Preconferences Media Psychology and Organizational Communication at the Etmaal 2023

Dear NeFCA-members,

We want to raise your attention to two preconferences that are organized before the start of the Etmaal 2023 on February 2nd.

  • 09:30 – 11:00: Organizational Communication
  • 09:15 – 11:00: Media Psychology: Systematic Review and Bibliographical Analyses

Media Psychology Preconference: Systematic Review and Bibliographical Analyses

The NeFCA Media Psychology division happily invites those who are interested to our preconference for the 25th Etmaal at the U Parkhotel in Enschede (Room C3), Februari 2nd from 9:15-11:00. After the keynote, there will be coffee and time to catch up and interact with other attendees. There will be no fee for this preconference.

For our estimation of attendees, please register via this link (Before February 1st): https://forms.gle/71tw3p7grHMFPjJ66

If you are not able to come after registration, or have questions about the preconference please let us know and do not hesitate to contact Martin Jansen at martin-pieter.jansen@uni-due.de

Description

Every day, many articles are published in many journals. The steady increase in publications makes it impossible for us to stay up to date on every development and knowledge gap within our field and adjacent fields. Systematic literature reviews and meta analyses can help us in summarizing the current state of research on relevant topics. However, such reviews and analyses are often not conducted because of their time-consuming procedure. Fortunately, there is a novel tool which can help us with this: ASReview LAB. This is a free and open-source artificial intelligence tool, developed by a team of researchers at Utrecht University. It helps to screen large amounts of text using state-of-the art active leaning techniques. In the first presentation, Joël Hendrix will introduce you to this new software and share her experiences as a user. Joël is a PhD candidate at Radboud University (Behavioural Science Institute) and her research focusses on how entertainment media can influence people’s openness towards underrepresented groups, and the cognitive and affective processes that play a part in this.

Another novel approach to the help researchers cope with the constant growing influx of new scientific articles within their area of interest is the use of bibliographical analyses. Unlike the traditional literature review, tooling helps researchers to analyze and plot for four different level metrics: sources, authors, documents and clustering by coupling. This approach also analyzes three knowledge structures: conceptual structure, intellectual structure and social structure. In the second presentation, Adriaan Denkers will introduce you to this approach by showing the results of a recent bibliographical analyzes of the Value of Sustainability; a study of the scientific literature. Adriaan Denkers has worked as a senior scientist for the Dutch Government, as an associate professor in psychology and criminology and (currently) as an independent social scientist.

Organizational Communication Preconference: Employee Voices in Digital Organizations

On Thursday February 2nd, from 09:30 until 11:00 AM, NeFCA’s Organizational Communication Division organizes a pre-conference about ‘employee voices in digital organizations’ (location: UPark C1). The session will also be stream through the zoom link below.

Literature on organizational communication praises employee voice for many different reasons: employee voice is reported to improve employee well-being, ethical decision-making, knowledge sharing, the problem-solving capacity of organizations, organizational resilience, and (brand) strategy. The notions that employees as well as organizations benefit when knowledge and information flows freely through an organization, has become commonplace among academics as well as practitioners. Digital media, and social media platforms in particular, have often been praised as a democratic arena enabling this free-flow of information and knowledge, particularly after the turn of the century. However, digital media have not really lived up to that potential because employees choose to remain inactive on digital media, because online dialogues remain shallow, or because people are rude towards each other. At the same time, digital media have changed the way we work dramatically, and have enabled new-ish forms of organizations altogether: remote work has become more common after the pandemic, and the whole meaning of ‘work’ has changed for self-employed workers, platform workers,  and ghostworkers.

In this session, we will explore employee voice in the context of digital organizations. We will talk about the antecedents and consequences of (online) voice behaviors of different groups of employees, as well as the organizational policies that are developed to govern these behaviors.

  • Ellen Soens (Gent University) will discuss employees’ social media use and social media governance.
  • Mark van Vuuren (Twente University) will discuss the physical consequences of virtual work.
  • Claartje ter Hoeven (Erasmus University) will talk about platform workers’ voice (and silence) in the context of algorithmic management.

We look forward to welcoming you there, right before the start of the Etmaal 2023. Spread the word, if you know any other colleagues who might be interested as well.