Search results

In this chapter, we explore ‘unanticipated excess’ through the lens of our own doctoral research projects, which are presented as distinct vignettes: Reade’s digital ethnography of young women’s relations with ‘fitspo’ (fitness inspiration) content on Instagram, Moran’s social media ethnography of African young people in Australia and Lyall’s show-and-tell interviews with users of digital self-tracking devices. While our projects differ in many ways, we share research practices that did not fully anticipate the challenges of digitalised research fields. In coming to terms with our unanticipated excess, we reflect on inescapable moments and uneasy feelings from our fieldwork. In so doing, we argue that excess need not be considered a ‘failure’ – to establish boundaries, to filter data or to engage in objective analysis – but should rather be seen as an important part of reflexive research practice. Excess holds possibilities and potentials to foster care and camaraderie between digital scholars and can push us and our work – empirically, methodologically and ethically – in new directions. It also presents an opportunity to continue to champion integrity over production as we move forward in our personal and collective research journeys.

This paper explores the way in which industrial pollution has been expressed in the narrative accounts of nature, landscape and industry by William Gilpin in his 18th-century picturesque travel writings. A positive description of pollution is generally outdated and unacceptable in the current society. The authors contrast his “picturesque” view with the contemporary perception of industrial pollution, reflect on these early accounts of industrial impacts as representing the roots of impression management and use the analysis to inform current accounting.

The research uses an interpretive content analysis of the text to draw out themes and features of impression management. Goffman's impression management is the theoretical lens through which Gilpin's travel accounts are interpreted, considering this microhistory through a thematic research approach. The picturesque accounts are explored with reference to the context of impression management.

Gilpin's travel writings and the “Picturesque” aesthetic movement, it appears, constructed a social reality around negative industrial externalities such as air pollution and indeed around humans' impact on nature, through a lens which described pollution as adding aesthetically to the natural landscape. The lens through which the picturesque tourist viewed and expressed negative externalities involved quite literally the tourists' tricks of the trade, Claude glass, called also Gray's glass, a tinted lens to frame the view.

The paper adds to the wealth of literature in accounting and business pertaining to the ways in which companies socially construct reality through their accounts and links closely to the impression management literature in accounting. There is also a body of literature relating to the use of images and photographs in published corporate reports, which again is linked to impression management as well as to a growing literature exploring the potential for the aesthetic influence in accounting and corporate communication. Further, this paper contributes to the growing body of research into the historical roots of environmental reporting.

A “state-driven” approach suggests that colonists use census categories to rule. However, a “society-driven” approach suggests that this state-driven perspective confers too much power upon states. A third approach views census-taking and official categorization as a product of state–society interaction that depends upon: (a) the population's lay categories, (b) information intellectuals' ability to take up and transform these lay categories, and (c) the balance of power between social and state actors. We evaluate the above positions by analyzing official records, key texts, travelogues, and statistical memoirs from three key periods in India: Indus Valley civilization through classical Gupta rule (ca. 3300 BCE–700 CE), the “medieval” period (ca. 700–1700 CE), and East India Company (EIC) rule (1757–1857 CE), using historical narrative. We show that information gathering early in the first period was society driven; however, over time, a strong interactive pattern emerged. Scribes (information intellectuals) increased their social status and power (thus, shifting the balance of power) by drawing on caste categories (lay categories) and incorporating them into official information gathering. This intensification of interactive information gathering allowed the Mughals, the EIC, and finally British direct rule officials to collect large quantities of information. Our evidence thus suggests that the intensification of state–society interactions over time laid the groundwork for the success of the direct rule British censuses. It also suggests that any transformative effect of these censuses lay in this interactive pattern, not in the strength of the British colonial state.

What do we do with the excess data from our research? ‘Excess’ – particularly in digital media research – is inevitable. It emerges in the research process as the ‘debris’ and ‘leftovers’ from planning, fieldwork and writing; the words cut from drafts and copied to untouched and forgotten files; and the data archived but never analysed or published. From our conversations with colleagues, to our call for contributors, we repeatedly heard researchers’ stories of digital data overflow, as they shared a collective sense of excess data as something more than that which is simply left out of formal research outputs. Digital excess, in particular, holds discursive flexibility: it points to abundance and possibility but also to our failure to control or contain information. Excess data matter, but how and why they do is somewhat opaque and largely underexplored.

This book, Data Excess in Digital Media Research, is a dedicated collection that pays attention to excess data. We position ‘excess’ as a conceptual, methodological, ethical and pragmatic challenge and opportunity for digital media research – we examine what happens when media researchers return to their surplus archives and explore the labour and affects surrounding data overflow and excess. We suggest that data excess is – or should be – a central concern for digital media scholars because of the methodological characteristics of digital media research, the ‘research ethos’ around data excess and the unexpected affects and ‘hauntings’ of excess data. This introduction provides an overview of these concerns and outlines each chapter.

Wellness has moved beyond its original emancipatory roots to become a mechanism for self-optimisation. In this chapter, the authors examine how wellness transforms or ‘wellness washes’ pleasurable practices into rationalised and instrumentalised ones. The authors argue that one of the key drivers of ‘wellness washing’ is the entanglement of wellness with and in contemporary workplaces. In advance of this analysis, the authors examine digital pleasures, ASMR and digital drugs to examine how pleasures mediated and afforded by the screen are ‘wellness washed’ to better position them as normative cultural practices.

March 2020 signaled school closures and moves online for many institutions, but an online EdD program at a midsize, Christian university featured fewer than-expected programmatic changes. Because of its modality, program operations continued with relatively few changes. Although COVID-19-related campus closures did not interrupt these students’ scheduled courses, they substantively impacted their personal and professional lives. As a result, the authors in the program-specific writing center serving these students found themselves helping them navigate not only stresses related to the already-strenuous task of writing a dissertation but also personal and professional anxieties related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to explore and reflect on the strategies employed by a program‐specific writing center to support doctoral students during the COVID‐19 pandemic, focusing on relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond writing, and fostering deeper interpersonal connections to address the unique challenges students faced during this period.

The authors conducted an autoethnographic exploration of their experiences to consider and examine effective strategies for supporting students in times of stress. The authors guided this inquiry by reviewing logs, notes and video recordings of sessions held or rescheduled in Spring 2020.

The authors identified three major themes in how they adjusted their approach to considering the pandemic: relaxed scheduling policies, emotional support beyond the writing process by permitting students to set the writing aside while they focused on the more immediate concerns emerging from the rapid onset of pandemic life and intentionally using the opportunity to form deeper interpersonal connections with students in their home environments.

As institutions reflect on lessons learned during pandemic stresses, closures and mandates, intentional exploration and reflection allow for a greater understanding of what improvements the authors can make to future practice. This uniquely positioned study offers a valuable perspective on supporting students through crisis.

This research investigates the impact of corporate donations on the cost of equity capital. We argue that corporate donations reduce firm risk and improve reputation, affecting the cost of equity.

We employ a large international sample of 44 countries from 2002 to 2019. We use several econometric methods and conduct a range of sensitivity tests to examine the robustness of findings.

We find that corporate donations reduce the cost of equity capital. In terms of economic significance, the study shows that one standard deviation increase in corporate donations leads to a 12.9 to 14.9 basis point decrease in the cost of equity capital. The additional analyses reveal that donation patterns, country-specific attributes and macroeconomic characteristics likely influence the findings. Our results are robust to a batch of sensitivity tests, including GMM regression analysis and tests with alternative measures for corporate donations and the cost of equity capital.

Our research findings have practical implications. Policymakers can encourage firms to undertake philanthropic activities to reduce business risk, which benefits both firms and investors.

We contribute to the theoretical discussion about the role of corporate philanthropy. We argue that firm risk is reduced due to philanthropic activities such as corporate donations. Overall, our results suggest that corporate donations affect worldwide external financing costs.

Social networks can not only mobilize individuals for collective action but also pose risks, potentially leading to political challenges and societal unrest. Information consumption varies across platforms, with platform characteristics influencing user interactions and information sharing; yet this has received limited attention in scholarly literature. Acknowledging platform-specific differences, this paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms driving information diffusion on social networks in the context of geopolitical tensions.

The structural communication features on Twitter and Reddit are explored using schema theory and the concept of social media platform schema. Comparisons are drawn with social network analysis and content analysis of communication dynamics surrounding geopolitical tensions in India–Qatar relations, followed by the context of geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan.

The results illustrate how content-based connections on Reddit foster closer ties within subreddits but less connectivity between them, contrasting with Twitter’s profile-based connections. These distinct characteristics lead to varied information diffusion patterns and shape the diversity of opinions, influencing community structures and affecting the emotional tenor of discourse.

Social networks can potentially influence geopolitical events, but focusing on one platform overlooks differences in how information spreads and the influence each platform holds. Recognizing this, our comparative analysis of social networks’ structural attributes highlights their crucial roles in shaping user engagement and information diffusion. It lends theoretical support to the notion of social media platform schema with empirical insights into how users’ perceptions of these schemas impact thematic and emotional differences in platform discourse related to geopolitical tensions.

This study examines the consumption of fruit and vegetable (FV) beverages, distinguishing between sugar content, whether from added sugar (AS) or naturally occurring sugar (NOS). While FV beverages are widely perceived as a healthier alternative to other beverages, concerns about their sugar content persist, particularly for AS-sweetened beverages. This study examines the situational contexts (e.g. physical context, social context and temporal conditions) and food pairing contexts (vice versus virtue foods) that influence the selection of AS- over NOS-sweetened FV beverages. Furthermore, it also examines how situational factors and food pairing contexts interact to shape individuals’ FV beverage selection behaviour.

This study used food diary data from March 2019 to May 2022 in South Korea, concentrating on the consumption of ready-to-drink FV beverages with food.

The results reveal specific situational contexts that increase the likelihood of choosing AS-sweetened FV beverages. In addition, AS-sweetened ones are more likely to be paired with vice foods, whereas NOS-sweetened ones are more likely to be paired with virtue foods. Furthermore, the study shows a significant interaction effect of the social context with paired food menus on FV beverage selection behaviour.

The consumer-centred approach of the study provides valuable insights into the decision-making processes behind FV beverage consumption. It validates that AS- and NOS-sweetened FV beverages are consumed in different situational contexts and with distinct food menus, enabling individuals to make healthier choices in their own consumption context.