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This article examines how qualitative approaches to human-centered inquiry benefit public diplomacy (PD) scholarship. It argues that rigorous qualitative methods improve the frameworks guiding PD research. Tendencies for miscommunication permeate the encoding and decoding communication processes in international/intercultural contexts, with PD often transcending cultural boundaries and national borders. This article cautions against assuming conceptual, measurement, and semiotic equivalence of constructs and variables, based on influences from culture and language. Furthermore, the article advocates mixed methods, explicating how rigorous qualitative methods can better contextualize the statistics of quantitative methods, leading to more comprehensive understandings of PD.

Corporate diplomacy research suggests US executives display little interest in supporting government diplomacy and promoting national culture; rather, corporate strategy focuses on profit. The corporate diplomacy phenomenon, however, needs additional examination in the more collectivistic East Asia context. This study investigates a public–private partnership in which a corporation sponsors a cultural exchange project in Japan, specifically how Japanese business leaders perceive and integrate promoting national interests and country image into corporate strategy. This research analyzes the New Tohoku program that brings foreign students, businesspersons, and social media influencers to Tohoku, a region undergoing reconstruction since the 2011 tsunami, to learn about Japan’s economy, history, climate, and culture. Interviews with executives and managers and documentary information from corporate webpages, news releases, and promotional brochures reveal motivations for engaging to (1) promote Japan’s culture, (2) stimulate economic growth, and (3) generate awareness about Pasona through publicity. While unrelated to Pasona’s business model, New Tohoku reflects the “Japanese mindset” of helping Japan; the founder, employees, and shareholders ensure this remains a strategic objective regardless of profits. This research has implications for multinational corporations’ role in cultural diplomacy as a component of public diplomacy.

This study explores whether South Koreans’ superordinate identification with North Koreans leads to increased humanization of and empathy for North Koreans as well as reduced negative feelings toward North Koreans. This study also examines whether superordinate identification intensifies support for people-to-people exchanges and unification using an experiment. South Koreans’ increased superordinate identification with North Koreans leads to greater humanization of the latter as well as less negative feelings toward them but does not affect support for unification. This suggests that extended contact is enough to generate superordinate identification with the outgroup but not enough to affect support for government policies.

This study explored the concept and practice of corporate diplomacy from the perspective of multinational corporate communication executives. It sought to assess corporate views on, and motivations for, engaging in diplomatic activities abroad and to gauge levels of interest among corporate leaders in participating in government-sponsored public diplomacy activities aimed at advancing national goals and interests. Semi-structured interviews with corporate communication executives revealed a lack of familiarity with the concept of corporate diplomacy and the types of activities corporate diplomacy might entail. While recognizing reciprocal impacts of company and country of origin images and reputations, communication officers, especially those representing corporations with the United States as the home country, expressed little interest in engaging in efforts to promote national culture and values among foreign publics, and they did not perceive an obligation to actively support government efforts in public diplomacy. Rather, corporate communication activities abroad are motivated primarily by economic self-interest perceived to be advanced through the creation of global—rather than national—corporate identities and brands and the development of supportive host-country operating environments. However, the interviews identified the potential for state and non-state corporate actors to work together through collaborations on issue-oriented diplomatic initiatives that serve common goals.

This study proposes alternative measures of infotainment’s effects on audience perception and reception of news on social media, focusing on infotainment coverage of North Korea. We determine the elements of framing strategies and narrative styles in facilitating public attention, positive and negative responses, and engagement in news content. We used the YouTube application programming interface to collect data from VideoMug, Korea’s most popular YouTube channel, run by the Seoul Broadcasting System. We examined 23,774 replies commenting on North Korea-related video clips from July 1, 2018, to May 17, 2019. The findings show that entertainment and human interest frames were effective in drawing public attention to news coverage about North Korea. Using humor and colloquial language facilitated public attention (both positive and negative) and public engagement. Over half (59.55%) of the comments generated positive emotions; less than one-third generated negative emotions (31.41%); and a few generated neutral ones (9.03%). The infotainment approach helped make South Koreans’ attitudes toward North Korea and inter-Korean relations more positive. A small number of users who served as top authorities were extremely partisan and conducted intense debates about infotainment practices. This study’s hybrid analytical framework using computerized text mining techniques offers both theoretical and methodological insights into the function of infotainment in the context of social media.

Contains fulltext : 226720.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called "replication crisis" has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability of findings. Communication research is subject to many of the same challenges that have caused low replicability in other fields. As a result, we propose an agenda for adopting open science practices in Communication, which includes the following seven suggestions: (1) publish materials, data, and code; (2) preregister studies and submit registered reports; (3) conduct replications; (4) collaborate; (5) foster open science skills; (6) implement Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines; and (7) incentivize open science practices. Although in our agenda we focus mostly on quantitative research, we also reflect on open science practices relevant to qualitative research. We conclude by discussing potential objections and concerns associated with open science practices. 26 p.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter could not avoid the “unfinished business of the [Vietnam] war,” specifically the fate of the United States' war resisters...

This study analyzes frames related to the flight MH370 disappearance in Malaysian (N = 93), Chinese (N = 155), and U.S. (N = 150) newspapers. The results provide insight about media orientations in an international crisis, particularly regarding national interests and international citizenship. Attribution of responsibility is the dominant frame; secondary frames vary among conflict and human-interest frames, demonstrating that attribution of responsibility is the most important frame even with unknown controllability and ambiguous intentionality. Results also demonstrate significant differences in national interest frames and in the roles in the societal evaluation of risk. This study contextualizes the results in media systems, diplomatic relations, and cultures.

This study examines from an information subsidies and framing theory perspective the media coverage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Through a content analysis of Malaysian government information subsidies (N = 78), and Malaysian (N = 155) and Chinese (N = 93) newspaper articles, findings include differences of crisis frames and risk roles, the absence of crisis cause did not detract from attribution of responsibility in regard to risk arbiters’ potential solutions to managing the crisis, among other key findings. Implications include the need for the inclusion of an unknown crisis type to the crisis communication typologies and models and theories, as well as supporting the argument of previous studies in regard to media coverage partially determined by the country’s media system and Palmlund’s (1992, 2010) generic roles of societal evaluations of risk.