<p> The marketplace in today's world is more dynamic than ever with the growing trends of environmentally-conscious business practices and products. The popular phrase of "going green" is used by many companies and organizations striving to provide environmentally safe products and services. With this growing industry, consumers are exposed to more and more "green" advertisements each day. However, many question if the practice of green advertising is worthwhile.</p><p> By looking at the way consumers react to different kinds of advertisements, it can be seen that green advertising is not always a smart choice. Researchers suggest that the reactions vary on many factors such as the type of consumers and the type of product. </p><p> This study analyzed the idea of green advertising versus non-green advertising based on the levels of high and low involvement products. An experiment was conducted using college students who completed a survey that presented a set of eight different advertisements for an array of brands and products. The participants included two groups made up of those who were exposed to green advertisements and those who were exposed to non-green advertisements. Both groups were shown the same set of four high involvement products and four low involvement products. The group of high involvement products included two kinds of cars and two kinds of laptops. The group of low involvement products included two kinds of pens and two kinds of bottled water. </p><p> The findings show that green advertisements work best with high involvement products. Unlike low involvement products, green advertising positively influences the consumers' attitude toward the advertisement and the brand, as well as purchase intention. Low involvement products did not have the same results and the influential power compared to high involvement products.</p>

<p> With the increasing number of Chinese international students coming to the United States every year, a more in-depth understanding of these international students' acculturation is necessary and urgent. Given the fact that past researches mostly describe Chinese immigrants, migrates or international students as oppressed cultural adaptors, who cannot avoid being marginalized; who suffer from various adjusting problems; and who have to make use of acculturative strategies to adapt to the new country, this thesis takes the factor of wealth and its relation with class, status and power into account during Chinese international students' acculturation under the globalized context. Instead of sticking to the stereotypical view of regarding Chinese International students as simply marginalized group, this thesis explores the possibility of these students as power negotiators in their everydayness of life by using the methodological tool of interview.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores the role of critical service-learning from the perspective of urban community members. Specifically, it examines the counternarratives produced by Black women community gardeners who engage in academic service-learning with postsecondary faculty. The study focuses on this particular group because of the women's deep involvement with grassroots organizing that reflects their sense of self and other community members, as well as their personal and political relationships to Detroit, Michigan. Given the city's economic disparities rooted in racial segregation, structural violence and gender oppression, Detroit is a site of critical learning within a postindustrial/postcolonial context. This intersectionalist approach to service-learning is likened to bell hooks's concept of homeplace, a site of resistance created by Black women for the purposes of conducting anti-oppression work. Integrating community member interviews and the author's autoethnographic account to dialogically co-construct meaning, the study employs the womanist epistemological tenet of multivocality through connections to place, community, and activist praxis. Presenting Black female cultural expressions and life stories illustrated in the data, the study identifies holistic community-campus partnerships as those that emphasize environmental insight, cultural representation, reflexive relationships, and collective action. The dissertation has strong implications in service-learning research and practice, advancing an ethos of responsibility that provides a space for unheard voices to speak and for relationships among community members and academics to reflect a model based on solidarity as opposed to traditional paradigms centered on charity. </p>

<p> Information Technology (IT) professionals use the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process to better manage their business operations, measure performance, improve reliability and lower costs. This study examined the operational results of those data centers using ITIL against those that do not, and whether the results change when traditional facilities engineers are included in the process. Overall, those IT departments using ITIL processes had no statistically significant improvements when compared to those who do not. Inclusion of Critical Facilities (CF) personnel in the framework offered a statistically significant improvement in their overall reliability of their data centers. Those IT departments who do not include CF personnel in the ITIL framework have a slightly lower level of reliability than those who do not use the ITIL processes at all.</p>

<p> Signaling theory originated in evolutionary biology and explains the mechanisms behind the honest communication of information between organisms. Communication scholars are increasingly turning to signaling theory as a way to test evolutionary explanations for human behavior. The present study tests if receiver-dependent costly signals can be used to predict the moment of aggressive behavior in video game environments. High status (but not high trait aggression) male subjects were fastest to engage in combat against a low voice pitch male opponent - but only when subject skill was high. This result underscores the importance of video game skill as a variable of interest as well as the need for video games researchers to tease out when real-world behaviors map to video game contexts.</p>

<p> This study investigated how the sociomaterial features of e-mail shaped the dynamics of teacher work expectations and work actions in one high school. Drawing on Greenhalgh and Stones' (2010) Strong Structuration Theory Incorporating a Technology Dimension, the study utilized Stones' (2005) Quadripartite Cycle of Structuration to make meaning from the data. The research site was a k-12 independent school in the Southeast United States. The network-in-focus was the high school and the agents-in-focus were high school teachers. Three administrators, all of whom taught at least one high school class, were also included in the sample. Data were collected primarily through interviews with the participants, supplemented by relevant documents, and a participant-generated e-mail communication log. Data were analyzed through a multi-step open coding process, as well as document analysis and analysis of the e-mail communication logs. The study's findings demonstrate that the sociomaterial features of e-mail played a significant role in shaping the dynamics of teachers' work expectations and work actions at Southeast. Teachers all utilized e-mail on a daily basis as both an efficiency and accountability device; however, some also appropriated it for task and work management purposes. Those teachers that used a smartphone in the execution of their jobs experienced feelings of increased availability, stress, and disruption to their work/home lives. There was a strong theme of accountability that was enabled--perhaps even encouraged--by uninhibited e-mail use. Finally, the research demonstrated that e-mail was at the center of how teachers understood their job(s) and what it meant to be "professional." </p>

<p> Utilizing ethnographic methods, this work examines how attendees of computer gaming events held by the Gaming@IU club form a community which uses technology to bring people together rather than isolate them and analyzes the ways attendees perform a unique forms of Whiteness and "nerd masculinity." Known as LAN parties, these computer gaming events are social functions where approximately 200 participants collocate their computers and play videogames with and against each other for up to twenty-four hours straight. Drawing years of fieldwork, this work uses participant observation and in depth interviews to examine how this group uses the computer gaming events to create a third place away from work and school where friendships can be created and maintained. </p><p> Based on this data, I examine the ways in which the statements of the LAN party attendees draw on a discourse of racial colorblindness to avoid dealing with the overwhelming Whiteness of these events which is not reflective of the racial and ethnic diversity of the area. I show how an avoidance of discussion of Whiteness and a general inability to articulate their thoughts about race prevents the attendees from interrogating the role the LAN party's organization may play in the racial makeup of attendees. </p><p> Focusing on issues of sexual harassment within gaming, I also look at the ways in which the games played and the social norms of the LAN party encourage the performance of hegemonic masculinity while playing the videogames but allow the attendees to inhabit a more complicit form of masculinity which is not overtly sexist. I argue that by embracing non-normative masculinity outside the games but discouraging it within the games, the LAN party participants are professing openness and acceptance but are failing to live up to that ideal.</p>

<p> This dissertation seeks to create a vision for virtuality culture through a theoretical expansion of Walter Ong's literacy and orality culture model. It investigates the ubiquitous and multimodal nature of the virtuality cultural phenomenon that is mediated by contemporary technology and not explained by pre-existing cultural conventions. Through examining the theoretical underpinnings of orality and literacy culture, the dissertation explores the cultural shift that is just beginning to restructure human consciousness through the ways that society is connecting, exploring and communicating. Further, this dissertation examines the contrasts between virtuality culture features and those related to traditional literacy and orality types, including the gap between the theory of secondary orality and virtuality culture. This dissertation also proposes three ways that contemporary technology creates human presence related to virtuality culture. Finally, this dissertation describes the broad implications for the evolution of virtuality culture in areas such as education, technology, literacy, philosophy, politics, linguistics, ethics, history, the arts and cultural studies.</p>

<p> This dissertation explores a discourse of democratic modernity in EU-member Bulgaria, which revolves around a hybrid popular music called chalga. I argue that chalga does not function as the name of a defined music genre. Rather, Bulgarians use it as a self-reflexive voice of ambivalence regarding the recontextualziation in liberal democracy of the socialist language ideology of evolutionary modernization: <i> navaksvane</i>&mdash;catching up&mdash;with Europe. On one hand, chalga indexes musical images that resonate with the current <i>zeitgeist</i> of modern European culture: aesthetical and social heterogeneity as well as commercial mass media. On the other hand, Bulgarians take this Ottoman-derived word as a non-referential index that invokes anxieties of Balkanism&mdash;a discursive trope of European modernity that has invented the Balkans as its liminal incomplete Self. As the ethnographic chapters of the dissertation show, Bulgarians deal with their ambivalence to chalga by seeking paternalist figures capable of imposing the language regimes of <i>navaksvane</i> when performers and audiences digress too much into coded zones of Balkan liminality. Regimenting modern popular music with top-down control points also to the political communication implicit in chalga. Cognizant of their inferior location vis-&agrave;-vis "real modern societies", ordinary Bulgarians seek paternalist leaders who can address them on an intimate level but are powerful enough to impose norms and practices circulating to Bulgaria from loci that represent the Occident. The expectation to have such leaders is not exclusive to democracy. It defined the political culture during socialism and even before. What is special to the contemporary era is the discursive formulation of such leadership, which I define as paternalistic populism. Bulgarians regard democracy as working in their country when it is guided from above by an authoritarian boss <i>(shef),</i> who knows how to anticipate the popular will, how to ally with bigger and external forces in order to overcome the society's marginality, and most importantly, how to act with "barbarous" Balkan aggression so as to put the nation in modern European order.</p>

<p> Martin Heidegger is a key philosophical thinker who has influenced contemporary scholarship in rhetorical theory. His concept of disclosure has become particularly significant because it is uniquely situated to explain the nuances of contemporary public political address. Yet the meaning and applicability of Heidegger's rhetoric of disclosure to explain new forms of political speech have been contested by two contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who advance different interpretations of the nature of a rhetoric of disclosure--one highlighting rhetoric as immanence, the other transcendence. This thesis, then, examines the philosophical and rhetorical debate about the rhetoric of disclosure by focusing on Derrida's transcendent interpretation and Deleuze's immanent interpretation in an effort to clarify Heidegger's rhetoric of disclosure and its usefulness for rhetorical studies. These divergent perspectives will then be applied to the political case study of President Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech to assess how each contributes to our understanding of rhetorical theory and criticism.</p>