This dissertation examines the potential for the media to act as a corporate governance mechanism and suggests how corporate leaders, through the use of symbolic action, can influence the media’s ability to effectively enact this role. Specifically, I examine how media scrutiny may prompt firms to adopt governance structures that increase the structural independence of the board and thus, according to the prevailing agency logic of corporate governance, are thought to increase the board’s ability to monitor and control corporate leaders. However, the adoption of structurally independent boards may be largely symbolic wherein formal structural changes in board independence are made without increases in the social independence of the board. I argue that symbolic responses to scrutiny will meet the media’s expectations for proper governance and engender more positive subsequent evaluations in the media of the firm and its leaders. I conclude by showing why the effects of symbolic action on media coverage are important for a range of outcomes relevant to firms and CEOs including the likelihood of strategic change, CEO dismissal and compensation, and subsequent board appointments. By influencing the manner in which they and their firms are portrayed in the media, firm leaders may enhance their reputations in the press and garner personal benefits. Thus, while agency theory focuses on the media’s ability to curb agency costs, this study points out that because of the media’s susceptibility to symbolic action, the press may actually perpetuate agency costs in some cases. Longitudinal analysis of a sample of S&P 500 firms provides some support for these ideas. / text

Background / Objectives: Mental diseases are perceived as one of the highest stigmatised conditions in our society. Public knowledge of mental illness does not come from professional journals or medical authorities, but largely from mass media as it is a major and most convenient source of information. Media tends to portray mental illness with negative attitude, focusing on bizarre and unexplainable behaviours of patients with mental illness, and exaggerating the linkage between mental illness and aggressive behaviours. However, few studies have been conducted in Hong Kong focusing on media perspective on this. This study focuses on the research of media’s role on psychosis from the perspective and experience of media professionals, and to identify media’s functional role of whether it is fostering public awareness and reducing stereotypes towards psychosis or on the contrary intensifying stigma conditions in the community of Hong Kong. Methodology: This is a qualitative study that purposive sampling method was used to recruit 22 media professionals from various media background including news media, entertainment and creative media, as well as public service broadcasting. All participants had up to one hour’s face-to-face in-depth interview based on pre-set theme of area of discussion. Results: Majority of subjects is able to recognise psychosis symptoms such as hallucination and (mainly persecutory) delusions, but unknown factors and myths about psychosis are still existed among the subjects. Confusion between psychosis, multiple personality disorders and even psychopath is commonly observed. Suggesting that media portrayal on psychosis and other mental illnesses is instilled with negative and stigmatised attitude is not prevalent. Most subjects believe that local news media can still perform with a neutral attitude when reporting the issues related to psychosis and mental illness. However, insufficient exposure of discussion about the topic across media platforms may affect public accessibility on the knowledge of psychosis and mental illness. Anti-stigma programs can contribute mostly positive messages and images about psychosis, but quality and quantity of those programs and promotions have to be designed and planned in delicate and persistent manners so as to maximise the effectiveness. Conclusion: Media plays a constructive role in educating the public about mental illness, and can also perpetuate stereotype and undermine the efforts of public campaigns. Suggesting that media practitioners are recommended to learn more about the well-round knowledge of psychosis and mental illness issue. Indeed, increased communication between media and mental health agencies can benefit the mutual understanding and lead to cooperative approach to tackle social stigma against psychosis. Though media professionals agree that media has its own limitation in terms of highly competitive broadcasting time and editorial space, most suggested that envisioned educational plan is an essential and influential method in removing public stigma and stereotype about psychosis. / published_or_final_version / Psychological Medicine / Master / Master of Psychological Medicine

The burgeoning of a new print form—the women’s press—in early twentieth-century China signaled a radical transformation in the ways of women’s literary and cultural production. This dissertation focuses on the discursive and imaginative space afforded by the women’s press. It explores in the women’s journals the processes of knowledge production and circulation that re/formulated the notions of gender and national identity. I examine writings by women and also by men writing in a feminine voice or assuming a female identity. In addition, I include writings that deploy “woman” as a trope through which authors express concerns of national salvation, social transformation, or Chinese modernization. The dissertation shows how experiences and expressions of “modernity” intersect with women’s print culture, and how the women’s press mediates a mixed gendered space for both women and men authors to bring into light a wide range of concerns at a critical historical juncture as Chinese modernity unfolded. How and why did women collaborate, reconcile, or contest with men in their writings or debates on themes related to feminine literary tradition, nationalism, feminism, ethnicity, and the female body to envision and construct “modern” Chinese women? In order to answer these questions, this thesis examines in the women’s press the multifarious writings by various groups of women, including “traditionally” literate women, “progressive” feminist activists, “ethnic” Manchu women reformers, “new-style” urban professionals, and “modern” female students. By reexamining prevailing assumptions regarding the relationship between Chinese feminism and nationalism, the “modern” production of women’s literature, and the masculinist formation of the New Woman, this analysis seeks to both highlight women’s agency and subjectivities in their political and cultural engagements and to illustrate the complexity and multivalence in the imaginings of modern Chinese women. Throughout, I argue that the women’s press provides a productive site for us to understand gender, women’s writing, and modernity in late Qing and early Republican China. / published_or_final_version / Modern Languages and Cultures / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This qualitative study explores identity formation in contemporary society, through investigating the influence of the media on identity formation. The focus is on identity and what people attribute from the media as defining their view of themselves and their world. Seven people aged 25 to 35 years participated in individual, semi-structured interviews, specifically focusing on the participants’ media usage in their leisure time. The analysis revealed that the participants’ tendency to position themselves as agents that were immune to the media’s influence was reflective of the ideological discourse of the ‘self-contained’ individual. Evidently, the participants were unaware of the way(s) in which they had been interpellated to behave as subjects of an individual kind. The prevailing ideological discourse of individualism was challenged by highlighting the contradictions in the participants’ accounts. The analysis further confirmed that identity formation is a dynamic and contradictory process, and unavoidably shaped (even constituted by) history, culture, politics, and ideology. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.

The primary purpose of this study is the exploration of the theoretical and critical framework of media education. The major paradigms used as rationale for the study of media embody views of media as agents of cultural decline that stress discriminating against the media; media as popular arts, stressing discriminating within the media; media as agents of communication, featuring the behavioral models of media studies; studying the media as representational or symbolic systems; and an exploration of the interaction between the self and the media and the question of whether and how media empower or oppress. Developments in the fields of structuralism, semiotics, theories of ideology and the social context of media production are discussed as the contributing factors to a view of media as representational systems. The study is concluded with a discussion of the significance of the context of meaning and a brief discussion of the educational implications of the field of cultural studies.

The thesis begins by acknowledging the writer's status as a fan. The stimulus for the enquiry emerges from the discrepancy the writer encounters between his fan experience and the ways in which the academy conceptualises fandom. Such theories serve to position the fan at extremes of the field of reader response: as either a passive, cultural dupe or as a radical, textual freedom fighter. By contrast, this thesis aims to take the diversity of fan response into consideration, and situate its analysis in very real concepts of people's lives. In the first of three parts, a typology is developed that examines the contested and disputed nature of fandom. Reference points are drawn from academic writing, popular media and a focus group session with fans of diverse interests. The second part is devoted to fieldwork. Fan conversations, observations and reflections are combined to create six intimate pen-portraits that convey differing ideas of fandom. Topics covered include fans of Doctor Who, The Adventure Game, Sheffield Wednesday football club; the users of archive TV website The Mausoleum Club; attendees at a Kirsty MacColl get-together;Panopticon( a Doctor Who convention); Forbidden Planet (a collector's shop). The final part, `Fandom and Modem Life', draws together the ideas of the thesis to propose a series of maxims on how fandom operates that emphasise complexity, diversity, the significance of emotional attachment, and fandom's interrelation to capitalism (of it, but not about it). Fandom's role is considered in relation to notions of religiosity and sexuality. Fandom is defined ultimately as a form of social identity possible in contemporary western society. The thesis concludes by speculating on how fandom may evolve in the future.

This dissertation researches some of the implications of the integration of documentary with the Internet, examining the effects on the genre as such products become new media objects. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2008.

Thesis (M.A.)--Washington State University, December 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-57). Also available online in PDF format.