This study examines how reliance on the client’s internal audit function (IAF) affects auditors’ ability to persuade management to accept material weakness assessments of detected internal control deficiencies. I further investigate whether auditors’ ability to persuade management to accept material weakness assessments depends on the subjectivity the control deficiency assessment to varied interpretations (ambiguity). I apply group affiliation and persuasion theories to hypothesize that management will have higher group identification with the IAF than with the auditors. I predict that management’s group affiliation will lead them to be more accepting of auditors’ internal control assessments when the auditors rely on the client’s IAF than when auditors do not. Further, I hypothesize that the greater the ambiguity in the internal control deficiency assessment, the more persuaded management will be to accept the auditors’ control assessment in situations where the auditors rely on the IAF than when the auditors do not. I conduct an experiment using a 2 X 2 between-subjects design in which I manipulate auditors’ reliance on the client’s IAF during tests of the client’s internal controls (rely or not rely) and the level of ambiguity in the internal control deficiency assessment (less ambiguous or more ambiguous) in a SOX 404 Internal Controls Over Financial Reporting (ICFR) audit setting. The study’s findings provide evidence that relying on the client’s IAF can improve auditors’ likelihood of persuading the client when control assessments are more open to varied interpretations. This study sheds light on a previously ignored benefit of using the client’s IAF – as a persuasion tactic. Thus, my research contributes to two literature streams: factors influencing auditor-client negotiations and the effects of using the IAF on audit engagements. These results provide both practical and theoretical insights to academics, practitioners and auditing standard setters.

This study investigates the effect of communication channel (e.g., face-to-face, written) and management information (i.e., background information on the reliability of client personnel) on auditors’ judgments of evidence persuasiveness in a management inquiry setting. Management information directs auditors to focus on the source of the evidence, creating a goal of assessing management during evidence collection. Auditors are distracted away from the evidence when the communication channel presents management characteristic cues (i.e., face-to-face), unrelated to the message and related to their new unconscious goal of assessing management. By comparison, when evidence is communicated by a channel that does not provide additional management characteristic cues (i.e. written), auditors are better able to evaluate the evidence without distraction. I predict an interaction effect, where communication channel effects auditor judgments when management information is provided, but not otherwise. I design a 2x2 between-participants experiment to test my theory and present results of an experiment with 122 practicing senior auditors. Auditor participants receive an explanation from a client’s assistant controller to explain an unexpected fluctuation in a financial ratio. I manipulate the means by which the assistant controller communicates with the auditor (communication channel) and the presence of background information about the assistant controller (management information). Results of my experiment indicate an interaction effect of the communication channel and management information. When management information is provided, auditors assess the evidence as more persuasive when communication is face-to-face versus text. Auditors not receiving management information do not assess the evidence any differently, irrespective of communication channel. I also find evidence that auditors assess management differently when management information is provided. The results suggest that auditors are focused more on evaluating management when communicating through face-to-face versus written channels. Further, these assessments of management are consistent with the pattern of persuasiveness, indicating that they use this information more in their judgments when communicating face-to-face versus text and only when management information is provided. The results of this research suggest auditors may be assessing evidence as more persuasive than merited when management information is present and auditors are communicating with management face-to-face. Auditors as well as regulators should be aware of this effect so that adjustments can be made. Future researchers should consider these results in future research on management inquiry.

Past consumer research on mood has focused mainly on the impact of pre-processing mood on attitude formation, cognitive process, or behaviour. The present study, however, opens a new research direction by investigating the impact of ad characteristics on pre-processing mood. In particular, this research develops a model by combining the mood management and mood disruption mechanisms to answer the following interrelated research questions: (1) How does a consumer's mood interact with an ad's characteristics? (2) What is the effect of this interaction on subsequent mood and ad evaluation? (3) When will the above effect on ad evaluation be more likely to occur? Before the main experiment was conducted, a scale was developed to measure the mood potency of an ad -- a construct developed to capture the dimensions of an ad in eliciting affective responses. Following a systematic psychometric scale-development procedure, a reliable and valid scale with eighteen items was obtained. A 2x2x2 between-subject factorial design was conducted to test the model. The treatments included pre-processing mood pleasure, pre-processing mood arousal, and mood potency of an ad. The experiment involved exposing groups of subjects to one ad after listening to one piece of music, then comparing ad evaluations by music condition. The ad's mood potency was manipulated to elicit either a positive or negative feeling. Music was employed to vary pleasure and arousal prior to ad processing. Altogether two ads and four pieces of music were used. For the dependent measure considered (i.e., ad evaluation), findings were in accordance with a mood management interpretation. It was found that a positive mood potency ad was preferred to a negative mood potency ad either in a good or bad mood condition. Moreover, this effect was more pronounced when the arousal level was high. Regarding predictions on change in pleasure/arousal due to an exposure of an ad, only the change in pleasure yielded marginal support for the mood disruption mechanism. The findings of this study not only contribute to our understanding of research on advertising context and affective responses but also have important implications for managerial decisions on ad placing, design, and copy testing.

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Beginning with the premise that all literary texts are rhetorical in nature, this thesis explores the impact of the persuasive function in Romain Gary's Le grand vestiaire from the perspective of his poetics, defined in Pour Sganarelle. The analysis of typical narrative, descriptive and dialogal techniques used by the author brings to the fore at once the textual sites in which Gary's central precept, the univocity of meaning, is upheld, and the presence of ambiguities that undermine it. Likewise, the analysis of the novel's socio-historical context highlights its ideological dimensions, which is both inherent to the work and responsible for certain indeterminacies that foreclose the possibility of a unique meaning. Finally, it is shown that the rhetorical figures in Gary's text, which are designed, by their overwhelming presence, to forcefully reconfirm the univocity of meaning, also generate a series of equivocations. This thesis demonstrates that while Le grand vestiaire is indeed based on literary techniques that ensure its effectiveness, the novel is at odds with Gary's poetics and ultimately represents its functional ineffectiveness.

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No description available.

An approach commonly used to teach argument in English departments tacitly dichotomizes argument and persuasion, separates cognition from affection, and values the product over the ability to form concepts and to convey ideas with engagement. Yet contemporary texts like Annette Rottenberg's Elements of Argument indicate a growing concern that teaching argument as formal reasoning and excluding ethics and emotions fail "the complexity of arguments in practice" (v).This dissertation argues for a pedagogy of argument as "inquiry." While its intellectual roots trace to the Isocratean/Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, the interdisciplinary theories from which it draws all recognize the mind's power to create knowledge through the dialectic of the "knower" and the "known": the semiotic language theory of Peirce, the instrumental learning theory of Dewey, the legal theory of Holmes, and the composing theory of Berthoff.The current-traditionalist over-attention to form inhibits the natural composing process and constrains inquiry by ignoring social values and public opinion. In contrast, "jurisprudentialism" attends to the critical analysis and creation of argument by focusing upon a writer's active participation in the recursive process of exploration and justification. It operates by an informal logic in which the test of sound judgment is whether an audience of competent persons is willing to accept its truth.In exploring and justifying a jurisprudential pedagogy of argument, this study claims that the traditionalists' pedagogy of "right" writing in the modern academy traces to the elitist, positivist camp of Plato's academy. This pedagogy casts rhetoric as a medium of communication, not as a means of making knowledge. It employs "recipe" argument in which language is the "batter of thought." It comprises a "know-what" pedagogy that treats writers as "lesser souls, not as the "philosophers" that they can become if provided the "know-how."Additionally, the study shows how the Platonist and the Sophistic rhetorical traditions have emerged in modern education as current-traditionalism and jurisprudentialism. It traces the historical ties between law and rhetoric and the intellectual forces of science and philosophy that separated them, as well as those that are bringing them back together again. / Department of English

This study examined the effect of tag questions, hesitations, and hedges on participants' attitudes toward an advocacy, perceptions of the speaker, message, and cognitive responses regarding the message. Results from 351 participants showed that although linguistic power markers affected attitudes when participants were motivated to process the message, the markers did so through different processes. The use of hesitations in an advocacy affected influenced attitudes by affecting participants' perceptions of the speaker, whereas the use of hedges influenced attitudes by affecting participants' perceptions of the message. The use of tag questions in a message influenced attitudes, but this study failed to find the mechanism this effect. The overall finding suggest a more complex relation among linguistic power components and aspects of a persuasive appeal than once thought and researchers should consider the different aspects underlying the effects of linguistic power components on persuasion. / Department of Psychological Science

Persuasion communication, elaboration likelihood model, intrinsic persuasion variables, extrinsic persuasion variables, Life Orientation, HlV/Aids, grade 9 learners, guidance counselling, persuasion campaigns, credibility, motivation, capacity, youth The elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Caccioppo, 1996:l-309) in the field of persuasion communication explains the role that variables can play in the measure to which the youth can be influenced and persuaded by messages aimed at changing sexual risk behaviour. In order to offer the North West Province Department of Education's Life Orientation learning area, which is marked by a life skills approach, a better chance of success, it is important to determine which of the intrinsic and/or extrinsic variables-as is hypothesised by the elaboration likelihood model-play a role with grade 9 learners. Thus, the persuasion messages within Life Orientation could be adapted accordingly. The purpose of this study was to determine what role the intrinsic and/or extrinsic persuasion variables have in the presentation of Life Orientation classes to selected grade 9 learners at three Potchefstroom high schools. Relevant literature was analysed in regard to HlV/Aids campaigns and programmes that had been launched in South Africa, especially in instances where the theoretical framework corresponded with this study. The empirical study was done by way of methodological triangulation. An overall picture was formed by way of a quantitative survey questionnaire of the persuasion variables that are found among grade 9 learners in Potchefstroom, Promosa and Ikageng. Qualitative methods (focus groups, personal interviews and non-participatory observation) were employed to investigate the deeper seated aspects of the persuasion variables. The results of the study confirm the premise of the elaboration likelihood model, and proved that intrinsic persuasion variables play an important role with grade 9 learners when HlV/Aids persuasion messages are conveyed to them through Life Orientation classes. Thus, it can be inferred that grade 9 learners of the three selected Potchefstroom schools would process these persuasion messages via the central route, which enhances the chances of long term persuasion. Further, it appears that in this study extrinsic persuasion variables mostly played a strengthening role with regard to persuasion messages. The study deduces, therefore, that Life Orientation, and specifically the content that is focused on HIV/Aids, led to the successful persuasion of grade 9 learners in the selected schools. However, the study also makes important recommendations on how the impact of these persuasion messages can be even more heightened within the context of the elaboration likelihood model. / Thesis (M.A. (Communication Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006