Volume 33, Issue 1

In previous research, cultural proximity has been operationalized by ‘hard facts’ such as geographical distance, the exchange of goods or persons (tourists and immigrants) and the similarity of political systems. This article will try to complement current work in the field by suggesting a new operationalization derived from Hofstede's (1991) cultural dimensions. A survey was conducted in eight countries with a student sample (N = 325) to find out if international audiences which resemble each other in terms of Hofstede's (1991) cultural dimensions have similar attitudes towards U.S. prime-time fictional programming. The results show that Hofstede's four cultural dimensions significantly differentiate between the U.S.A., Asian and European countries in a student population. However, operationalizations based on geographical distance allow a better differentiation between nation-states in terms of how they evaluate U.S. fiction. It will be discussed whether cultural dimensions in general are able to measure cultural proximity.

Zillmann's mood-management theory (Zillmann, 1988) has acquired a prominent place in media psychology and makes reliable predictions about people's hedonistically motivated mood regulation via entertainment offerings. However, the full potential for explaining affect regulation through media usage has not been exhausted so far. Therefore, we aim at an integrative view of the field based on empirical findings from communication studies as well as on the background of contemporary theories of mood (regulation) and emotion (regulation). The purpose of this analysis is to argue towards an integrative theoretical perspective which considers both unconscious and conscious/reflected processes of affect regulation through media, supplements the hedonistic motive with other non-hedonistic, instrumental motives of affect regulation, looks at selection behavior as well as at other behavioral and cognitive strategies of affect regulation, and encompasses individual attributes (particularly those with affinity to affects).

In this article, we discuss the use of time series models in communication research. More specifically, we consider autoregressive and moving-average processes, which together constitute the autoregressive integrated moving average-framework (ARIMA). This approach provides a comprehensive framework to deal with the essential issue of stationarity and to model the dynamics of any time series by estimating the autocorrelation structure. Underlying the models are questions as to what extent news tends to reproduce itself and how news flows adjust after deviations from the normal news stream. The data illustrating the models consist of visibility-scores of the immigration issue in Dutch national newspapers. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the impact of immigration figures on this visibility is not significant when the ARIMA-framework is applied, while an analysis using OLS suggests a positive influence.

This work investigates the influence of geo-cultural proximity and exposure to news and crime-action drama on the cultivation effect. A content analysis of prime-time programming (N = 63 hours) was used to compose questions about the prevalence of policemen, lawyers, and salesmen in the USA and Israel. A sample of 655 students answered the questions. Viewing of American programming is significantly correlated with a tendency to hold a biased estimation of the prevalence of all three occupations in America in a manner that resembles the world of TV content. Viewing of Israeli programs has no such impact. Viewing of news and crime-action drama and general viewing have no systematic influence on the estimations made about any of the countries.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically explore in what ways Information and Communication Technology (ICT) corresponds with knowledge sharing in organizations. We will address the research question: “What notions and relationships have been proposed in the literature regarding ICT use and knowledge sharing?” In order to draw connecting lines between different bodies of literature, we developed two notions of ICT performance as a guiding principle in reviewing the literature. On the one hand, ICT is portrayed as a guide that moulds ways of knowledge sharing, and on the other hand ICT is described as a facilitator that follows existing knowledge sharing processes in organizations. The two types of ICT performance offer a tool with which approaches and perspectives on ICT in processes of knowledge sharing can be interconnected and displayed in one overview. This systematic research overview that connects separate notions and ideas coming from different disciplines results in a synthesis of research questions that are relevant for future research on the role of ICT in knowledge sharing in organizations.

Lowe, G.F. and Jauert, P. (Eds.). (2005). Cultural dilemmas in Public Service Broadcasting . Nordicom. ISBN 91-89471-32-6 (330 pp.) (Irene Costera Meijer) Höijer, B. (Ed.). (2007). Ideological Horizons in Media and Citizen Discourses: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches . Göteborg: Nordicom. ISBN 978-91-89471-45-0 (165 pp.) (Baldwin Van Gorp)