Susan McKay

Impact of social group processes and functional diversity on communication in networked organizations

This study examines the role of social group processes in perceptions of effective communication in Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs). Communication professionals in 25 CRCs discussed the barriers and opportunities for communication in their diverse networked organizations. Thematic analysis of the transcripts highlighted the contribution of social group processes to both barriers and opportunities. Communication challenges implicated the social identity of organizational members, many of which were associated with distinct structural aspects of these organizations. Opportunities for communication frequently involved features that implicated social identity, including taking advantage of existing organizational or industry identities, preventing conflicting identities from becoming salient, and promoting a collective CRC identity.

Telling stories: Breast cancer pathographies in Australian women's magazines

Womens magazines provide an important source of health information for their readers. This information is published across a variety of texts including personal narratives of illness and disease (pathographies). This study examines a recent set of such stories specifically related to breast cancer and finds that these have particular tabloid characteristics. It compares narratives of various celebrities with those of ordinary women, finding that the latter are more sensationalised. Both types of pathographies over-emphasise certain risk factors, but nevertheless provide a mechanism for women to share the experience of serious illness

Evaluating Illness in Women’s Magazines

Traditionally, mass-market women’s magazines have been a significant source of health information for their readers and include information about raising children, maintaining health, and growing older as well as dealing with grief, chronic illness, and disability. This information occurs in medical information articles, advice columns, and stories that relate the personal experience of illness. This study focuses on the last category, personal illness narratives, and looks at these stories over the past 20 years in three high-circulation Australian mass-market magazines to investigate their characteristics and possible functions. The approach used is qualitative with an emphasis on textual features and discourse structures and investigates the evaluation phase of the narratives. It finds four major themes in the evaluations and suggests that these are used to demonstrate the resilience of the human condition and to give inspiration to the readers.

Personalizing current affairs without becoming tabloid The case of Australian Story

The television programme Australian Story is located in the News and Current Affairs section of the Australian public broadcaster, yet it does not follow a conventional current affairs format. Each week, it presents a personal profile of either a high-profile or an ordinary Australian, and it does so without the on-screen presence of an interviewer. The paper argues that this more documentary approach represents a feminizing of the current affairs format rather than a shift into a tabloid approach. It considers a number of examples to demonstrate the persistence of themes such as altruism, perseverance and the importance of family, but also human weakness. It demonstrates that Australian Story is able to operate as a current affairs programme both by augmenting contemporary news coverage and being a rich site for working through a range of issues.

Adolescent Risk Behaviors And Communication Research Current Directions

Examples of recent research into adolescent risk behaviors from a variety of disciplines and methodologies, denoting the range of researchers interested in this area and whose interest in communication and language articulates and exemplifies the extent of the field, are surveyed in this article.

Media and Language: Overview

This article notes the emergence of Critical Discourse Analysis with its emphasis on sociopolitical considerations in association with text analysis. It notes CDAs place as a standard especially in European linguistics, but at the same time emphasizes the diversity brought to it by a range of analysts. This article indicates contemporary debates about the nature of media language itself as it changes in relation to changing industry and social pressures and through the increasing influence of emerging technologies.

The paradox in ageing well: stories of older women in the Australian women's weeky

The popular media construct themselves as influential sources of information on aspects of everyday life for many women. Mass market women’s magazines, in particular, attempt to guide generations of readers through their lives from teenage years, through pregnancy and motherhood and beyond, providing advice, gossip and life skills. While recent attention has focused on the images of women in magazines with respect to body consciousness (Malkin et al., 1999; Lumby, 1999; Tebbel, 2000), the advertising of beauty products (Wolf, 1991), health and illness (Bonner and McKay, 2000; McKay and Bonner, 1999), domestic role (Anderson, 1999; Peirce, 1997), sexuality and race (Calafell, 2000), and love (Alexander, 1999), little work has been reported on representations of older women in magazines. Notable exceptions are work on the menopause (Shoebridge and Steed, 1999; Gannon and Stevens, 1998) and Featherstone and Hepworth’s work on retirement magazines (1990, 1995), although the latter looked at images of both men and women. It may be that issues relating to the representation of older women may be less appealing to researchers, especially to those feminists whose main interests lie in critiquing the values of a society that still revolve around youth and beauty (Feldman and Poole, 1999, pp. 3–4). However, the answer may be more systemic. The general lack of attention may be due to what has been termed the invisibility of older women, not only in magazines but in society in general (Arber and Ginn, 1991, p. 36). Older women face a dual dilemma: as women, they have had to exist in a world that historically has undervalued their contributions and concerns; as older women, they have to contend with negative media stereotypes at best (Harrison, 1983; Harwood and Giles, 1992; Harwood, 2000; McCracken, 1993; Vernon et al., 1990), or under-representation, even invisibility, at worst (Atkins et al., 1990; Davidson et al., 1987). For many women, ageing remains a process to be feared and even delayed if at all possible (Macdonald, 1995, p. 194). Not only do the media supply stereotypes of ageing, but they may also influence the formation of the self-perceptions of older women themselves since so many elderly people live in the relative isolation of retirement or bereavement, and use the media to replace social contact (Rubin, 1988; Vasil and Wass, 1993). It then follows that mass market magazines which include older women as an important (and increasing) part of their demographic are more likely to present positive and appealing images of growing older through wellness and activity to reflect the interests of their readers, rather than perpetuating negative and unappealing stereotypes so pervasive in other forms of media. Just as it is possible to promote positive stereotypes, it is also possible to remove ageing from the gerontological paradigm of emphasis on declining health, with its associated perceptions of passivity and vulnerability, into a situation where wellness and activity

Health and the media

The mass media play an important role in the dissemination of health information, providing some of the context for public understanding of health and well-being and expectations about health care delivery. Research conducted into health and the media is spread across disciplines and includes both quantitative and qualitative analyses. This article discusses some of this research into media and health for its intersection with language.

TAKING THE POLITICS OUT OF SPORT? Australian Press Coverage of South African-Australian Sport, 1992-1994

Apart from so-called rebel tours there had been little sporting contact between Australia and South Africa between 1971 and 1992. In response to political reforms in South Africa, Australia started to relax its barriers to sporting contact in 1991, and in 1992 South Africa returned to the international sporting arena after an enforced absence of more than 20 years. This article explores representations of relationships between sport and politics in four Australian newspapers during the transition period in South African politics. While politics was inflected in the ways in which renewed sporting contacts between Australia and South Africa were reported, the frames used were not clearcut but interacted in complex and dynamic ways.