Public Stance Research Articles

Decoding nationalistic biases in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam research

ABSTRACT The Nile Basin, supporting 40% of Africa's population, faces a critical challenge in aligning developmental goals with water security needs. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) illustrates this dilemma: it promises substantial energy benefits for Ethiopia but raises downstream water scarcity concerns, particularly in Egypt. This study examines GERD-related research to understand how academic perspectives may influence regional tensions or foster collaboration. Through systematic analysis of 79 articles published between 2011 and 2023, we utilized quantitative sentiment analysis to explore potential biases linked to researcher nationality, methodology, and co-authorship diversity. Findings reveal a statistically significant nationalistic bias, with Egyptian and Ethiopian researchers showing negative and positive sentiments, respectively, suggesting research can inadvertently shape polarized public and political stances on GERD. Importantly, studies with diverse co-authorship displayed reduced bias, underscoring the value of multi-national collaboration in mitigating partiality. Contrary to expectations, qualitative methods did not necessarily correlate with extreme positions, while quantitative methods appeared vulnerable to unintended bias. These insights highlight the need for critically assessing academic objectivity in transboundary resource issues, advocating for interdisciplinary and collaborative research to build mutual trust, which could potentially inform and improve regional diplomatic efforts.

Use of large language models as a scalable approach to understanding public health discourse.

Online public health discourse is becoming more and more important in shaping public health dynamics. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable solution for analysing the vast amounts of unstructured text found on online platforms. Here, we explore the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT models and open-source alternatives, for extracting public stances towards vaccination from social media posts. Using an expert-annotated dataset of social media posts related to vaccination, we applied various LLMs and a rule-based sentiment analysis tool to classify the stance towards vaccination. We assessed the accuracy of these methods through comparisons with expert annotations and annotations obtained through crowdsourcing. Our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting of best-in-class LLMs are the best performing methods, and that all alternatives have significant risks of substantial misclassification. The study highlights the potential of LLMs as a scalable tool for public health professionals to quickly gauge public opinion on health policies and interventions, offering an efficient alternative to traditional data analysis methods. With the continuous advancement in LLM development, the integration of these models into public health surveillance systems could substantially improve our ability to monitor and respond to changing public health attitudes.

James Baldwin in the USSR and Post-Soviet Countries, 1970s–2010s

This article explores the history of Baldwin Studies in the USSR and post-Soviet countries (Azerbajian, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), which is illustrative of literary approaches and interpretations characteristic of Soviet scholarship. First translations of his short stories, essays, and the play Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared in the early 1960s, followed by commentaries in leading Soviet literary and popular journals. For ideological reasons, in the 1960–70s the focus was on the writer’s public stance and involvement in the civil rights movement. It was only in the years of perestroika—“openness”—and the 1990s that his oeuvre in its entirety began to be discussed without taboos, omissions, or ideological bias. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to discussions of aspects of Baldwin’s method and peculiarities of his style. At present, James Baldwin is regarded as a key personality in contemporary US literature, though interest in his literary heritage has somewhat subsided.

“Ideology and Religion” how left‐right ideology plays a key role in attitudes toward Israel and Palestine in Sweden

AbstractThis research underscores the key role of ideology in shaping the Swedish public's stance towards Israel and Palestine. With the help of a survey conducted by the Surveyinstitute in 2020, this paper studies the Swedish population's attitudes toward the actions of Israel and Palestine in the Israel‐Palestine conflict. The findings reveal a distinct ideological divide along the left‐right scale in the attitudes of the Swedish population towards Israel and Palestine's actions. This ideological chasm extends to additional actors, such as Sweden, the United States, and the EU, in the Israel‐Palestine conflict. While religion does exert influence, particularly among practicing individuals, the study concludes that ideology is the most relevant factor in attitudes toward the actions of Israel and Palestina from a Swedish perspective.

Epistemic Hubris

ABSTRACT It is common nowadays for laypeople to take public stances on complex issues, such as the effectiveness of a vaccine or the seriousness of anthropogenic climate change, without any kind of disciplinary expertise. Yet those who do so act as if they were experts in the field, disseminating their thoughts and sometimes also spreading their advice. Scholars have ascribed this phenomenon to various kinds of individuals, such as conspiracy or contrarian thinkers, science denialists, know-it-all experts and celebrities. This paper aims to argue that behind such different manifestations lies a common, independently identifiable epistemic disposition that will be called epistemic hubris that will be fully explained in relation to other epistemic vices already discussed in the literature. Epistemic hubris includes, but is not limited to, overconfidence; it may or not entail arrogance; it is similar to yet distinct from hyper-autonomy and conspiracy thinking. Its peculiarity is that individuals who develop it seem to believe that they can easily become experts, even without special training. This disposition negatively affects individuals’ epistemic conduct, hindering knowledge and true belief formation, and can generate morally relevant consequences when people who falsely consider themselves experts begin to share their mistaken beliefs.

What Is Brand Activism? Explicating Consumers’ Perceptions of Its Characteristics, Authenticity, and Effectiveness

Guided by existing brand-activism literature, this study investigates the rising phenomenon of brands taking a public stance on controversial issues to advocate for societal changes. Based on one-on-one, in-depth interviews, this study delineates the conceptual differences between brand activism and corporate social responsibility (CSR), proposes a new conceptualization of brand activism, and explicates consumers’ responses to brand activism acts. We propose a new conceptualization of brand activism, defined as values-based, controversial, focused on external communications, and driven by public interest. We also unpack factors that potentially shape consumers’ perceptions of authenticity in brand activism activities—measurable action, brand-cause fit, and consistency. Furthermore, we explore consumers’ responses to brand-activism acts and show that consumers generally rate these actions favorably. The study offers a comprehensive conceptualization of brand activism that is empirically substantiated and explicates factors shaping its perceived authenticity and consumer reactions. These findings advance current literature on brand activism and CSR.

Taking sides: Corporate social responsibility and political ideology

AbstractIn the United States and other countries, large private firms are increasingly more likely to take public political stances on controversial issues. Firms behave as ideological actors when they take sides in large public debates on social and economic issues. These stances may involve public speech, changes in the terms of service, or in internal reorganization and intrafirm actions. Despite the increase in firms' political actions, firms' ideological orientations remain unexamined. To answer this question, we collect corporate social responsibility statements from Fortune 1000 firms. Using semisupervised topic models, we identify topics that reflect stances on environmental and social issues. We then examine if firms are more likely to take stances on political issues due to pragmatic or ideological factors. We find that while pragmatic considerations play a role, firms' political stances are more driven by the ideological orientation of employees and managers. This research contributes a novel measure of firm ideology and sheds new light on the determinants of corporate political activity.

Employee responses to CEO activism

We examine employee responses to CEO activism, the increasingly common practice of CEOs taking public stances on socio-political issues. CEO activism may bolster employees' identification with their organizations and strengthen shared beliefs among employees. Alternatively, CEO activism may alienate employees if CEO stances contrast with employees' ideologies. We find that employee satisfaction is higher when CEOs engage in activism that is aligned with employees’ ideologies. Furthermore, firms with CEO activism experience a net inflow of productive, ideologically-aligned inventors, which contributes to increased firm-level innovation. The improvements in employee satisfaction and innovation constitute an important channel that connects aligned CEO activism to increased firm value.

Examining the cultural influence on online stances towards COVID-19 preventive measures and their impact on incidence and mortality: A global stance detection analysis of tweets

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nations implemented various preventive measures, triggering varying online responses. This study examines cultural influences on public online stances toward these measures and their impacts on COVID-19 cases/deaths. Stance detection analysis was used to analyze 16,428,557 Tweets regarding COVID-19 preventive measures from 95 countries, selected based on Hofstede's cultural dimensions. To ensure the variety of population, countries were chosen based on Twitter data availability and a minimum sample size of 385 tweets, achieving a 95% confidence level with a 5% margin of error. The weighted regression analysis revealed that the relationship between culture and online stances depends on the cultural congruence of each measure. Specifically, power distance positively predicted stances for all measures, while indulgence had a negative effect overall. Effects of other cultural indices varied across measures. Individualism negatively affected face coverings stances. Uncertainty avoidance influenced lockdown and vaccination stances negatively but had a positive effect on social distancing stances. Long-term orientation negatively affected lockdown and social distancing stances but positively influenced quarantine stances. Cultural tightness only negatively affected face coverings and quarantine stances. Online stances toward face coverings mediated the relationship between cultural indices and COVID-19 cases/deaths. As such, public health officials should consider cultural profiles and use culturally congruent communication strategies when implementing preventive measures for future pandemics. Furthermore, leveraging digital tools is vital in navigating and shaping online stances to enhance the effectiveness of these measures.

Situating deep learning in a relating management approach: Examining the dynamics and outcomes of contingent organization-public relationships (COPRs) in crisis

Existing research in crisis communication and public relations focuses on relationship quality or outcomes, along with their causes and effects, mainly using cross-sectional survey data. This research expands the COPR theoretical framework by employing big data and deep learning to analyze the dynamics and intricacies of corporate and public stances during a long-term organizational crisis. Focusing on Monsanto/Bayer’s Roundup crisis from 2012 to 2022, the study analyzed 232,694 tweets and 334 articles to examine corporate stances, public stances, and various relationship modes formed from both party’s standpoints throughout the crisis. The results show the evolving and interdependent interactions between corporations and their publics, as well as the longitudinal impacts of public stances on stock prices. Our findings highlight the application of computational methods for enhancing strategic decision-making in managing organization-public relationships, particularly during prolonged and complex crisis scenarios.

YouTube parsing as a tool for analyzing public stance

YouTube parsing as a tool for analyzing public stance

Enhancing public health response: a framework for topics and sentiment analysis of COVID-19 in the UK using Twitter and the embedded topic model.

To protect citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic unprecedented public health restrictions were imposed on everyday life in the UK and around the world. In emergencies like COVID-19, it is crucial for policymakers to be able to gauge the public response and sentiment to such measures in almost real-time and establish best practices for the use of social media for emergency response. In this study, we explored Twitter as a data source for assessing public reaction to the pandemic. We conducted an analysis of sentiment by topic using 25 million UK tweets, collected from 26th May 2020 to 8th March 2021. We combined an innovative combination of sentiment analysis via a recurrent neural network and topic clustering through an embedded topic model. The results demonstrated interpretable per-topic sentiment signals across time and geography in the UK that could be tied to specific public health and policy events during the pandemic. Unique to this investigation is the juxtaposition of derived sentiment trends against behavioral surveys conducted by the UK Office for National Statistics, providing a robust gauge of the public mood concurrent with policy announcements. While much of the existing research focused on specific questions or new techniques, we developed a comprehensive framework for the assessment of public response by policymakers for COVID-19 and generalizable for future emergencies. The emergent methodology not only elucidates the public's stance on COVID-19 policies but also establishes a generalizable framework for public policymakers to monitor and assess the buy-in and acceptance of their policies almost in real-time. Further, the proposed approach is generalizable as a tool for policymakers and could be applied to further subjects of political and public interest.

A quiver full of arrows: An examination of tactics employed by CEO activists in Ghana

CEO activism is rising in popularity around the world due to growing social injustices, the inability of governments to address key concerns of their constituents (e.g., global warming, health, and safety), and abuses of power. Many people are simply fed up with the current state of affairs and want to see people in power held accountable. As a result, CEOs are taking public stances on timely issues. They are doing so not only because they want to win favor with their employees and customers but also because they feel an obligation—and pressure—to speak up and pursue greater good on behalf of others since they have platforms and visibility that are not shared by those whose lack similar status or vehicles to for their voices to be heard. This is a qualitative study that involved in-depth interviews with 24 CEO activists. Data analysis followed the hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The findings advance the CEO activism literature by focusing on the tactical repertoire of activist CEOs within the non-Western context of Ghana. Activist CEOs in Ghana use a broader portfolio of tactics than previously thought, offer a typology of CEO activism tactics, and help to internationalize CEO activism research. This study also expands upon nascent research streams such as responsible management, Africapitalism, Afrocentric philosophies of sustainability, and public relations for social responsibility.

The other extreme of the circumplex of emotion: an investigation of consumer outrage

PurposeAll hypothesized relationships were significant. Specifically, H1 was supported as disconfirmation and surprising consumption were significantly correlated. Moreover, arousal (H2) and outrage (H4a) were functions of surprising consumption and negative affect (H3) and outrage (H4b) were functions of arousal. H4c was also supported as negative affect had a significant direct effect on consumer outrage. In addition, disconfirmation had negative direct effects on both negative affect (H5) and dissatisfaction (H6a) and dissatisfaction was a function of negative affect. Finally, both outrage (H7a) and dissatisfaction (H7b) had significant negative effects on behavioral intentions.Design/methodology/approachRespondents were recruited to participate in the data collection in a “college town” in the Southeastern United States. Respondents were provided a paper and pencil data collection instrument that include complete survey instructions and the balance of the research design. To adequately test all hypotheses, the researchers developed a unique scenario that described an extreme service failure that takes place during a hotel check-in. Each respondent was asked to read the scenario and then reflect upon it as they responded to items that assessed their feelings toward the hotel check-in experience.FindingsThe results provide additional evidence in support of the existence of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum, as well as specifically identifying the affective nature of levels of satisfaction that fall surprisingly well-below the zone of tolerance. The authors feel that the present study is a necessary step to provide a more comprehensive view of the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum. Likewise, the authors posit initial evidence of the antecedents and consequences of consumer outrage. This research supports the prior assumptions of Westbrook (1987) about the vast detrimental effects of negative affective responses to service or product failures.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research needs to discover just how extremely deficient service has to be to elicit outrage. Is outrage a personal phenomenon with every consumer experiencing it to different degrees? As such, is outrage triggered at different points on the satisfaction-dissatisfaction continuum? The zone of tolerance seems to suggest this, but it would be interesting to discover if at some collective level of dissatisfaction consumers generally begin to show signs of outrage. Likewise, it would be interesting to understand how the level and pattern of outrage results in customers exiting the relationship but also results in loyal customers becoming enemies (e.g. Gregiore et al., 2009; Gregiore and Fisher, 2008).Originality/valueThe motivation for the current study is both pragmatic and theoretical. As alluded to above, it is evident that the level of service customers’ emotional responses to their service experiences are increasing in frequency and intensity. These negative emotions affect the efficacy of service workers and impede the financial performance of service providers. The popular mantra of “anti-woke” consumers, “Go Woke, Go Broke,” is indicative of the importance of negative emotion. Sometimes referred to as “brand activism” (Moorman, 2020; Sarkar and Kotlet, 2019), recent public stances on social and political issues have led to a boycott of Gillette razors, the burning of Nike shoes, and the canceling of Costco Memberships in what has been called “virtue signaling” (Vredenburg et al., 2020). While none of these actions are desirable, the importance of investigating the impact of strong negative emotions (i.e. outrage) is further demonstrated in reports that 65% of consumers expect companies to authentically support such issues (Barton et al., 2018; Edelman, 2018; Larcker and Tayan, 2018; Moorman, 2020).

Armenians in Modern Turkish Literature: The Ghost Stories of Orhan Pamuk

Abstract: The relative paucity of Armenians in the novels of the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is ironic, given Pamuk's own political and very public stance on the Turkish government's silence concerning the twentieth century history of violence towards its Armenian minorities. I examine a possible relationship between this paucity and the influence of theory (deconstruction, new historicism) on Pamuk as an intellectual—whether a conviction regarding the intangibility of history, nationhood, or the self has any part to play in the way Armenians haunt Pamuk's work. If Armenians in Pamuk's fiction effectively amount to ghosts, examining the meaning of their spectral presence will highlight a strategy for lamenting a past one can now no longer articulate.

Transcending Economic Authority. From a Businessman’s Enthusiasm for the Applied Humanities to the Founding of a Regional “Club de Réflexion” (1950s–1980s)

In this article, the role of culture in the business world is explored based on the situated case of a businessman in Western France. In the 1950s, he was involved in a sector-based professional organization linked to productivity and informed by the humanities; twenty years later, he founded and invested in a “Club de refléxion” (or “Thinkers’ club.”) Taking seriously the role played by modernist beliefs and their meaning—both in this man’s rising career and in the political, economic, and social configuration of an industrial city—reveals the impact of the circulation of ideas for this business leader (a belief in an entrepreneurial game that is inextricably linked to the common good and the acquisition of a reflexive stance) and the conditions of possibility for this appropriation of generic schemes in the city. The industry actor in question permitted himself, and was permitted by others, to take public stances in the local press and he transposed his acquired economic and psycho-sociological knowledge across to the Club Kervégan, which operated as both a neutral place and a political headquarters. This article therefore explores the transformation of economic authority into symbolic power.

Institutional leadership after Dobbs: a mixed methods analysis of US medical schools' public statements regarding abortion

IntroductionMedical schools, as significant and influential organisations within their communities, have the potential and the capacity to impact abortion policy. Organisations often engage in advocacy by issuing public statements that...

Neologisms in the media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war in the context of information warfare

The article provides a comprehensive account of English words and phrases that gained media prominence during the first 10 months of the Russia-Ukraine war. Three categories of lexical units were identified: lexical neologisms (new coinages), such as sanctionista, war fatigue, Zelensky-washing, etc.; semantic neologisms – words and phrases that had existed prior to the war, but acquired new meanings due to it – such as deputinization, Russian exodus, etc.; units that had been used occasionally and inconsistently up to 2022, but gained new relevance in light of the war – such as ruscism, stalinization, digital iron curtain, etc. Some of the units under study were first coined in the Ukrainian or Russian languages and subsequently spread to other languages (missile terrorism, ruscism), while others are limited to English only and have no equivalents in either Ukrainian or Russian (sanctionista, archivocide). Focusing on news media and social media discourse on the Russia-Ukraine war, we trace the etymology of these words and phrases, their recurrence and context of use, as well as the pragmatic value they have in shaping public stance on the war in the West. We also take into consideration humorous occasionalisms, memes and monikers that trended on social media during this period of the war, providing a way of tension release while also contributing to Ukrainian information warfare and fundraising purposes. The study is instrumental in driving our understanding of the mechanisms of media framing of emotionally loaded and potentially dividing political issues.

CEO Activism and Firm Value

We investigate the increasingly common practice of chief executive officers (CEOs) taking public stances on social and political issues (CEO activism). We find that CEO activism stems from a CEO’s personal ideology and its alignment with investor, employee, and customer ideologies. We show that CEO activism results in positive market reactions. Furthermore, firms with CEO activism realize increased shareholdings from investors with a greater liberal leaning, who rebalance their portfolios toward these firms. Our results suggest that investors’ socio-political preferences are an important channel through which CEO activism affects equity demand and stock prices. Notably, CEOs are less likely to be fired when their activist stances generate positive market responses. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4971 .

Appearance and reality: Einstein and the early debate on the reality of length contraction

In 1909, Ehrenfest published a note in the Physikalische Zeitschrift showing that a Born rigid cylinder could not be set into rotation without stresses, as elements of the circumference would be contracted but not the radius. Ignatowski and Varićak challenged Ehrenfest’s result in the same journal, arguing that the stresses would emerge if length contraction were a real dynamical effect, as in Lorentz’s theory. However, no stresses are expected to arise, according to Einstein’s theory, where length contraction is only an apparent effect due to an arbitrary choice of clock synchronization. Ehrenfest and Einstein considered this line of reasoning dangerously misleading and took a public stance in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, countering that relativistic length contraction is both apparent and real. It is apparent since it disappears for the comoving observer, but it is also real since it can be experimentally verified. By drawing on his lesser-known private correspondence with Varićak, this paper shows how Einstein used the Ehrenfest paradox as a tool for an ‘Einsteinian pedagogy’. Einstein’s argumentative stance is contrasted with Bell’s use of the Dewan-Beran thread-between-spaceships paradox to advocate for a ‘Lorentzian pedagogy’. The paper concludes that the disagreement between the two ways of ‘teaching special relativity’ stems from divergent interpretations of philosophical categories such as ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’.