Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Reseña del libro Después del fin. Una perspectiva no-antropocéntrica sobre la post-tv, el post-cine y youtube, de Mario Carlón (Buenos Aires: La Crujía, 2016).

This article attempts to determine whether the hospitals of the Spanish Health System carry out evaluation activities of their public relations and communication campaigns and to establish their purpose. As secondary objectives, the budget for the evaluation was examined, as well as if the characteristics of the hospital evaluation process were adapted to Besson’s postulates. A large sample of 300 Spanish public hospitals (response rate of 23.33%) was taken. The results indicate that hospitals carry out evaluations for the development of their duties, but that they do not allocate a large budget to evaluate their actions. This suggests that there is a concern to demonstrate the value of public relations practice in hospitals but that they are still at an early stage of a systematic adoption of a concrete form of model for the strategic use of evaluation.

This article seeks to contribute to the theoretical-practical discussion on the role of corporate communications in building trust in global commerce. For this purpose, the case study of the Chilean wine industry and its communication towards the Chinese market is used, and it is analyzed from two central aspects of literature: knowledge and identity. Through the creation of a matrix based on semiotics and elaborated by the authors, six corporate websites of the industry are examined in exploratory form. From this case study, elements that contribute to the theoretical discussion are provided, for the case of the trust and communication relationship, as well as to the methodological discussion with the construction of a preliminary matrix that relieves the attributes of the concept of trust. It is concluded that there are cognitive elements in the construction of trust between organizations, but it is also about a moral and identity discourse and that there is little representation of the listener, which weakens this last aspect.

This research focuses on how the communication of corporate social responsibility affects the perception of corporate reputation of communication companies, taking the entire value chain as an object of analysis, which is novel in the field. In this sense, the communication of corporate social responsibility is assumed as part of the commitment to all stakeholders. The empirical work takes as a case La Marató de TV3 (fundraising for medical research from the autonomous public channel of Catalonia-Spain), and how this solidarity and communication activity influences the image and corporate reputation of the channel. The methodological tool applied is the survey. A total of 463 surveys were carried out in the 7 interest groups throughout their entire value chain. The results are expressed with a quantitative and qualitative perspective and allow to evidence that corporate social responsibility has a relevant impact on the image and corporate reputation of the brand, which becomes a fundamental condition to maintain the links with every stakeholder.

This paper is a multimodal critical discourse study of the representation of Sub-Saharan immigrants who arrive on the Spanish coasts in small boats. The main objective of this research is to analyse the visual portrayal of the way the Spanish press transmits news items dealing with the arrival of the above mentioned immigrants. The data of this article consists of all the news items published upon arrival of these immigrants in the digital edition of the two most popular Spanish newspapers, i.e., El País and ABC, from 1 June 2011 to 1 January 2015. For its framework of analysis, the study draws on the principles of critical discourse analysis and visual grammar in order to observe the main visual strategies used by the press to portray the immigrants under analysis. The analysis of the corpus of examples is intended to assist in the creation of a typology of the main ways in which immigrants are represented visually. The study reveals that immigrants are represented dysphemistically, i.e., negative aspects of them and of their arrival are highlighted. The results show that the general tendency is to represent Sub-Saharan immigrants as victims, distanced from the readers and as strangers and different from the majority group. Moreover, they are portrayed as vulnerable and dependent people who are sick or in need, i.e., as a people-problem.doi:10.5294/pacla.2017.20.2.6

People often express ambivalent feelings about the influence and impact of advertising on our contemporary society. In this quantitative study, we aim to analyze the audience’s attitude towards advertising, based on the model proposed by Pollay e Mittal (1993), using a sample of 210 Portuguese young men and women. We verified that, in general terms, participants have a positive attitude regarding publicity. Results show that they generally believe that advertising conveys information about products and that at the same time it is a source of entertainment for consumers. In socio-economic terms, there is a strong belief that advertising is positive for the development of the economy but that, on the other hand, it can be detrimental to society, particularly in the corruption of values, the encouragement of materialism and the transmission of misleading messages. Based on a linear regression, we find that it is possible to predict the attitude towards advertising through four factors: the informative role of advertising, its hedonic role, the benefits of advertising for the economy and the corruption of values by advertising. We also find that the attitude towards advertising has an impact on the purchase decision.

The present article aims to study the strategies used in the creative process of the experience of the alternate reality game (ARG) of the album Year Zero (2007), by the band Nine Inch Nails, as a case study of the aspects to take into account when introducing a product in the global market. For this purpose, a theoretical framework of cultural transduction processes is carried out and, in particular, the analytical model of the essential elements in the transparent contents based on the mythotype is presented. Finally, an exploration of the morphology of the mythotype in the actions that composed the already mentioned experience is carried out, in order to conclude with the importance of appealing to a strategy that includes the quality of the values of production and, in particular, to the anthropological component of classic narratives, based on reality.

In this paper, we propose a reflection on the happiness represented in the advertising discourse, in terms of the satisfaction afforded by consumption. For this purpose, we focus on the content presented by the advertising film Narcissus, in which discourses, themes and images converge in a mythical construction of happiness. The analyses are carried out in separate but complementary segments: the mythical nature of the discourse that lays the foundation of the audiovisual under observation is discussed, considering the ideological and psychosocial aspects involved in its construction; emphasis is made on the syncretism of languages selected for transmitting its greatest message—the happiness resulting from the perfection of the Self—, evidencing the intertextual relations established, as well as the argumentative effects of the linguistic resources involved. The result was the effective dialogue between theories that, in their heterogeneity, lay the foundations of the considerations on the happiness inscribed and encouraged in/by consumption.

This study focuses on the analysis of the audiovisual production The Walking Dead to verify how this series of fiction uses different thematic and audiovisual resources to propose ideas that we can relate to the Christian worldview and morality. It analyzes the first two seasons of the series, set in a post-apocalyptic context, in which a group of people tries to survive in a world ravaged by a virus that turns men into zombies. The script raises several conflicts raised by this situation between the characters, as well as the evolution of their conscience on the morality of their acts.

Contemporary TV series are having a great success and influence in our postmodern societies. The zombie phenomenon is getting everyday bigger audiences as well. Perhaps, this is the reason why the number of TV series about zombies is also growing. This paper uses the theory of social imaginaries to show the manner in which one of these before mentioned media products, the series The Walking Dead, invites us to picture or imagine the human through a new characteristic of the survivors: that of being infected. This new state shows how this TV fiction introduces and potentiates a new idea of the humanhood as eventual and impossible for the naturalistic and economical reasoning. In order to clarify this idea of the human being as someone who cannot be reduced to the mere scientific discourse we invoke Derrida and his attempt of defending the human difference.doi: 10.5294/pacla.2017.20.2.2