Sense Of Community Identity Research Articles

Enhancing Relationships Through Online Brand Communities: Comparing Posters and Lurkers

ABSTRACT This study establishes the importance of considering both posters (interactive members) and lurkers (non-interactive members) for a clearer understanding of online brand communities. Based on organizational support theory and social identity theory, this study proposes a model a model that illustrates the impacts of perceived brand support in brands’ online communities upon members’ community identity and brand trust, leading to their positive behaviors toward the brand (i.e., purchase intention, resistance to negative information, and positive word of mouth) and how these effects differ between posters and lurkers. Using structural equation modeling, results reveal that in firm-hosted online brand communities, perceived brand support (i.e., recognizing contributions, encouraging interactions, and providing quality information) relates to members’ satisfaction by fulfilling their socioemotional needs (community identity) and increases their brand trust. Furthermore, multigroup analyses indicate significant differences in the paths to brand trust between posters and lurkers. Brand knowledge, providing quality information, and encouraging members to interact drive brand trust for lurkers. For posters, trust is driven by their sense of community identity and encouraging members to interact. This research advances the literature on online brand communities by shedding light on the scant knowledge of lurkers in online communities. It demonstrates how perceived support from brands can improve both posters’ and lurkers’ relationships with the community and the brand itself. The findings provide actionable managerial recommendations regarding how brands can manage their relationships with all members (both posters and lurkers) in their online communities.

Na ugorach czasu. Pamięć kultury i idylla w eseju Jerzego Stempowskiego W dolinie Dniestru

On Time’s Fallow Lands. Cultural Memory and Idyll in Jerzy Stempowski’s essay In Dniester Valley According to the author of the article, the key to the interpretation of Jerzy Stempowski’s essay In Dniester Valley are the programmatic remarks of Hostowiec, who wanted to impart the generic form of Vergilian essay onto the ancient form of bucolic idyll. The author uses the convention of idyll to present the ideal coexistence model for nations living in multicultural areas, where their sense of communal identity should be based on the fundament of cultural memory presented as the counterweight to oftentimes tragic historic past of the region.

The Islamic State’s Targeting of Christians and their Heritage: Genocide, Displacement and Reconciliation

ABSTRACT The rapid advance of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) across Syria and Iraq from 2013 had devastating consequences for the myriad peoples and heritage sites of the region. However, few studies have documented how those most affected perceive the destruction of their heritage, its complex relationship to their persecution and displacement, and the role they see for reconstruction in fostering peace. This paper addresses this lacuna by analysing interviews with Syrian and Iraqi Christians along three specific but inter-connected axes. First, in terms of genocide and belonging, respondents reported experiencing the destruction as a key component of the broader persecution, leading to a profound rupture of their sense of communal identity. Second, the axis of displacement and return reveals that the destruction was a key catalyst in their decision to flee, shaped their experiences of exile and attitudes to return. And finally, along the axis of reconstruction and reconciliation respondents held complex and divergent views on the extent to which rebuilding could play a role in fostering peace. The article concludes by noting that the insights gleaned from this case advances studies of heritage in conflict and that being sensitive to local sentiment could enhance projects to reconstruct heritage in conflict.

‘Just like us’: community radio broadcasters and the on-air performance of community identity

ABSTRACT The ‘community’ of community media has long been a contentious question in the field. Given the wide range of interpretations of community and the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences, it has never been more important for community media to define and delineate their audiences. One approach to this is developing and maintaining a sense of mediatized community identity through content production. Community identity represents an under-researched area in community media studies. While community media audiences and broadcasters have themselves been the subject of research, how a sense of community identity is created through content production is less understood. This article details a critical discourse analysis of programming from ten different community radio stations within the same geographic location. The findings of this research reveal the very different approaches that stations take to developing a mediatized community identity. Several stations approach identity expression by engaging in overt performances of ‘localness’, while the growing influence of commercialization was also observed among many stations. What this research highlights is that the performance of community identity on community radio is integral in shaping the listening communities, as well as delineating community radio from its commercial and state-run counterparts.

City, Community and Sport in Birmingham during the Second World War

ABSTRACT While transnational, global and imperial studies of the Second World War have added to established national frameworks, the analysis of local and regional perspectives remains limited. This article examines the importance of local belonging and community identity during wartime through the case study of sporting activity in Birmingham. In a city where social disruption was particularly high due to the impact of changes in wartime production, bombing and evacuation, sport offered a reassuring sense of comfort and familiarity. While some clubs disappeared and events declined in frequency, sport nonetheless survived, and in some cases thrived, thanks to the activity of active councillors, sports administrators, club officials and the support of the local press. This article argues that the city’s ability to maintain a relatively stable and vibrant civic sporting culture during an unprecedented period of population movement and social upheaval buttressed a sense of community identity, which acted as a starting-point for the articulation of wartime citizenship and patriotism.

Simulating Experiential Learning in Professional Online Courses

Few studies have explored how to simulate the experiential learning of professional knowledge domains in online graduate courses. This paper addresses how to provide the type of deep, socially situated learning that is achieved in professional practice by employing peer and vicarious learning in discussion forums. We start by describing what we have learned about scaffolding peer learning environments from prior studies. We distinguish vicarious learning, which exposes and sensitizes students to situated knowledge based on observation of peer discussions, from peer interactions which engage students actively in co-constructing knowledge about professional practice. Then we present findings from a 10-week graduate course in Information Systems Project Management. Our findings present evidence for vicarious learning from observing peer interactions, and of interactive peer learning that not only demonstrates the co-construction of knowledge across learners but also uncovers a collaborative process based on a sense of community identity. We end with a substantive theory of social cognition in community learning based on our findings. The intention is to provide a framework for the evaluation of collaborative knowledge construction, so that courses may support deep, experiential learning in graduate online professional education.

A stubborn victim of mass atrocity: The peace community of San José de Apartadó

This paper presents the experience of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia. Building upon different academic works about this experience, I explore the Community’s usage of the category of victim. As a category coming from the discourse of international human rights, victims – and particularly victims of mass atrocity – are usually portrayed as defenceless and passive subjects. Instead, the Community embodies a group of victims full of contradictions, at the same time suffering, empowered, stubborn, and inflexible. To understand this, it is necessary to look past the mere use of international law and to consider the Community as a collective process. Here, a sense of communal identity has emerged through the struggles of war. This communal identity partly gives a content to their complex victimhood. Moreover, the new political context in Colombia brings important challenges but, it is argued, the category of victim can still be useful for the Community.

Are we sustainable? Promoting a culture of sustainability in planned communities with a sustainability focus

Sustainability has become a primary concern of new communities worldwide. With regard to planned communities specifically, sustainability planning has taken into account technical environmental standards as well as economic and technological factors. However, planned communities must consider social factors, or their “culture of sustainability” if their endeavors should prove to be truly successful in not only being environmentally sustainable, but also uphold and encourage sustainable human behavior. This paper will first consider the definition of cultures of sustainability. Cultures of sustainability vary from one community to the next and are defined by a strong hierarchy of values. How these values are translated differ, especially as it concerns the structure and governance of a community; values can either be communicated top-down through institutions or bottom-up using a community based-approach. Second, this paper will explore the methodologies communities use to make themselves sustainable. Third, the methodologies and cultures of sustainability explored through three case studies on three different continents: Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Throughout the three case studies, the obstacles and challenges to sustainability and the different forms it takes, environmental, economic, and social, are explored. In this study, it becomes clear that cultures of sustainability must first and foremost take into account the inclusion of the community in decision making processes as well as their embrace of community values and willingness to alter their behavior. Without a shared vision, concrete plan, and sense of community identity, sustainability goals can only last in the short term rather than create a real impact.

Pop Songs and Solastalgia in a Broken City

Pop Songs and Solastalgia in a Broken City

Antiracism apps: framing understandings and approaches to antiracism education and intervention

ABSTRACTMobile apps for antiracism have become valuable pedagogical and activist tools for their real-time and mapping capabilities, their portability and intimate bodily presence, which enables a reaction exactly when an act of racism occurs. In this article, five mobile apps aimed at producing antiracism education or intervention outcomes from the United Kingdom, Australia and France are the focus of an interrogation of the ways in which racism and antiracism are framed and the strengths and weaknesses of these initiatives for countering dominant forms of everyday racism. We identify a number of different approaches to racism and antiracism in our inquiry, which lead to particular sets of aims, features and uses: the app as a tool for capturing, reporting and responding to racist acts; as a way of reinforcing a wider sense of community identity and solidarity; to demonstrate racism, especially Islamophobia, and make its forms visible, and as a means for challenging racism through raising awareness and encouraging bystanders to oppose it. We argue that while these apps are well disposed to exposing and manifesting isolated incidents of racism in everyday life, we question their potential for transformative societal outcomes beyond the level of unilateral action in the context of events experienced as unique incidents.

The Role of Community Identity in Cattlemen Response to Florida Panther Recovery Efforts

ABSTRACTThe concept of community identity has often been employed to explain ways in which communities respond to agents that impact community well-being. Using a case study of the Florida cattlemen community, we examine how cattlemen understand and perceive regulatory efforts to recover the Florida panther on private ranch lands. The data comes from participants in the Florida cattlemen community, and was collected through in-depth interviews (n = 13), group interviews (n = 32), and written comments associated with a survey about panther conservation (n = 78). Our findings indicate that some cattlemen in Florida have a strong sense of community identity. Perceptions of government actions and variation in economic risks are critical factors in understanding how this community responds to federal interventions. Our findings suggest that the concept of community identity can be used to explain the responses of agricultural landowners to governmental policies that are perceived as a threat to collective identity.

Constituting community through food charters: A rhetorical-genre analysis

Communities across Canada are increasingly developing food charters, with at least 22 regional charters published in Ontario alone. As a rhetorical genre, food charters are persuasive actions that articulate not only the kind of food system to which a community aspires, but also the kind of community that it aspires to be. We argue that Ontario’s food charters play an important role in constituting a sense of community identity and values through the rhetorical action of the genre itself. We analyze how this is accomplished through two rhetorical features, the naming of community and the listing of community priorities, showing how these features simultaneously obscure and reveal ideological tensions and logical incongruities within each community’s vision for its food system. Our analysis illustrates how the genre of the food charter both responds to and shapes the diverse, possibly conflicting values that inform food policy and food security initiatives in Ontario, and it offers insight into how the genre itself may inadvertently constrain the action it is intended to perform.

THE ‘GLOUCESTER BENEFACTORS’ AFTER FOUR CENTURIES

Some time in the early years of the seventeenth century, the city fathers of Gloucester evidently commissioned twelve paintings of past benefactors to that city. The paintings survive in the Gloucester Folk Museum and were exhibited in the spring of 2014 to mark the approximate date of their four-hundredth anniversary. Given the absence of critically important sources that would have given precise information on their commissioning, their origin and history have remained somewhat obscure. This paper nevertheless strives to understand why, and by whom, they may have been painted, and why they remain significant today, both to the City of Gloucester and to the history of English portraiture. It argues that they were commissioned to bolster a sense of community identity and to encourage further benefaction at a time of local hardship and stress. It comments on them as examples of the regional English vernacular style in portraiture of the day, reflects on their current condition and very tentatively suggests who might have painted them.

The Central Role of Engagement in Online Communities

Online communities are new social structures dependent on modern information technology, and they face equally modern challenges. Although satisfied members regularly consume content, it is considerably harder to coax them to contribute new content and help recruit others because they face unprecedented social comparison and criticism. We propose that engagement—a concept only abstractly alluded to in information systems research—is the key to active participation in these unique sociotechnical environments. We constructed and tested a framework that demonstrates what engagement is, where it comes from, and how it powerfully explains both knowledge contribution and word of mouth. Our results show that members primarily contribute to and revisit an online community from a sense of engagement. Nonetheless, word of mouth is partly influenced by prior satisfaction. Therefore, engagement and satisfaction appear to be parallel mediating forces at work in online communities. Both mediators arise from a sense of communal identity and knowledge self-efficacy, but engagement also emerges from validation of self-identity. Nevertheless, we also found signs that the contributions of the most knowledgeable users are not purely from engagement, but also from a competing sense of self-efficacy. Our findings significantly contribute to the area of information systems by highlighting that engagement is a concrete phenomenon on its own, and it can be directly modeled and must be carefully managed.

The State of Speech

The State of Speech

Narrating the Nowhere People: F. B. Vickers's <em>The Mirage</em> and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals

I stuck to it because I had faith in the story and its message-one I wanted to put over if it was the one and only novel I ever wrote.-FB Vickers, handwritten note on an early typescript draft of The Mirage (dated May 1958)BY THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AND INCREASINGLY in the decades that followed, most of mixed Ab- original and European descent were consigned by their white compatriots to a figurative limbo that paralleled the slum- like camps and reserves on the outskirts of towns and in ob- scure areas of cities in which they were forced to congregate. the century wore on, mainstream society's widespread and com- forting belief that the true or tribal Aboriginals were pass- ing into extinction was shadowed by a perception that these so-called half-castes-a term that had come to designate all those of mixed white and ancestry in whatever pro- portion-and their conceptual siblings, the dwellers, were now the dark Others whose enduring presence threatened the dream of an all-white Australia. Not all fringe dwellers were of mixed descent, of course, nor were all part-Aboriginals de- racinated (detribalized), as was frequently assumed. None- theless, a virtual equation between genetic and cultural inter- breeding was taken for granted by most commentators who directed their attention to fringe life. In the eyes of white Australia, these fringe-dwelling non-white/non-black were the nation's phantom natives-faceless inhabitants of placeless locales. They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds's apt phrase, Australia's nowhere people (1-2).Usually they were simply not in view; when sighted by main- stream Australians they were deemed literally unremarkable. As a kid I unconsciously learned the Australian denial, no ac- knowledgement or speaking about the of the land: 'out of sight, out of mind,' commented Margaret Jeffrey with regard to her postwar childhood in Australia (Ashforth 42-43). Simi- larly, Hal Jackson has written that, although in or near the Vic- torian towns in which he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s there must have been people, he wasn't aware of them: Aboriginal were out of my sight and out of my mind, as I'm sure they were among the bulk of my contemporaries (84). The anecdotal evidence of the ghostly insubstantiality of the nowhere people is of course impossible to document empiri- cally, but the abundance of such testimonies is persuasive none- theless. It appears that until at least the 1960s, the dominant society's image of itself amounted to a kind of ethnic cleansing of the imagination. And the culture's chronic inclination to render its most marginalized social group translucent was no- where more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives. In Australian novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the near invisibility of the nation's half-castes registers as an all but palpable absence. This was less the case in other discursive forums. Government reports and regulations, for example, though predicated upon the assumption that of mixed descent would need to be actively erased from the Australian scene, did acknowledge their presence backhandedly in regarding them as a significant demographic presence and social problem (Rowley 18-31; Reynolds 133-58). Newspapers and magazines would occasion- ally call attention to their troubled and troublesome existence; C. D. Rowley has noted that greater chances of employment during the Second World War had brought many part-Aborig- inals into cities and towns, resulting in increased press pub- licity of the 'half-caste problem' after the war (Rowley 38). But prior to the 1930s, there were very few representations of detribalized Aboriginals in either popular or self-consciously literary narratives-those important means by which a nation stories itself into a sense of communal identity. They are all but entirely unsighted in the familiar nineteenth century texts of Lawson, Paterson, Furphy, and Clarke. …

Music, Tradition, and Cultural Adaptation among the Maronites of Lebanon: The Reform of the Funeral Liturgy

The Maronite Church is a branch of the Syro-Antiochean Church and one of the oldest among the Eastern churches. Modernisation, globalisation, emigration, civil war and other factors have together influenced many aspects of local religious expression, but the Maronite Church has succeeded in adapting to the social changes and the spiritual needs of its followers without losing its identity. This is reflected in the Maronite funeral liturgy, which is here examined. I aim to show how the role of music and poetry is perpetuating a sense of communal identity among the members of this religious group, and is creating boundaries with other ethnic and religious groups.

Comparative Analysis of Popular Legal Participation in Japan and the U.S.: Differential Perceptions of Actual Jurors and College Students on the System of Lay Participation in Law*

This paper presents comparative analyses of societal impacts of civic legal participation in Japan and the U.S. In 2001, the Japanese government announced the introduction of the quasi‐jury system, called ‘'Saiban‐in Seido,’’ which begins its first trial in 2009.2 Research, limited mostly to the analysis of American juries, has demonstrated that civic legal participation is effective in democratizing the criminal process and building broader public confidence in the system of justice. At present, Japan relies on a grand jury system called ‘'kensatsu shinsa‐kai,’’ also known as the Prosecutorial Review Commission (PRC). The commission consists of eleven citizens, randomly selected from voter rolls in local jurisdictions, and reviews the appropriateness of prosecutors’ decisions not to indict. The data for the present research was collected from more than 200 individuals who have served in these commissions. They were asked about their experiences and views on Japanese legal procedures. Additional surveys were conducted of more than 2,500 prospective jurors at the Dallas County Courthouse in Texas in March and April, 2006. Furthermore, both Japanese and American college students were asked to respond to the same questions concerning lay participation in the justice system. Analytic findings suggest that both Japanese and American respondents with prior jury experience exhibited a heightened sense of civic responsibility, greater feelings of trust toward government agencies, and a greater sense of community identity and self‐efficacy. Lastly, the paper provides important suggestions to build an effective system of civic lay participation in Japan, as well as in other nations.

Protection and participation: an interactive programme introducing the female condom to migrant sex workers in Cambodia

The female condom has received much attention for its potential to empower users in negotiating safer sex. Studies demonstrate that the process used to introduce the method can influence subsequent use rates, resulting in calls for comprehensive documentation of introduction activities. This paper details an intervention study introducing the female condom to Vietnamese sex workers in Cambodia. Part of a wider community mobilization approach to reducing HIV/AIDS transmission, the intervention emphasized informed debate, group skills building and collective support. Research methods included both quantitative and qualitative data collection to evaluate the introduction's effect on sex workers’ negotiation skills and social support networks. The findings show that approximately 16% of sex workers tried the female condom. Ever-use was significantly associated with participation in intervention workshops, and with indicators of both individual and community empowerment. Sex workers who incorporated the female condom into their work were also more likely to feel a sense of community identity. Introduced through an appropriate process, the female condom can serve as an ‘entry point’ to building community capacity. It can support sex workers in achieving protected sex and developing cooperative relationships, even in severely restrictive settings.

Burns v. Received View

judgment, tacit and complex, weaves together judgments of morality, legality, credibility, probability, plausibility, and politics, and it expresses the jury's own sense of community identity. In Bums's description, the trial's emphasis on narrative arguments by the lawyers and its play of direct and cross-examination are uniquely designed to help the jury reach a good verdict, while in the Received View, the emphasis on lawyer arguments makes little sense for finding facts. Hence, Bums concludes that the Received View is a thin and incomplete understanding of the trial that, at worst, leads to mindless efforts to reform or even abolish it. A more mindful and thick understanding of the trial demonstrates a much better fit between trial process and jury decision making. As a philosopher, my reaction is an unqualified BRAVO! Yes, our understanding and experience of law should be enriched by Wittgenstein, Arendt, Hegel, Taylor, Geertz, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Kant, Aristotle, etc. (The footnotes alone are exhilarating.) Yes, these philosophers generate not theories of law to which practice must conform, but a new lens through which to look at our practices more clearly and deeply. Yes, truth is practical and narrative all the way down, and there is no pre