Elizabeth A. Williams

Saving Lives Branch by Branch: The Effectiveness of Driver Licensing Bureau Campaigns to Promote Organ Donor Registry Sign-Ups to African Americans in Michigan

African Americans are disproportionately represented on the national waiting list for organ transplantation. Promoting organ donor registries is one way to improve the possibility that those on the waiting list can receive a life saving transplant. Driver licensing bureaus have been suggested as an efficient site for campaigns aimed at increasing state-based registry sign-ups. Previous research has suggested these campaigns work well for Caucasian populations, but there is less evidence supporting this approach in more diverse populations. To determine whether more diverse populations demonstrate similar sign-up rates when receiving a driver licensing bureau campaign, the present study used a previously successful strategy as the basis for designing and disseminating materials that would appeal to African Americans and Caucasians in two diverse counties in the state of Michigan (Wayne and Oakland Counties). Communication design and media priming served as the theoretical foundations of a three-prong campaign that used mass media, point-of-decision, and interpersonal components. Results from countywide and zip code data indicate that the campaign greatly increased sign-ups among African American residents (700% increase above baseline). Although more Caucasians still signed up than did African Americans, the inclusion of an interpersonal component resulted in similar numbers of registry sign-ups during 2 intervention months. The study provides evidence supporting the use of driver licensing bureau campaigns to promote organ donation registries to diverse audiences.

Promoting the Michigan Organ Donor Registry: Evaluating the Impact of a Multifaceted Intervention Utilizing Media Priming and Communication Design

There are currently more than 100,000 individuals waiting for an organ transplant. Organ donor registries represent the easiest and most concrete way for people to declare their intent to donate, but organ donor registries are vastly underutilized. This study reports a campaign intervention designed to increase the rate of joining the Michigan Organ Donor Registry. Grounding intervention development in the theoretical principles of media priming and communication design, the intervention took place in two waves in three counties in Michigan. Each intervention consisted of a media component, point-of-decision materials, and an interpersonal component. Increases in registration rates of 200 to 300% in each intervention county, compared to stable statewide trends in registry rates, provide evidence of highly successful intervention efforts. The rate of registry increase in intervention counties was approximately 1,900% higher than statewide on a per capita basis.

Expressions of Identifications: The Nature of Talk and Identity Tensions Among Organizational Members in a Struggling Organization

This study investigates how organizational members communicatively enact identification and more specifically how tensions in identification are expressed through members’ talk and behaviors. Using a case-study approach, we explored the experiences of members in an organization in turmoil. Semi-structured interviews, questionnaires given at two times, and observations of organizational events were used to understand the identification tensions these individuals negotiated and ways that identification, disidentification, and ambivalent identification were enacted. The study provides empirical evidence of changing identifications and articulates their communicative manifestations. The findings not only support the notion that identification is a complex and dynamic process but also contribute to the identification literature by illustrating specific ways that various forms of identification tensions are enacted and communicated in response to organizational change.

The “Tell Us Now” Campaign for Organ Donation: Using Message Immediacy to Increase Donor Registration Rates

There is a substantial gap between those people in the United States who identify as being favorable toward organ donation (~90%) and those registered as donors (~30%). A growing body of evidence suggests Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices are effective sites for facilitating higher organ donor registration rates on a national scale. The goal of the current study was to determine the utility and sustainability of a message immediacy approach, which draws from theoretical concepts such as priming and cues to action. Message immediacy requires individuals be: (a) exposed to a message that prompts an action, (b) in an environment where a prescribed action or behavior can be enacted, and (c) favorable toward the promoted behavior or action. Thirty-four Michigan counties, divided into three implementation groups, received campaigns in October (Group 1), November (Group 2), and December (Group 3) of 2009. Registration rates for three to six months after campaign implementation indicate that the on-site message prompts almost doubled registration rates in DMV offices. Additionally, preliminary cost-effectiveness evidence suggests message immediacy offers a relatively inexpensive campaign strategy.

Discourses of an Organizational Tragedy: Emotion, Sensemaking, and Learning After the Yarnell Hill Fire

How an organization discursively responds to a tragedy can have lasting impacts on how it makes sense of its past and plans for future actions. This study explores the organizational discourses that emerged after the Yarnell Hill Fire. We argue examining the social discourses following this fatality fire can illuminate how a high reliability organization, its crews, and members experience and make sense of an organizational tragedy. Several themes are found to be at tension with one another within the overarching discourses of emotion, sensemaking, and learning. We examine how these are negotiated and offer implications of these discursive tensions.

Slides in the Tray: How Fire Crews Enable Members to Borrow Experiences:

Experiential learning is essential for many high-performing teams, yet there are also challenges to its incorporation into team training. Using an interpretivist lens, this study explores how members of wildfire crews are encouraged to appropriate the experiences of their teammates to improve team process. First, we offer a tripartite argument for how experiential learning is inhibited. Then, based on our findings, we argue that a key practice of critical teamwork is the ability of team members to “borrow” experiences or learn from the experiences of others. We examine how firefighters interpret the concept of experience; the delineation between experiences and personal experiences was often blurred, as some firefighters spoke about experience as something that could be gained through activities that are not specifically firefighting. We delineate five training interactions through which firefighters are encouraged to appropriate the experiences of their colleagues. We then discuss how this extends the principles of the Nested Phase Model for critical teams and suggest areas for future research. These findings have implications for all types of critical teams—including military units and medical teams—as well as high-reliability organizations.

HIV/AIDS in Botswana: President Festus G. Mogae's Narrative of Secular Conversion

Over the last decade, Botswana has been identified as a model for countries fighting against annihilation from HIV/AIDS. The country had the highest rate of HIV infections in the world in 2000, but by the end of Festus G. Mogaes presidential term in 2008 Botswanas situation had improved significantly, as residents were increasingly likely to get tested, obtain treatment, and discontinue practices of discrimination against the infected. This study seeks to contribute to a growing body of literature focusing on the communicative elements that played a role in Botswanas successes. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to explore Mogaes national speeches about HIV/AIDS to consider how his rhetoric may have encouraged Botswanas residents to alter their health-related beliefs and behaviors. We find that Mogae used a narrative of secular conversion (i.e., discourse with a pseudoreligious structure that positions problems as rooted in existing values and offers a new guiding principle as an antidote), and we identify such narratives as persuasive health communication tools. The analysis offers public health advocates, scholars, and opinion leaders a framework for persuasively communicating about diseases such as HIV/AIDS without drawing exclusively from a biomedical framework.

A dynamic model of organizational resilience: adaptive and anchored approaches

Organizations of all types desire to be imbued with resilience, or the ability to withstand and bounce back from difficult events (Richardson, 2002; Walsh 2003). But resilience does not play the same role in every organization. Previous research (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2011) has argued that organizations can be more or less resilient. For high reliability organizations (HROs) such as fire crews and emergency medical units, resilience is a defining feature. Due to the life-or-death nature of their work, the ability to be successful in the face of difficult events is imperative to the process of HROs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.,This is a theory piece.,The authors put forth a dual-spectrum model that introduces adaptive and anchored approaches to organizational resilience.,There are organizations for which resilience is only enacted when the organization must overcome difficult events. And at the other end are organizations that may not enact resilience in difficult times, and therefore fail or deteriorate. But while it has been shown that organizations can be more or less resilient, there has been little attention paid to how organizations may have differing types of resilience.,In this piece, the authors theorize that resilience may differ in type between organizations. Drawing on theoretical approaches to resilience from communication (Buzzanell, 2010), organizational behavior (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2011), and motivational psychology (Dweck, 2016), the authors introduce a model that views resilience as a dynamic construct in organizations. The authors argue that an organization’s resilience-centered actions affect – and are determined by – its approach to Buzzanell’s (2010) five communicative processes of resilience. The authors offer testable propositions, as well as theoretical and practical implications from this model, not only for HROs, but for all organizations.

Conflicted Identification in the Sex Education Classroom Balancing Professional Values With Organizational Mandates

Despite enormous resources spent on sex education, the United States faces an epidemic of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections among young people. Little research has examined the role sex educators play in alleviating or exacerbating this problem. In this study, we interviewed 50 sex educators employed by public schools throughout a Midwestern, U.S. state about their experiences in the sex education classroom. Twenty-two interviewees communicated feelings of conflicted identification and provided examples of the ways in which they experienced this subjectivity in the context of their employment. We find these interviews shed light on the as-yet-understudied communicative experience of conflicted identification by delineating key sources of such conflict and discursive strategies used in its negotiation. Our results suggest that those who experience conflicted identification and who have a sense of multiple or nested identifications within their overarching professional identity may be safeguarded to some extent from eventual organizational disidentification.