This dissertation is a qualitative discourse analysis study. The study seeks to understand roles of organizational discourse and management discourse in stimulating strategic organizational change, and facilitating organizational culture dynamics and identity development. Specifically, this study examines how The Haier Group Company has constructed, disseminated and entrenched its corporate public discourse (CPD) as a symbolic and rhetorical means for stimulating organizational change in the context of global challenges. Theoretical positions guiding this study are: globalization, the nexus of the global and local, glocalization, transculturation and hybridity, as well as organizational communication, organizational discourse study, organizational discourse analysis, and corporate public discourse. Methodologically, to better reveal the impact of globalization on organizational communication in a primarily non-Western context, this study adopts an interpretive-oriented approach, and adds a critical element from the language- ideology-power perspective. The data for this study is composed of a multiplicity of corporate public discourses (including print, online, audio-visual forms of texts, and artifacts) primarily produced by Haier between 1984 and 2004. In analyzing Haier's main CPD, this study examines how Haier has strategically constructed, disseminated, and entrenched the organization's culture, ideology, identity, and brand building. It also analyzes and demonstrates how Haier has, discursively and strategically, cultivated an organizational environment that fostered strategic organizational change. As the data set is diverse and large, the textual analysis and discussion depends on a combined use of organizational rhetorical analysis and storytelling analysis. To conclude, broadly, this study of Haier's corporate public discourse demonstrates China's current position within the historical phenomenon of globalization. More specifically, it shows that through constructing and communicating a specific organizational discourse about globalization and Haier's place in it, the Haier CEO and management is creating a reality that is challenging the dominant West- and U.S.-centric interpretations of globalization. This discourse challenges the notion that globalization is a new phenomenon, and that certain established and powerful global economic players will forever remain in positions of dominance. It frames globalization as a fluid phenomenon involving cultural fusion. This study is significant in at least two aspects. First, it demonstrates the impact of global mobility and interconnectivity upon a non-Western business corporation's communication strategies thereby adding to the scant numbers of empirical studies on this topic. Also, it differs from the extant studies on Haier, which are primarily case studies conducted by MBA scholars and practitioners of business and management, and provided an intercultural and organizational communication perspective. Second, this study demonstrates the utility of specific globalization concepts such as the global-local dialectic, glocalization, as well as some international/intercultural concepts such as transculturation and hybridity in studying organizational communication in a transnational context. One contribution of this study is its "insider" Chinese view of how Confucianism has shaped organizational communication practices in P. R. China. Another contribution is the "insider-outsider" perspective adopted in examining Haier's strategic communication about organizational change in an age of globalization. This `straddling' position is helpful in achieving an interpretive understanding of the impact of globalization upon organizational communication as it is situated in a mainly non-Western context.

Este estudo apresenta uma pesquisa sobre a ausência de laboratórios de ciências nas Escolas do Campo, o impacto que a falta deles causa na aprendizagem do ensino de ciências e que alternativas podem ser utilizadas para a melhoria da qualidade deste ensino. Para isso, o objetivo desde trabalho foi realizar a implantação de Clubes de Ciências nas Escolas do Campo como ferramenta complementar para o ensino de ciências, sendo este um espaço democrático de aprendizagem coletiva que possa contribuir na comunidade escolar e na formação dos sujeitos, tornando-os cidadãos atuantes na sociedade em que estão inseridos. Essa pesquisa surgiu diante a dificuldade que foi observada entre os alunos nas aulas de ciências, e do quão significativo é o ensino de ciências para o cotidiano das pessoas. A partir desse diagnóstico partimos para as intervenções práticas de microensino realizadas em cooperação entre universidade-escola, com os acadêmicos do curso de Ciências Biológicas – Licenciatura da UNIPAMPA, oportunizando aos alunos a vivência de aulas práticas de ciências em ambientes não formais de ensino, como os Clubes de Ciências. A abordagem dessa pesquisa foi de natureza empírica qualitativa com o uso de ferramenta de avaliação, a Análise Textual Discursiva – ATD de Roque e Galiazzi (2006), que proporciona a compreensão da realidade dos alunos sem que se quantifiquem dados. Ao final desse estudo, conclui-se que a implantação do Clube de Ciências na escola resultou na melhoria da qualidade do ensino de ciências, expresso na maior participação dos alunos nas aulas de ciências, melhora no rendimento escolar e envolvimento nas atividades extracurriculares da escola. Espera-se que com a adesão dessa primeira escola, todas as outras Escolas do Campo do Município de São Gabriel-RS, venham a aderir ao projeto como uma ferramenta complementar nos currículos de ciências dessas escolas / This study presents a research on the absence of science labs in the Field Schools, the impact that the lack of these laboratories causes in the learning of science education and what alternatives can be used to improve the quality of this education. Therefore, this study aimed to carry out the implementation of Science Clubs in Rural Schools as a complementary tool for science teaching, being this a democratic space of collective learning that can contribute in the school community and in the formation of the subjects, making them active citizens in the society in which they live. This research emerged from the difficulty that was observed among students in science classes, and how significant is the teaching of science to people's daily lives. Based on this diagnosis, we started with the practical interventions of teaching, carried out in cooperation between university-school, with the academics of the Biological Sciences course of UNIPAMPA, giving students the opportunity to experience practical science classes in non-formal teaching environments, such as the Science Clubs. The approach of this research was of qualitative empirical nature with the use of evaluation tool, the Discourse Textual Analysis - DTA of Roque and Galiazzi (2006), which provides an understanding of the reality of students without quantifying data. At the end of this study, it was concluded that the implementation of the Science Club in the school resulted in the improvement of the quality of science teaching, expressed in the greater participation of students in science classes, improvement in school performance and involvement in school extracurricular activities. It is expected that with the accession of this first school, all other rural schools of the Municipality of São Gabriel-RS will join the project as a complementary tool in the science curriculum of these schools.

The aim of the thesis is to study the pseudonymous letters of Aeschines, all of which purport to give an account of his sojourn in exile. There is a strong consensus among scholars that all the letters are forgeries, and their date of composition tends to be located in the first few centuries CE on linguistic grounds. Embracing a variety of literary forms, these letters were probably composed by multiple hands and may for convenience be divided into three categories: Letters 2, 3, 7, 11, 12 imitate the ‘Demosthenic’ letters in a manner similar to the Hellenistic (and beyond) historical declamations and progymnasmata; Letters 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 come to us with features reminiscent of what German scholars would call Briefromane, or ‘epistolary novels’, and are normally deemed typical of the so-called Second Sophistic; and Letter 4 is a showpiece assuming the form of a Pindaric exegesis. The thesis consists of two parts. The first gives an extensive account of the letters, including their background, history of scholarship, and basic features, to seek to present the ‘forger’ and the text in their proper historical and cultural contexts. The second part, which constitutes the basis for the reflections developed in the first, provides a detailed commentary in thematic sequence. It begins with the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts (Epp. 2, 3, 7, 11, 12), and stylistic comparisons are made throughout. The analysis of the fictional letters (Epp. 1, 5, 6, 8, 9) pays particular attention to their consistency of narrative and engagement with other literary genres. The commentary on Letter 4 foregrounds the Pindaric elements and completes the thesis. Letter 10 is discussed at sporadic points: it is a later attachment to the corpus and the erotic content is inconsistent with the ‘original’ forgeries. The overall focus of the thesis is on two overlapping aspects of Aeschines’ early reception in antiquity – as ‘the other orator’ beside Demosthenes and as inspiration for later rhetorical education. Existing studies, however, are more concerned with textual criticism and linguistic analysis and have left the letters almost unproductive in these respects: so Drerup (1904), Schwegler (1914), and, most recently, García Ruiz and Hernández Muñoz (2012). In his classic work Goldstein (1968) took the parallel passages in the pseudonymous letters as evidence for authenticating Demosthenes’ letters, and scholars are now able to take advantage of a more reliable reference when studying Ps.-Aeschines. Holzberg (1994), on the other hand, established a set of generic criteria for the Briefromane and has substantially changed the way we read Ps.-Aeschines: it is now possible to appreciate the literary value of the letters without scrutinising their authenticity. Yet both these studies tell us only half the story: while Goldstein left more remarks on the imitative counterparts of Demosthenes’ letters, Holzberg focused on the way the letters reflect the epistolary narrative. Following Rohde (1876/1960), moreover, it seems common sense to characterise the pseudo-historical tale as seen through the letters as a product of the ‘Second Sophistic’, though discoveries of new papyri, e.g. the Ninus romance c. first century BCE, undermined this assumption. My study is built on these investigations in an attempt to form the most extended analysis. The study of the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts will contribute to a better understanding of Ps.-Aeschines’ intertextual engagement with Demosthenes and his successors, e.g. Ps.-Leosthenes (FGrH 105 F 6 = MP3 2496). It shows that Ps.-Aeschines owes a great deal to the culture of rhetoric and highlights his significance in the Nachleben of Attic oratory. As for the other letters, this thesis argues that they deserve some space in our accounts of the history of exilic, periegetic, and epinician literatures for contextualising a wide range of preexisting literary forms such as the Homeric Odyssey (Ep. 1) and Pindar’s victory odes (Ep. 4). As contingent by-products of the ‘Demosthenic’ counterparts, however, they seem to allow no confident judgement about generic consciousness, esp. the very notion of ‘novel’, and need to be approached as antedating the Imperial exponents. Contrary to the communis opinio, therefore, I attempt to move the date of composition forward to the late Hellenistic period, in which there was already ample encouragement for a sophist, as well as for his students, to write pseudonymous letters. The ‘traitors’ blacklist’ (Ep. 12.8–9) and the term for the Rhodian family of Diagoreans (Ep. 4.4) entertain this possibility inasmuch as both show marked affinities with the Hellenistic sources. Last but not least, the two coexisting, radically opposed interpretations of one’s civic orientation in exile will help us tackle the stability and change in the political cultures of the post-Classical era. My conclusion is that these letters hold a unique position as very early – and very illuminating – examples of how different literary, political trends were interwoven to make, and to remould, a Classic. It is hoped that this study may have done something to reappraise Ps.-Aeschines, who is, in all likelihood, a pre-sophisticated forerunner at a crossroads in the history of Greek literature.

abstract: The mass media genre known as true crime is dismissed often as a more sensational, less reliable iteration of traditional crime journalism. Consumer and editorial confusion exists because there is no overarching criteria determining what is, and what is not, true crime. To that extent, the complete history of true crime’s origins and its best practitioners and works cannot be known with any certainty, and its future forms cannot be anticipated. Scholarship is overdue on an effective criteria to determine when nonfiction murder narratives cease to be long-form crime reporting and become something else. Against the backdrop of this long-evolving, multi-faceted literary/documentary genre, the researcher in this exploratory, qualitative study seeks to (a) examine the historical tension between formal journalism and true crime; (b) reveal how traditional journalism both reviles and plunders true crime for its rhetorical treasures; and (c) explain how this has destabilized the meaning of the term “true crime” to the degree that a more substantive understanding needs to be established. Through a textual analysis of the forms and functions of representative artifacts, the researcher will suggest that a Theory of True Crime could be patterned after time-tested analytic codes created for fiction, but structured in a simple two-stage examination that would test for dominant characteristics of established true crime texts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Journalism and Mass Communication 2017

Este estudo apresenta uma pesquisa sobre a ausência de laboratórios de ciências nas Escolas do Campo, o impacto que a falta deles causa na aprendizagem do ensino de ciências e que alternativas podem ser utilizadas para a melhoria da qualidade deste ensino. Para isso, o objetivo desde trabalho foi realizar a implantação de Clubes de Ciências nas Escolas do Campo como ferramenta complementar para o ensino de ciências, sendo este um espaço democrático de aprendizagem coletiva que possa contribuir na comunidade escolar e na formação dos sujeitos, tornando-os cidadãos atuantes na sociedade em que estão inseridos. Essa pesquisa surgiu diante a dificuldade que foi observada entre os alunos nas aulas de ciências, e do quão significativo é o ensino de ciências para o cotidiano das pessoas. A partir desse diagnóstico partimos para as intervenções práticas de microensino realizadas em cooperação entre universidade-escola, com os acadêmicos do curso de Ciências Biológicas – Licenciatura da UNIPAMPA, oportunizando aos alunos a vivência de aulas práticas de ciências em ambientes não formais de ensino, como os Clubes de Ciências. A abordagem dessa pesquisa foi de natureza empírica qualitativa com o uso de ferramenta de avaliação, a Análise Textual Discursiva – ATD de Roque e Galiazzi (2006), que proporciona a compreensão da realidade dos alunos sem que se quantifiquem dados. Ao final desse estudo, conclui-se que a implantação do Clube de Ciências na escola resultou na melhoria da qualidade do ensino de ciências, expresso na maior participação dos alunos nas aulas de ciências, melhora no rendimento escolar e envolvimento nas atividades extracurriculares da escola. Espera-se que com a adesão dessa primeira escola, todas as outras Escolas do Campo do Município de São Gabriel-RS, venham a aderir ao projeto como uma ferramenta complementar nos currículos de ciências dessas escolas / This study presents a research on the absence of science labs in the Field Schools, the impact that the lack of these laboratories causes in the learning of science education and what alternatives can be used to improve the quality of this education. Therefore, this study aimed to carry out the implementation of Science Clubs in Rural Schools as a complementary tool for science teaching, being this a democratic space of collective learning that can contribute in the school community and in the formation of the subjects, making them active citizens in the society in which they live. This research emerged from the difficulty that was observed among students in science classes, and how significant is the teaching of science to people's daily lives. Based on this diagnosis, we started with the practical interventions of teaching, carried out in cooperation between university-school, with the academics of the Biological Sciences course of UNIPAMPA, giving students the opportunity to experience practical science classes in non-formal teaching environments, such as the Science Clubs. The approach of this research was of qualitative empirical nature with the use of evaluation tool, the Discourse Textual Analysis - DTA of Roque and Galiazzi (2006), which provides an understanding of the reality of students without quantifying data. At the end of this study, it was concluded that the implementation of the Science Club in the school resulted in the improvement of the quality of science teaching, expressed in the greater participation of students in science classes, improvement in school performance and involvement in school extracurricular activities. It is expected that with the accession of this first school, all other rural schools of the Municipality of São Gabriel-RS will join the project as a complementary tool in the science curriculum of these schools.

I investigate how career concerns influence banking analysts’ forecasts and find that banking analysts issue relatively more optimistic forecasts early in the year and more pessimistic forecasts later in the year for banks who could be their future employers. This pattern is not observed when the same analysts forecast earnings for banks with no equity research departments. Using the Global Settlement as an exogenous shock on career concerns, I show that this forecast pattern is pronounced after the Settlement. Moreover, I find that analysts benefit from this behaviour as analysts that are more biased in their forecasts towards potential future employers are more likely to move to a higher reputation bank. Textual analysis of analyst reports is also valuable due to the private information and analysis conveyed in the text. Second paper therefore examines analyst reports with consistent and conflicting signals in terms of qualitative and quantitative outputs. I find that investors react more strongly when the sentiment and earnings forecast bias are consistent. Interestingly, when the tone of report text does not coincide with the earnings forecast, investors place greater weight on the text rather than the EPS forecasts. I also find that consistent reports with both optimistic sentiment and forecast bias have a strong positive market reaction but they are low in forecast accuracy. Markedly, forecasts with pessimistic sentiment have higher accuracy than those of optimistic sentiment. Hence, pessimistic sentiment is a good indicator of the quality of forecast reports. Finally, in my last paper, I explore whether there is any association between firm-specific investor sentiment and the subsequent tone of firms' quarterly reports. Firm-specific investor sentiment is measured using the methodology from Aboody et al. (2016), which proxies for market confidence relating to a specific firm. Given the potential cost-benefit trade-off in the reporting strategy, I argue and find different responses from managers in their 10-Qs in terms of their investor sentiment. I focus on the tone of optimism, readability and the proportion of uncertain words in the 10-Q filings. For firms with extremely high levels of investor sentiment, managers tend to be more conservative by using less optimistic words to avoid future disappointment. In comparison, in firms with extremely pessimistic investor sentiment, managers tend to use more optimistic and easy to understand language, and minimize their proportion of uncertainty in their 10-Q filings. By doing so, perhaps they are trying to alter their investor sentiment.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Nobel Committee uses the concept of peace in their press releases about the Nobel Peace Prize. This essay starts by investigating various articles and books to establish a basic understanding of how to efficiently investigate peace. This research then prompts us to investigate the related concepts of War, Conflict and Violence. It also tasks us to investigate a possible expansion of the concept in the context of a expanding globalised world. We could also relate ideas of peace to ideas of democracy and world order. This is done through Kosellecks methods of ”begriffsgeschichte”, by investigating the use of these various terms as well as their semantic field, we get an idea of how they’re conceived, and thus, the context in which they are used. This essay uses press releases found on the Nobel Prize Committee website as well as the award speeches as complements. This essay shows us how the concept of peace has grown, incorperating new ideas of justice, democracy and human rights. This can be seen in the context of an increasingly complex, westernized, globalised world, furthering the need for wider, more nebulous concepts to describe it.

Feminist geographers argue that gendered bodies and power are deeply entwined (McDowell 1992; Rose 1993). However, few geographers have investigated how gender and power interact in relation to the politics of abortion access. This thesis seeks to fill this gap by conducting a feminist content analysis of six newspapers from Florida’s three largest metropolitan areas to determine how articles featuring abortion are framed. Analysis of the dataset concludes that the politicization of the abortion debate results in the erasure of women from the conversation, the identification of a pregnant women trope which homogenizes all women into one category, and Planned Parenthood’s classification as a health care provider being ignored subsumed under a recognition of its role in providing abortion services. Overall this study argues that patriarchal institutions regulate women into compulsory motherhood, thereby constraining their agency and ability to fully participate in society participate in political democracy.

This dissertation concerns how activists preserve particular feminisms in everyday life, particularly in this postmodern moment as advances in technology create virtual spaces, as feminism experiences generational shifts, and as notions about gender and bodies influence the discursive and political construction of contemporary activism and communities. The particular feminists at the center of this study are self-described radical feminists. While original theories allowed members to question the essentialism of bodies (i.e., sex class), this study focuses on the movement trajectory in which members critique how people assigned male at birth learn masculinity as inextricably tied to the oppression of women (i.e., sex caste). Using data from a historical newsletter and two current micro-blogs, I provide a textual analysis to understand how public narratives of gender and essentialism circulate in and are challenged by feminist (cyber)spaces. The results of this project suggest four important findings. First, in print and online, people use imagined and essential understandings of bodies where actual bodies are not present in order to exclude. Second, when text reflects the personal, lived experiences of community members, logic and emotion are better connected in the everyday. On the other hand, when lived actuality is abstracted, storytellers rely almost exclusively on logic to make claims. Third, while lesbian newsletter-writers of the past constructed a sexual identity, they did not take on the radical-feminist mandate to talk about sexual desire. Online, only the radical identity of the movement’s predecessor’s has persisted, while any discussions of sexual identity or pleasure are missing. Lastly, while radical and trans-identified feminists often find themselves at odds, this study suggests that perhaps their consciousness-raising practices are more similar than can be seen from the everyday. Both groups use poetry and creative writing as a way to make sense of their coming-out and being-out experiences amid cis- and hetero-normativity.

Thesis advisor: Robert Taggart / My dissertation is comprised of three chapters. The first chapter is motivated by many lowfrequency sources of systemic risk in the economy. We propose a two-stage learning procedure to construct a high-frequency (i.e., daily) systemic risk factor from a cross-section of low-frequency (i.e., monthly) risk sources. In the first stage, we use a Kalman-Filter approach to synthesize the information about systemic risk contained in 19 different proxies for systemic risk. The low frequency (i.e., monthly) Bayesian factor can predict the cross-section of stock returns out of sample. In particular, a strategy that goes long the quintile portfolio with the highest exposure to the Bayesian factor and short the quintile portfolio with the lowest exposure to the Bayesian factor yields a Fama–French–Carhart alpha of 1.7% per month (20.4% annualized). The second stage is to convert this low frequency Bayesian factor into a high-frequency factor. We use textual analysis Word2Vec that reads the headlines and abstracts of all daily articles from the business section of the New York Times from 1980 to 2016 to collect distributional information on a per word basis and store it in high-dimensional vectors. These vectors are then used in a LASSO model to predict the Bayesian factor. The result is a series of coefficients that can then be used to produce a high-frequency estimate of the Bayesian factor of systemic risk. This high-frequency indicator is validated in several ways including by showing how well it captures the 2008 crisis. We also find that the high frequency factor is priced in the cross-section of stock returns and able to predict large swings in the VIX using a quantile regression approach, which sheds some light on the puzzling relation between the macro-economy and stock market volatility. The second chapter of my dissertation provides a basic quantitative description of a compendium of macro economic variables based on their ability to predict bond returns and stock returns . We use three methods( asymptotic PCA, LASSO and Support Vector Machine) to construct factors out of 133 monthly time series of economic activity spanning a period from 1996:1 to 2015:12 and classify these factors into two groups: bond demand factors and bond supply factors. In PCA regression, we find both demand factors and supply factors are unspanned by bond yields and have stronger predictability power for future bond excess returns than CP factors. This predictability finding is confirmed and enhanced by machine learning technique LASSO and Support Vector Machine. More interestingly, LASSO can be used to identify 15 most important economic variables and give direct economic explanations of predictors for bond returns. Regarding to stock predictability, we find both demand and supply PC factors are priced by the cross-section of stock returns. In particular, portfolios with highest exposure to aggregate supply factor outperform portfolios with lowest exposure to aggregate supply factor 1.8% per month while portfolios with lowest exposure to aggregate demand factor outperform portfolios with highest exposure to aggregate demand factor 2.1% per month. The finding is consistent with ”fly to safety” explanation. Furthermore, variance decomposition from VAR shows that demand factors are much more important than supply factors in explaining asset returns. Finally, we incorporate demand factors and supply factors into macrofinance affine term structure (MTSMs) to estimate market price of risk of factors and find that demand factors affect level risk and supply factors affect slope risk. Moreover, MTSMs enable us to decompose bond yields into expectation component and yield risk premium component and we find MTSMs without macro factors under-estimate yield risk premium. The third chapter,coauthored with Dmitriy Muravyev and Aurelio Vasquez, is motived from the fact that a typical stock has hundreds of listed options. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to preserve their rich information content while reducing dimensionality. Applying PCA to implied volatility surfaces across all US stocks, we find that the first five components capture most of the variation. The aggregate PC factor that combines only the first three components predicts future stock returns up to six months with a monthly alpha of about 1%; results are similar out-of-sample. In joint regressions, the aggregate PC factor drives out all of the popular option-based predictors of stock returns. Perhaps, the aggregate factor better aggregates option price information. However, shorting costs in the underlying drive out the aggregate factor’s predictive ability. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that option prices predict future stock returns primarily because they reflect short sale constraints. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.