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In the fast paced PCB industry of today windows of opportunity are short. One needs to be able to find quickly the key variables to a new process or an existing process so that the capability requirement can be met. Guesswork and traditional experimental design approaches will not work. Control charts by themselves will not work. Very large experimental studies will not work. What will work are simple, well defined, statistically designed experiments. This paper is an example of how simple, statistically based experiments were used to reduce haloing on Teflon® circuit boards. The drilling and plating processes using different laminate materials were investigated using Box‐Wilson and Plackett‐Burman experimental designs. Different data analysis techniques such as confidence intervals, scree plots, analysis of variance tables and analysis of means charts were used to determine the true significant (key) variables and the insignificant (non key) variables. An effective experimental study must have a capable measurement system. A method of determining the measurement system capability and improving it for haloing using isoplots is presented. In the end, two economically feasible paths to reduce the haloing problem were found.

Despite recent advances, neither organizational studies nor the scholarship on economic resilience has systematically addressed how the ecologies of organizations that populate local economies can serve as infrastructures for responding proactively to economic shocks. Using county-level data, this study analyzes relationships between the prevalence of organizational alternatives to shareholder value-oriented (SVO) corporations within a particular locality and its unemployment levels during and after the Great Recession. The results support the hypothesis that the presence of such alternative organizations can enhance the capacities of local economies to resist and recover from recession shocks. Cooperative, municipal, and community-based enterprises, research universities, and nonprofits more generally were associated with greater resistance to the recession shock and stronger recoveries – specifically, lower surges in unemployment rates from 2007 to 2010 and greater reductions in unemployment rates from 2010 to 2016. By contrast, SVO corporations were associated with greater surges in unemployment and perhaps weaker recoveries. Providing a proof of concept, this study opens up new lines of inquiry for organizational studies by linking organizational ecologies to the promotion of collective efficacy and a more broadly shared prosperity in economic life.

Cognitive literary criticism is introduced as a bridge between cognitive approaches to the study of persuasion, and literary traditions in consumer research. As a successor to reader-response theory, cognitive literary theory focuses on the cognitive processes of interpretation, while keeping an eye on the aesthetic properties of the text. Paradigmatically cautious researchers might shy away from attempts to marry positivist cognitive constructs to interpretivist cultural theory, but this chapter argues that these qualms also conceal missed opportunities for the study of persuasion.

Insights from cognitive literary criticism are demonstrated at the hand of a LEGO ad.

Theory of mind and conceptual blending are crucial cognitive skills involved in the interpretation of persuasive texts.

Most research to date has kept literary and cognitive approaches to persuasion separate, black-boxing the processes of persuasion. This chapter argues for a revitalization of interest in aesthetic detail, informed by insights from cognitive science.

Charities in the United States contribute to the public good by delivering a broad range of services and by promoting civic engagement and social change. Though these dual roles are widely acknowledged, a relatively few studies explore advocacy among service-providing nonprofits. Analyzing a random sample of charities in the San Francisco Bay Area, the authors conceptualize nonprofits as institutionally embedded formal organizations and actors. The authors find that a majority of service providers blend advocacy and service provision. Organizational rationalization constructs nonprofits as goal-oriented actors working to benefit their constituents and society at large, increasing the likelihood that nonprofits will embrace advocacy. Moreover, collaboration embeds nonprofits in networks of mobilization and information for advocacy and facilitates engagement in political and social change activities. By contrast, embeddedness in the market is negatively associated with advocacy. These results reinforce the salient role of service-providing nonprofits in collective civic action and demonstrate how nonprofit embeddedness in multiple institutional influences affects engagement in advocacy.

Rhetorical works (schemes and tropes) can increase advertisement liking. Because liking impacts advertising effectiveness, this study aims to investigate if positive processing, brand awareness, and persuasion outcomes previously associated with rhetoric are spurious and chiefly attributable to liking.

An experiment (n=448) employed natural advertising exposure conditions and a 3 (headline: nonfigurative, scheme, trope)×2 (copy length: long, moderate)×2 (involvement: high, low) between‐subjects factorial design.

Absent of liking differences, schemes and tropes are robust motivators of available resources devoted to processing (elaboration and readership). Favourable arguments only influence brand awareness and persuasion if processed. Consumers negatively view longer copy. Nonfigurative headlines encourage insufficient processing as copy lengthens. Insufficient processing decreases brand awareness and persuasion. However, schemes and tropes overcome negative copy length effects on brand awareness and persuasion regardless of involvement.

Without the benefit of increased liking, schemes interfere with copy point and brand memory similar to other creative attention‐getters – humour and sex appeals. Instead, schemes focus consumers on advertising style. The results are based on consumer responses; thus, error may make differences harder to detect. Another limitation is the focus on a single low‐risk, informational product, i.e. pens. Future research should investigate effects of rhetorical works with high‐risk and transformative products.

Advertisers should use rhetorical works to motivate processing, especially with longer copy explaining advantages of new, technical, or complex products. Also, effective rhetorical works need not create positive affect.

Isolating advertising rhetoric effects from liking differences explains anomalies in the literature (e.g. scheme versus trope superiority).

Sociologists have long thought of the integration of people in communities – social integration – and hierarchical social systems – systemic integration – as contradictory goals. What strategies allow organizations to reconcile social and systemic integration? We examine this question through 40 in-depth, longitudinal interviews with leaders of nonprofit organizations that engage in the dual pursuit of social and systemic integration. Two processes reveal how the internal structure of organizations often mirrors the ways in which organizations are embedded in their local environments. When organizations engage in loose demographic coupling, relegating those who “match” the community to the work of social integration, they produce internal inequalities and justify them by claiming community building as sacred work. When engaging in community anchoring, organizations challenge internal and external inequalities simultaneously, but this process comes with costs. Our findings contribute to a constructivist understanding of community, the mechanisms by which organizations produce inequalities, and a place-based conception of organizations as embedded in community.

This research explores two interconnected questions: (1) How do we approach stylistic features of multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters? (2) Do said artifacts designed for different purposes exhibit systematic stylistic differences? Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic categorization, this study develops a framework for examining concision, one of the primary stylistic considerations for multimodal rhetorical artifacts such as protest posters. This paper illustrates the use of this framework by exploring the correlation between rhetorical purpose and concision in posters created and disseminated before and during the 2011–2012 Québécois student movement. This study fine-tunes our existing knowledge on multimodality with style sensitivity, and demonstrates how an economy-of-sign based semiotic approach could enrich the empirical examination of multimodal rhetorical artifacts by generating more controlled interpretations.

The purpose of this paper is to forward an extension of reception analysis as a way to incorporate and give insight to social media mediations and big data in a qualitative marketing perspective. We propose a research method that focuses on discursive developments in consumer debates for example on YouTube – a large-scale open-access social media platform – as opposed to the closed and tightknit communities investigated by netnography.

Online reception analysis

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we find that big data can enrich online reception analyses by showing new aspects of weak tie online networks and consumers meaning making.

The potential of online reception analysis is to encompass a discursive perspective on consumer interactions on large-scale open-access social media and to be able to analyze socialities that do not represent shared cultures but are more representative of transitory everyday interactions.

Our method contributes to the current focus to define levels of analysis beyond research centered on individuals and individual interactions within groups to investigate other larger socialities. Further, our method also contributes by incorporating and investigating the mediatization of interaction that social media contributes with and therefore our methods actively work with the possibilities of social media. Hence, by extending the advances made by netnography into online spaces, online reception analysis can potentially inform the current status of big data research with a sociocultural methodological perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to review current thinking about visual and verbal images used in advertising. It also aims to critique a range of current alcohol advertisements and provides practical analysis of the visual and verbal rhetoric contained within them.

The article provides three empirical readings of alcohol advertisements. The first reading, presented by the authors, evaluates alcohol advertisements using the taxonomy of rhetoric, introduced by McQuarrie and Mick in 1996. They then offer a second reading of visual rhetoric, shown in the Absolut Vodka “Everything” advertisements, using the Phillips and McQuarrie's typology introduced in 2004.

The first two qualitative readings of alcohol and Absolut Vodka advertisements show that there is high deviance in advertisements. However, with the introduction of taxonomies, detailed textual interpretations can be made, categorised and commented upon using socio‐cultural cues. In terms of the third empirical reading, of the Absolut “Everything” television advertisement, informants displayed a collective understanding of visual rhetoric that is low in deviance, but a wide variety of interpretations where highly complex rhetoric is used.

The first two readings were completed by the authors, using their own interpretive practice skills, therefore, future research could be completed with informants that are in the target audience and informants that are outside the target audience. The empirical research invited informants that are in the target audience and informants not in the target audience. Future research could be conducted with different audience types and different research methods to gain a rounded picture.

Taxonomies of rhetoric have been created and developed over the years. The introduction of the visual rhetoric typology has given scholars the opportunity to categorise the signs and codes used in advertisements. This paper has used verbal and visual rhetorical taxonomies to highlight the wicked deviations shown in alcohol advertisements. It explores the perceptions of the scholars, with their own deep readings and the perceptions of scholars through depth interviews. This paper's examination of alcohol advertisements does not offer a fixed view of the interpretations that can be gained from rhetoric, it does, however, present insights into the concepts and methodological process for future studies.