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PCCC study in collaboration with the University of Southampton sheds light on new brand relationships

Research news, Uncategorized

A Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre (PCCC) study in collaboration with the University of Southampton using Transactional Analysis (TA) to shed light on new brand relationships has been published in a high-ranking journal.

The paper titled ‘Games people play with brands: An application of transactional analysis to marketplace relationships’ authored by Georgiana Grigore and Becky Jenkins with Mike Molesworth (University of Southampton) is now available online in Marketing Theory: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1470593117706530.

In this paper, the authors use TA as an analytic to understand the complexity of marketplace relationships, and consumer-brand relationships in particular. The article shows how TA can be applied to the relations between different market actors to reveal underlying psychological structures that produce emotional ‘payoffs’, including dysfunctional ones. The benefits of such an approach are threefold. First, TA is more accessible than other psychoanalytic approaches, although it retains a biographical explanation of human motivations that are made absent in cognitive, or behavioural approaches. Second, the focus on ‘transactions’ allows us to examine specific exchanges between market actors that explain dysfunctional aspects of marketplace relationships. Finally, TA can provide both new and critical perspectives, and the possibility of transformation of relationship forms. The authors therefore explain the structural basis of marketplace relationships from a TA perspective, illustrate how TA Game Analysis can be applied to marketplace relationships, and discuss the implications of such an approach for transforming market practices.

 

Abstract

Relationships have been normalized in marketing theory as mutually beneficial, long-term dyads. This obscures their emotional content, ignores critical conceptualizations of corporate exploitation and fails to capture the range of possible marketplace relationship forms, including those that may result from individuals’ biographical psychology and that lead to repeated dysfunctional exchanges. In this article, we offer Berne’s (1964) transactional analysis (TA) as a way to uncover the biographical psychology that informs marketplace relationship structures and their accompanying emotions and to provide a critique of such arrangements. We first explain TA, its origins, its relationship with psychoanalysis, its limitations and contemporary extensions beyond therapy. We then present the structural basis of marketplace relationships from a TA perspective, before illustrating how a game in TA can be applied through an analysis of the iPhone and related mobile phone contracts and the Games If I didn’t Love Apple and Smallprint. Finally, we discuss the implications of such an approach for transforming market practices based on recognition of marketplace Games and their modification.

ADRC at National Dementia Action Alliance meeting in London

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The Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) was invited to join the National Dementia Action Alliance (DAA) Innovative Approaches to Dementia Care and Support event on Wednesday 19th April in London. Dr Michelle Heward represented ADRC at the event which provided an opportunity to connect with members of the National DAA and explore innovative approaches to dementia care and support.

The event was as co-chaired by Chris Roberts who lives with dementia, his wife and carer Jayne, and Neil Mapes (CEO of the charity Dementia Adventure). Throughout the event a range of speakers presenting new initiatives including John Craig (CEO of Care City); Dr. Ben Marathappu (Co-founder of the homecare provider Cera); University of Worchester’s peer support centres; SCIE’s augmented reality; and NHS Doncaster CCG innovative approaches to commissioning.

Discussion on the day focused on how these innovations might work in practice, as well as identifying the outcomes for people affected by dementia and their families.

 

 

 

 

 

FMC Faculty Research Seminar Series 2016-17 *UPDATED*

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Faculty of Media and Communication

Faculty Research Seminar Series 2016-17

May

at a Glance 

 

A Journalism Research Group

Research Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 10 May 2017 at 3pm 

JRG

Welcomes: 

Dr James Dennis –  University of Portsmouth

“It’s Better to Light a Candle than to Fantasize About a Sun”: Social Media, Political Participation and Slacktivism in Britain 

This presentation examines how routine social media use shapes political participation in Britain. Since the turn of the century, many commentators have argued that political activism has been compromised by “slacktivism,” a pejorative term that refers to supposedly inauthentic, low-threshold forms of political engagement online, such as signing an e-petition or “liking” a Facebook page. This is explored in three interrelated contexts, using three different research methods: an ethnography of the political movement, 38 Degrees; an analysis of a corpus of individually-completed self-reflective media engagement diaries; and a series of laboratory experiments that were designed to replicate environments in which slacktivism is said to occur. I argue that slacktivism is an inadequate and flawed means of capturing the essence of contemporary political action, as Facebook and Twitter create new opportunities for cognitive engagement, discursive participation, and political mobilisation.

Dr James Dennis is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Portsmouth. His research interests lie in political communication, with a particular focus on social media, political participation and citizenship, and digital news. His work has been published in the Civic Media Project, published by MIT Press, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, and Political Studies. James maintains a personal research site at jameswilldennis.com, and can be found on Twitter at @jameswilldennis. 

 

 

A Narrative Research Group

Research Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 10 May 2017 at 4pm 

NRG

Welcomes: 

Dr Matthew Freeman –  Bath Spa University

Small Change – Big Difference: Tracking the Non-Fictionality of Social Transmedia 

Today’s convergent media industries readily produce stories across multiple media, telling the tales of Batman across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the Star Wars universe across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood’s blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with ideas of digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmedia is so much more than movie franchises. Yet while scholarship dwells on transmedia’s commercial, global industry formations (Jenkins, 2006; Scolari, 2009; Evans, 2011; Mann, 2014; Freeman, 2014), smaller communities and far less commercial cultures now make new and very different uses of transmedia, in some ways re-thinking transmedia by applying it to non-fictional projects as a socio-political strategy for informing and unifying local communities. There has been little attempt to track or understand such a socio-political idea of transmedia: Henry Jenkins (2006) famously theorised this phenomenon within a digital and industrial context, but what does it mean to examine transmedia from a social perspective?

In one sense, examining transmedia from a social perspective means thinking about it as a non-fictional engagement strategy that has ramifications in terms of people, leisure, activism, politics, and society itself. As such, this paper begins to theorise a social, non-fictional form of transmedia, pointing to Comic Relief in the UK and to political projects in Colombia to tease out the fabric of social transmedia campaigns. This includes re-thinking modes of participation, documentary and community media.

Dr Matthew Freeman is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Bath Spa University, and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds (Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot, 2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history, and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication. 

 

 

A Conflict, Rule of Law and Society

Research Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 17 May 2017 at 3pm 

CRoLS

Welcomes: 

Mark “Max” Maxwell

Deputy Legal Counsel – U.S. Africa Command

 

 

 

A

Centre for Politics and Media Research

Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 24 May 2017 at 3pm 

Politics

Welcomes: 

Prof James Martin – Goldsmiths

A

Centre for Politics and Media Research

Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 24 May 2017 at 4pm 

Politics

Welcomes: 

Paul Reilly – University of Sheffield 

 

 

 A Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre

Research Seminar 

Venue: F309, Fusion Building, Talbot Campus, Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset, BH12 5BB 

Wednesday 31 May 2017 at 3pm 

PCCC

Welcomes: 

Andrea Esser –  Roehampton University

The Quiet Revolution: From Broadcasting and Advertising to Branded Entertainment 

Efforts to endear brands to consumers go back as far as the 1920s, when branded entertainment was widespread on US radio and later television. In the UK advertiser-funded programming has no history. The public-service broadcasting remit demanded a clear separation between advertising and editorial content. But recent years have opened the doors to branded entertainment. The unregulated on-line mediascape offers endless possibilities and British broadcast legislation was revised in 2011 to allow for product placement. Building on an extensive analysis of trade journal articles since 2011, this paper seeks to illuminate recent developments and to build a theoretical framework by identifying drivers and tokens of change and different types of TV-related branded entertainment. History, I will argue, has left its mark. British broadcasters and TV producers seem to have been reluctant to embrace branded entertainment. But traditional content providers, like advertisers cannot escape the consequences of digitalization. Branded entertainment in multiple forms is revolutionising both marketing and the production and delivery of audiovisual content.

All are welcome and we look forward to seeing you there! 

About the series

This new seminar series showcases current research across different disciplines and approaches within the Faculty of Media and Communication at BU. The research seminars include invited speakers in the fields of journalism, politics, narrative studies, literature, media, communication and marketing studies.  The aim is to celebrate the diversity of research across departments in the faculty and also generate dialogue and discussion between those areas of research.

Contributions include speakers on behalf of 

The Centre for Politics and Media Research

Promotional Cultures and Communication Centre

Centre for Public Relations Research and Professional Practice

Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community (JRG/NRG/Civic Media)

Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management

Conflict, Rule of Law and Society

EMERGE

Centre for Film and Television

 

 

Recent Writing from Kip Jones Available on the Internet

BU research, PG research, Research news, Uncategorized

 

“Kyle’s photo-montage of black and white clippings, mostly from fashion magazines, Bailey and Avedon, etc., glued to the walls surrounding his bed”.

Kip Jones is pleased to announce that the tripartite story, “True confessions: why I left a traditional liberal arts college for the sins of the big city”, first published in Qualitative Research Journal, is available on Academia.edu.  Jones is particularly pleased that what is now called ‘auto-fiction’ has been accepted for publication by such a major qualitative journal. The three stories in the article conclude with a scene from Jones’ ongoing development of the feature film script for “Copacetica”. All three stories portray aspects of the sexual fumbling and romantic insecurities typical in youth.

“Dirty Frank’s” bar, Philadelphia, where the main characters of “Copacetica” frequently meet.

The second piece of writing consists of the bar scene from “Copacetica”. This is the scene in which all the major characters are introduced and the story sets up the conundrum that the main character will face in the film.

“Copacetica” tells the tale of a gullible youth on a roller coaster ride of loss of innocence and coming out in the flux and instability of 1960s hippy America. Often seen as a period of revolution in social norms, Copacetica’s themes include being different, the celebration of being an outsider, seeing oneself from outside of the “norm”, and the interior conflicts of “coming out” within a continuum as a (gay) male in a straight world. These observations are set within the flux and instability of a period of great social change, but which are often viewed in retrospect as consistent and definable. Being straight or being gay can also be viewed in a similar way within the wider culture’s need to set up a sexual binary and force sexual “choice” decision-making for the benefit of the majority culture, or ‘heteronormativity’.  Through the device of the fleeting moment, the story interrogates the certainties and uncertainties of the “norms” of modernity.

In the later gallery scene (not yet published), a minor character explains the meaning of the word, “copacetic”:

VISITOR TWO
What d’he say?

VISTOR ONE
“Everything’s copacetic”! (Beat) 
What does that mean, anyway?

VISITOR THREE
Everything’s cool. Everything’s okay. 
Or “Groovy” as they like to say.

Asked what he enjoyed about writing the script for this film, Jones said, “Definitely revisiting the slang used by youth of the 1960s! It’s virtually its own language. And writing the sex scenes. Exciting and very tiring. Almost like the real thing”.

You can read the opening scene planned for the film on KIPWORLD: “Copacetica” Scene 1. EXT SUBURBAN HOUSE POOL NIGHT

Innovation Brunch May 10th ‘Reimagining civic engagement in a digital culture’

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The BU Civic Media Hub is hosting Paul Mihailidis from Emerson University’s Engagement Lab on Wednesday May 10th from 10-11am in Fusion 112. 
The Engagement Lab blends media studies, digital design, art and computer science in its teaching and research, which is largely done in partnership with community organisations. They recently launched an MA in Civic Media Art and Practice and have been featured by the New York Times.
 
Paul joins us for an innovation brunch (coffee, fresh fruit and pastries) to discuss his research and share strategies for developing grant bids, creating practice-based research partnerships, and generating internationally recognised outputs. He’ll also share with us the successes (and struggles) of their new postgraduate programme, helping to take forward our initiative to develop masters teaching in Data Communications at BU.
 
Please RSVP by 5th May to afeigenbaum@bournemouth.ac.uk if you would like to join.

New edition of bestselling book for BU Professor

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The fifth edition of Social Work Practice, BU professor Dr Jonathan Parker’s bestselling book, has just been published. The book takes readers through a step-by-step journey into the four main aspects of contemporary social work practice – Assessment, Planning, Intervention and Review – underpinning these in their relational contexts and stressing social justice and human rights. The book introduces readers to each process in a clear and accessible way, supporting readers to both reflect on and apply what has been learnt in practice across settings and service user groups. The book provides a theoretical foundation from which readers can explore other aspects of social work.

This new revised edition of the book introduces an ‘ethnographic approach’ to social work, fusing research, earning and practice. It focuses on the centrality of relationship and resilience, exploring these critically within the political context of contemporary social work

UUK – International Research Collaboration After the UK Leaves the European Union

EU, Impact, international, policy, Research news, Uncategorized

UUK have published International Research Collaboration After the UK Leaves the European Union. The information below summarises the main thrust of the document.

 

Benefits of Research Collaboration

International collaboration is vital as it enables individual academics to increase their impact through pooling expertise and resources with other nations to tackle global challenges that no one country can tackle alone. Cross-nation collaboration increases citations and combined talents produce more innovative and useful outcomes.

 

The paper emphasises that the researchers themselves need to drive the collaboration and have choice. Selecting ‘Britain’s best new research partners’ is infeasible as sectors have different needs and Britain needs to collaborate with the countries with the richest talent and expertise. Funding needs to be well-structured and flexible to allow this.

 

The foreword on page 2 states “We should look to developing new networks and funding arrangements that support collaboration with major research powers” both within Europe and internationally. “The primary focus should be on delivering excellent research”, the government should seek to access and influence the 9th Framework Programme (Horizon successor), alongside new funding sources to incentivise collaborations with high-quality research partners beyond the EU. UUK call for a cross-government approach to supporting international research and the drawing together of the current disparate funding mechanisms, including “promoting research collaboration opportunities as a central pillar of the UK’s offer to overseas governments and businesses.”

 

Collaborative Partners

While its important to work with both EU and non-EU partners the report notes that research with other EU member states collectively makes up the largest pool of collaborators. “Research undertaken with EU partners like Germany and France is growing faster than with other countries – hence while it is vital that the UK takes every opportunity to be truly global in their outlook, the importance of collaboration with EU partners should not be underestimated.”

 

Almost all the growth in research output in the last 30 years has been brought about by international partnership. In 1981 less than 5% of UK research publications had an overseas co-author. Whereas Figure 1 below demonstrates how collaboration has changed, illustrating how domestic output has plateaued and non-UK collaborations accounts for recent growth.

 

Figure 1: The trajectory of international co-authorship on research publications from Imperial, UCL, Cambridge and Oxford.        (Data: source, Web of Science; analysis, King’s College Policy Institute).

 

 

Table 1 below highlights the UK’s major collaborative partners demonstrating a mix of EU and non-EU partners (non-EU partner in bold).

 

Table 1: Countries co-authoring UK output (2007-2016).

The UUK report reminds that research is a form of diplomacy leading to alliances and memoranda between national academies. The international links create esteem and demonstrate the wider engagement and status of an institution which is attractive to international students and staff.

 

 

Addressing Collaborative Barriers

Addressing the barriers to research collaboration is more than just funding, the report calls for:

 

  • Better information on capabilities and strength of UK researchers

 

The report states there needs to be better understanding and matching of research and innovation strengths between partners and potential collaborators, with clearer articulation of these and provision of contact points at the research organisation, funding agency and sector levels.

 

The circulation of people and ideas is fundamental to international research collaborations: National policy frameworks of all partners must be flexible enough to support international exchange, enabling critical human resources – including technical expertise – to flow between systems.

 

  • Cultural barriers need better understanding

 

The report highlights South Korea and Taiwan as attractive collaborators because of their research-intensive economies, strong technology investment, excellent university system, and high-English speaking rate. However collaboration is challenged by geography, proximity and cultural differences.  UUK report that communication problems are a key barrier alongside the uncertainty about research profiles of UK universities and significant differences in research governance.

 

Researchers working within different national contexts will have experience of different research cultures. These can be a source of strength and innovation, but also create challenges that must be understood, acknowledged and addressed. This requires time, but can be mitigated by the development of shared understandings, priorities and policy frameworks.

 

  • Policy and funding stability is essential

 

Stability, certainty and trust are required if successful international research collaborations are to be fostered. Partners need to have confidence that the policy and funding environment will not be subject to unexpected or dramatic change after they have invested the time and resources necessary to develop productive and beneficial partnerships. Stability and certainty in both policy and funding environment is a key facilitator.

 

  • Bilateral agreements with defined funding facilitated by a coordinated application process

 

The report effectively highlights the difficulties of ‘double jeopardy’ (Roberts, 2006) whereby all partners need to individually secure funding across a sustaining period to both commence and fully complete. Furthermore while countries commission and pay for the research it depends on individual motivation for success. Individuals make research choices that further their career and are fundable. EU links exist because researchers at well-funded institutions saw mutual net benefits, however EU collaboration proliferated because mutually assured Framework Programme funding supported it.

 

The report suggests a mechanism for effective research collaboration is to create more flexible agency-level bilateral agreements with associated secure funding. A Memorandum of Understanding should identify common priorities and mutual research standards yet this should be backed up by a research fund. Page 6 describes collaboration with Brazil as an example of this.

 

Furthermore, UK research funding beyond the EU is highly dependent on the ODA budget which limits research themes and fundable countries. Post Brexit the UK needs new money without ODA type restrictions to support collaborations with partners not eligible for EU funds.

 

Note: UUK have also released a second report on whether free trade agreements can enhance opportunities for UK higher education post Brexit.

 

References

Roberts, Sir Gareth. (2006). International partnerships of research excellence.

 

 

PCCC study finds that choice in HE can be more about managing relationships between parent and child than just making the ‘right choice’​

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Helen Haywood and Richard Scullion have had their paper titled ‘It’s quite difficult letting them go, isn’t it?’ UK parents’ experiences of their child’s higher education choice process accepted for publication in ‘Studies in Higher Education’, a prestigious 3 star journal. The paper derives from Helen’s doctoral research on parents’ experiences of their child’s Higher Education choice process. The main findings include that parents experience this process, not as ‘rational’ consumers, in the way that much government and HEI communication assumes, but primarily as parents whose main aim at this key stage in their relationship with their child is to maintain this relationship and to minimise any arguments and conflict. ‘Relationship maintenance’ is thus the main theme. In some cases, parents are prepared to go to considerable lengths in order to manage this process and to ‘keep the peace’ with their adolescent child and their experiences are vividly captured in lengthy quotations which derive from the qualitative, interpretive research undertaken with this under-researched group. The findings in this paper will resonate with parents and particularly parents of adolescents. It also has important implications for HEIs and government policies and focuses on an often neglected facet of choice – the role of relationships in making choices.
Abstract:
This paper challenges the dominant discourse that Higher Education (HE) choice is a consumer choice and questions assumptions underpinning government policy and HE marketing. HE choice is largely viewed as a rational, decontextualized process. However, this interpretivist study found it to be much more complex, and to be about relationships and managing a transition in roles. It focuses on parents, an under-researched group, who play an increasing part in their child’s HE choice. It finds that they experience this process primarily as parents, not consumers and that their desire to maintain the relationship at this critical juncture takes precedence over the choice of particular courses and universities. The role of relationships, and in this context relationship maintenance, is the main theme. This is experienced in two principal ways: relationship maintenance through conflict avoidance and through teamwork. These significant findings have implications for the way governments and universities consider recruitment.

To read the full article, please click on the below link:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2017.1315084

Dr. Miguel Moital contributes to amateur documentary on FoMO

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As I was about to leave home and head to Heathrow to travel to India as part of the Bournemouth University’s Global Festival of Learning, I checked my work email one last time. There was an email inviting me to be interviewed about FOMO, but with a caveat: the interview had to take place that day or on the morning of the following day. This is because the interview was for the documentary competition #docinaday organised by the London Documentary Network.

The competition involves giving a theme to participating teams on Saturday morning, and they then have 36 hours to plan, record and edit a film of up to 6 minutes that captures the theme. The theme was fear and the team decided to focus on FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. They googled for experts in the area and came across the research blog entry reporting my 14:Live presentation on 14 March (a BU event), precisely on that topic.

Given the urgency of the request, I immediately replied that I was unable to do it in person as I was about to leave to the airport. They suggested we met at the airport (they were based in London), which I agreed as I had a 3 hour wait. During the interview, I talked about some of the findings of the research we have carried out on FOMO in events.

The team has just notified me that they were actually runners-up!


I think they have captured the essence of FOMO well, and I shall be using the film as part of my consumer experience and behaviour lecture on the topic. While it is unlikely that the film will have a large viewing, this example shows how important it is to keep feeding the Internet with information about what we do. You never know when someone needs an expert in one of your topics of expertise, and having this information readily available on the Internet may lead them to you.

Dr. Miguel Moital, Department of Events & Leisure

Volunteers Required (without ticklish feet!)

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We are looking for BU staff and students to help us test the accuracy and reliability of the newly developed NERVE device.  Designed to monitor loss of sensation in the hands and feet, it is hoped that this device will eventually be used by patients in their own homes. Our research study will compare the accuracy and reliability of the NERVE device to a device currently used in clinical settings.

So as long as you’re over the age of 18, have 10 minutes to spare and don’t have overly ticklish feet, we need you! All you need to do is lie down and tell us at what point you feel a vibration on the finger, big toe, and possibly the ankle and knee.

For more information please contact Emma Frampton (eframpton@bournemouth.ac.uk) and arrange a time suitable for you!