/she cared? How do we explain that the profession can evolve in the setting of health care reform legislation that we do not completely understand? Indeed, these Easter eggs in our curricula may pose the greatest challenges. It would be a productive exercise for faculty members within all of our colleges to examine their own personal curricula for hidden messages. Are we effective role models? What messages do our institutional policies convey? Does our allocation of resources reflect our values? And finally, what messages lurk in our silences?

R U Able to Meat Me: The Impact of Students’ Overly Casual Email Messages to Instructors

Out-of-classroom communication (OCC) in the form of email has increased considerably in the past few years. This study uses Interaction Adaptation Theory (IAT) to inform and frame the impact of using overly casual email messages with instructors. Study one used an experimental method to determine that message quality (casual vs. formal messages) accounted for between 48% and 64% of the variance explained in affect toward the student, student credibility, and message attitude. Message quality also significantly impacted on an instructor's willingness to comply with a simple request for a face-to-face meeting. Study two further examined these findings using a comparative analysis of both instructors and students. Findings reveal that instructors are bothered more than students by overly casual email messages. Instructors attribute students’ use of overly casual emails more heavily to training issues, while students attribute this to technology use. Two specific email violations that bother instructors more than students are emails not signed by the message sender and messages that include shortcuts like “RU” instead of “are you”. Finally, it appears that instructor generational differences have little impact on these descriptive findings.

Religious teachings and influences on the ABCs of HIV prevention in Malawi

This study examines the relationship between religion and HIV risk behaviors in rural Malawi, giving special attention to the role of religious congregations, the organizations with which rural Africans have most immediate contact. It draws on 2004 data from a household survey in 3 districts (N=3386), and quantitative and qualitative data collected in 2005 from 187 leaders of religious congregations previously identified in the survey. The first aim is descriptive--to identify overall patterns and variations in what religious leaders in rural Malawi teach about HIV and about sexual behavior in light of the epidemic. The second aim is to assess how religious organizations impact the behavior of individual members. I examine three outcomes that correspond with the ABCs of HIV prevention: abstinence (for never married persons), fidelity (for married persons), and condom use (among sexually active persons). Multi-level models reveal that religious affiliation and involvement are not correlated with the sexual behavior of congregation members, but that beliefs about appropriate sexual behavior and particular congregational characteristics are associated with adherence to A, B, and C. Individuals belonging to congregations led by clergy who 1) frequently deliver formal messages about HIV, 2) monitor the sexual behavior of members, and 3) privately encourage condom use report greater adherence to the ABCs of HIV prevention, suggesting that religious congregations are relevant for the sexual behavior of members and for better understanding the forces shaping individual behavior in the context of the African AIDS epidemic.

Effect of pictograms in text-messaging on impression formation of female students

This article examines the role of pictograms in text-messaging. Past research has shown that using emoticons in casual e-mail messages facilitates friendly impressions, while using emoticons in more formal and polite messages hinders sincere impressions of the sender. To examine how pictograms in text-messaging affects impressions of the sender, one-hundred and five female students were presented with different text-messages varying in pictogram use and message formality, and were subsequently asked to rate the impressions of each sender on multiple dimensions. The results showed a significant main effect of pictogram use as well as an interaction effect of pictograms and message formality. Use of pictograms generally facilitated favorable and friendly impressions towards the sender. However, whereas lack of pictograms leads to less sincere impressions for casual messages, pictograms did not affect sincerity for formal messages. The important role of pictograms in conveying emotional information in text-messaging is discussed.

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Two Urban Celebrations in Jewish Palestine

The civil religion created by Zionist settlers in Palestine included diverse rituals, among them the main annual public events performed in two Jewish towns: Purim in Tel-Aviv and Bikkurim in Hadar ha-Carmel. Based on various written and visual documents, these urban celebrations are described, analyzed, and compared to reveal ways in which the young Zionist community consolidated its collective identity during the 1920s and 1930s. The discussion includes the rituals' organization, execution, and reception; their formal ideological messages as well as implicit meanings; their socioeconomic facet in addition to their symbolic reading. Although both celebrations shared and expressed the same comprehensive national ideology, each also communicated unique local features, indicating how invented traditions can play important selfdefining and promotional roles in new towns.

Deviant organizational messages among suspect police officers in Israel

In light of criticism against the Israel National Police in recent years for excessive use of physical force, the personal views of Israeli police officers were elicited regarding the illegal use of force. Personal questionnaires were administered to a sample of police officers who had been investigated for using illegal force against citizens between 1989 and 1997. Informal messages contrary to the organization’s formal messages regarding the use of force, and justifying it in certain circumstances and for certain types of offense, seemed highly prevalent, especially among middle‐rank police officers. The results obtained provide support for the existence of a deviant organizational subculture.

Changing Contexts in the Professoriate

The current reform movement in higher education involves efforts to alter the missions of universities and the forms of scholarship necessq to accomplish these missions. The authors explore the changing contexts in the professoriate based on this redefinition of scholarship and cite the impact of changes on faculty roles and responsibilities, faculty socialization, and faculty evaluation. They indicate that the current reform movement will lead to significant changes in the way faculty work Department faculty will be given the autonomy to determine the mission of the department, the kinds of scholarship needed to fulfill that mission, and how to evaluate scholarship in their discipline. Formalized, structured socialization processes will be needed to provide consistent formal and informal messages to faculty regarding their changing roles and responsibilities, especially since individual faculty may have very different roles and responsibilities. Faculty will work in interdisciplinary, collaborative group...

The defense message system

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) plans to modernize the Defense Message System (DMS) to reduce costs and improve services. DMS includes all hardware, software, procedures, standards, facilities, and personnel used to exchange messages electronically in DoD. DMS today has two separate parts. The AUTODIN system handles formal messages between organizations, and the Defense Data Network's electronic mail system handles other messages. The DMS plan has a target architecture, for the year 2008, that integrates those separate systems, uses CCITT X.400 message handling and X.500 directory services, and provides writer-to-reader security with the Secure Data Network System developed by the National Security Agency. The implementation strategy has three phases that extend over 20 years. The plan has an indirect but strong effect on the Internet outside DoD.

A Citational Analysis of the Accounting Information Network

Citations appended to journal articles give us a measure of the number of formal messages passed between knowledge systems. They also provide a possible index for measuring the influence of one knowledge system on another. The accounting knowledge system nests within the social science knowledge system and is itself composed of at least three subsystems: an academic system, a management accounting system, and a professional system. An important component of each of these knowledge subsystems is the set of various journals which collect, store, and distribute information to their readers. Figure 1 presents a graphical description of the various component parts of the accounting knowledge system. In this paper, I examine first the flow of messages between the accounting system and other knowledge systems, and then the flow of messages within the accounting knowledge system, paying particular attention to the information flow between the academic and applied accounting networks. This will be followed by a citational profile of certain accounting journals. It should be emphasized that no qualitative connotation is implied by the analysis. The article provides an inventory of information flow within the accounting journal network.