Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, English: Composition and Rhetoric

This thesis investigates how undergraduate writing center consultants' engagement in their disciplinary and writing center communities mutually inform their conceptions of their disciplinary and consultant identity, expertise, and writing values. Through the lens of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), I analyze data from interviews with seven consultants to understand how writing consultants' identities as writers and consultants are influenced by their academic disciplines and writing center training as well as explore the impact of disciplinary expertise on consulting strategies, addressing the question of how writing center consultants conceptualize, adapt, and engage with disciplinary affiliations and expertise during consultations. From this analysis, I detail implications for threshold concept-based tutor training on the development of consultant identity and provide recommendations for consultant development that focuses on working with disciplinary writers. Ultimately, this thesis explores participants' perceptions, stories, and values as disciplinary writers and writing center consultants, arguing that consultants' insights can inform and contribute to research on writing identity, disciplinary writing, and expertise, and enrich the very disciplinary and writing center communities of which they are members.

Committee: Jason Palmeri (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Hutton (Committee Member); Elizabeth Wardle (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric

PHD, Kent State University, 2022, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Sociology and Criminology

For nearly a century, the claim that expertise leads to influence has been axiomatic in social psychology, yet this tradition of research cannot explain why people sometimes resist expert influence. I attempt to fill this gap by synthesizing communications research on the message and its properties, political science research on identity, and the perceptual control system branch of identity theory. I argue that identity is a “missing link” in research on social influence—one that helps explain resistance to expert influence. Focusing on the role of the political identity, I propose that politicized messages convey underlying, implicit meanings relevant to one's political identity. Discrepancies between these meanings and the political identity standard contribute to the resistance of expertise by impacting perceptions of message favorability, negative emotion, and the likelihood of deprecating the message source. To test these claims, survey respondents (50% Democrats, 50% Republicans) used a novel measure of political identity to rate themselves as well as evaluate ten partisan statements, each of which were attributed to an expert source and focused on “hot-button” political issues. Overall, identity-message discrepancies significantly impacted participants' perceptions of message favorability, negative emotions, and likelihood of deprecating expert sources; however, they did not always do so in a manner consistent with identity theory, and effects sometimes differed for Democrat and Republican respondents. With the exception of the impact of identity-message discrepancies on source deprecation, my findings were more nuanced than expected. I discuss the implications of my research for public policy and for future work in social psychology and political science.

Committee: Will Kalkhoff (Committee Chair); Gregory Gibson (Committee Member); Kristen Marcussen (Committee Member); Richard Serpe (Committee Member); Ryan Claassen (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Psychology; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, EDU Teaching and Learning

This study explores the instructional practices of three experienced L2 writing teachers at an ESL Composition program affiliated with a U.S. university in a post-pandemic teaching environment. Particularly, this study focuses on the interrelationship among expertise in teaching L2 writing, teacher identity, and teacher agency. Through the lenses of expertise, teacher identity, and teacher agency, this study examines three L2 writing teachers' self-perceptions, role identities, and understanding of expertise in teaching L2 writing through unpacking the three components—instructional beliefs, knowledge, and skills, which lead to their ideal L2 writing teacher identity construction. The teachers' ideal teacher identities were compared with their actual teacher identities when the researcher observed their actual teaching in class and their agentic actions in delivering the course content pre-determined by the composition program. Also explored was how context influenced expertise, identity, and agency of the teachers. The study adopts a multiple qualitative case study that yields rich descriptions of the three L2 writing teachers' teaching practices in class. The researcher observed the three teachers' class over the course of a semester, comparing and contrasting their course delivery given that they all shared the same course materials and syllabus. The main sources of data include classroom observations with extensive field notes, teacher reflection journals, and semi-structured interviews with the teacher participants. Supportive data were also collected for further data triangulation, including teacher CVs, course meetings, and course materials. Two stages of data analysis— within-case analysis and cross-case analysis—were conducted. During the first stage of data analysis, I organized data, wrote memos, and moved from open coding to axial coding, and reported each case. In the second stage, I compared and contrasted teachers' understanding and demonstration o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Francis Troyan (Advisor); Michiko Hikida (Committee Member); George Newell (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Language; Multilingual Education; Teacher Education; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, English

Setting the Table: Ethos-As-Relationship in Food Writing employs methods from rhetoric and technical and professional communication to argue that the rhetorical mode of ethos should be understood as fundamentally relational, rather than as a more discreet property of communication synonymous with the rhetor's authority or character. I argue that reconceiving ethos-as-relationship better accounts for the rhetorical strategies used by the food writers who identify as women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or as part of the LGBTQ+ community whose texts I analyze, which include food memoirs, decolonial cookbooks, and food blogs. Food writing is a valuable place to examine the development of ethos because food writers are especially attuned to hospitality, a structural metaphor that all rhetors can use as a framework for understanding their relationship to their audience. A key focus of my analysis is the development of these food writers' textual personas, or their self-portrayal within the text. Textual personas are crucial to the development of what I call the ethotic relationship between writers and readers because a reader is unlikely to meet the writer in person, and an ethotic relationship can only be formed with another party. Ethos-as-relationship has important implications for understanding expertise and professional identity, especially for those rhetors who occupy historically-marginalized positionalities, as they must often work harder to negotiate a position of authority in relation to their audiences.

Committee: Kimberly Emmons (Advisor); T. Kenny Fountain (Committee Member); Vera Tobin (Committee Member); Mary Grimm (Committee Member); Christopher Flint (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Rhetoric; Technical Communication

MA, Kent State University, 2020, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Previous research has found that homophones cause processing difficulties during word recognition (Folk, 1999; Perfetti & Hart, 2001; Pexman, Lupker, & Jared, 2001; Unsworth & Pexman, 2003). The present study evaluated if lexical expertise, the ability to efficiently recognize words during reading, influenced participants' ability to learn novel homophones while reading. In two experiments novel homophones (e.g. `brale') and novel nonhomophones (e.g. `gloobs') were embedded in sentence frames containing context that indicated the meaning of the novel word. In Experiment 1, novel homophones had low-frequency real-world mates, and in Experiment 2, novel homophones had high-frequency real-world mates. After reading the sentences, participants' word learning was tested using surprise meaning recognition and spelling recognition tests. Lexical expertise was measured through tests of spelling and vocabulary knowledge. Although eye movement behavior during reading did not differ between novel homophones and nonhomophones, participants had more difficulty learning the spellings of the novel homophones. Regardless of the novel homophone's real-world mate's frequency, learning rates for the novel homophone spellings were at chance levels in Experiments 1 and 2. In contrast, participants only had difficulty learning the meaning of a novel homophone when the novel homophone had a low-frequency mate. Higher levels of lexical expertise were related to higher learning rates of novel homophone spellings, but only when the novel homophones had a high-frequency mate. These findings indicate that phonology is activated when novel words are encountered and can interfere with the acquisition of new spellings associated with the existing phonological representation regardless of homophone mate frequency.

Committee: Jocelyn Folk Ph.D. (Advisor); John Dunlosky Ph.D. (Committee Member); William Merriman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeffrey Ciesla Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

PHD, Kent State University, 0, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

In this study the experiences of Chinese higher education (HE) faculty members at American universities were analyzed to determine whether their experiences were consistent with China's HE reform policy for faculty development, part of China's world-class university reform. Berry's acculturation theory and China's HE reform directives provided the conceptual framework underlying this work. The qualitative research design involved both document analysis and semistructured interviews. The research revealed that these young Chinese faculty members developed the skills and perspectives called for in China's HE reform policy; most of them developed a global vision and critical thinking skills, largely embracing international and Western scholarly norms for teaching and research. The doctoral students among them claimed they acquired content expertise, research-oriented scholarship, and other professional competences; the visiting scholars regretted their too brief exposure to scholarly experiences at American universities. In addition, their assumptions about the superiority of Western scholarly norms and their lack of confidence in Chinese epistemology and its place in the global knowledge economy were also reinforced. This perspective has the potential to deepen the asymmetrical relationship between the West and China in the center–periphery global academic structure. The consistency of the gains of Chinese HE faculty members in roles and values with China's reform policy goals through overseas deployment is significant for China's world-class university reformers. Suggestions for China's HE reform policy and practices for faculty development were derived from findings.

Committee: Vilma Seeberg Ph. D. (Advisor) Subjects: Comparative; Education; Higher Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, EDU Teaching and Learning

Argumentative writing is a crucial skill in the school years and beyond, and there is an emphasis in various local, state, and national standards on argumentative writing. However, such writing is known to be a challenging and complex genre for English Learners (ELs) with limited English proficiency as well as cultural differences in terms of how argumentative thought and writing are conceptualized (Hirvela, 2013). It can be equally challenging and complex for many English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, who are often ill-equipped for writing instruction (Larsen, 2013, 2016). From a research perspective, there have been few studies exploring the abilities and needs of ESL teachers as relates to instruction in argumentation, especially in high school settings, where various learning and achievement standards are increasingly requiring a focus on argumentation despite the difficulty of teaching and learning argumentative writing regarding ELs. To address the gaps in the scholarship discussed above, this dissertation explores how a ESL teacher, Ms. Patrick, sought to develop her expertise in teaching argumentative writing in a suburban high-school ESL class for ELs over a two-year period using a classroom-based research methodology that involved ongoing observations of her class sessions, interviews with her and her students, and examination of her teaching activities and materials as well as her students' responses to her instruction. This study employed as an analytical tool the notion of expertise, particularly a distinction between what is known as routine and adaptive expertise, to examine how Ms. Patrick initiated and engaged in change as a teacher over time with respect to her understanding of argumentative writing, her curricular planning, and her instructional activities. The study's findings revealed that Ms. Patrick acquired at least a degree of Hedgcock and Lee's (2017) three types of knowledge essential for ESL teachers: (1) subject matter knowled (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alan Hirvela (Advisor); George Newell (Committee Member) Subjects: English As A Second Language; Pedagogy; Teacher Education

PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Foundations, Leadership and Administration

Drawing upon feminist poststructural policy analysis, this study revealed dominant discourses of professionalism and the marketplace, working in tandem with a discourse of affirmation, to produce images of a regulated and vulnerable dietetics profession(al) who is striving to create and maintain perceptions of competence and expertise within a highly-gendered workspace. Through this convergence of discourses, a picture of dietetics practice as `risky,' `irrelevant;' or `future-ready,' is constructed, with tangible effects on the education and professional socialization of students into entry-level professionals through the development of dietetics epistemology and subjectivity. This research makes visible how contemporary policy solutions serve to entrench professionalism, socialize students into sanctioned forms of knowledge, place stricter gate-keeping mechanisms around professional practice, and seek affirmation of expertise in the form of recognition, reward, and respect for the dietitian. Largely absent is attention to the gendered nature and history of dietetics work, gender dynamics upholding power hierarchies in the workforce, and the influence of gender in constructing dietetics epistemology and subjectivity. Adopting a feminist framework makes visible the need for further discussion in in this regard, especially given the rapidly changing landscape of dietetics education. As dietetics engages in reprofessionalization, the time has come to acknowledge its gendered history and consider how changes to the educational model may have unintended consequences, such as disembodied and atheoretical practice. Critical researchers must continue to question and disrupt hegemonic nutrition discourse and the way it becomes reproduced through dietetics education and professional socialization practices.

Committee: Susan Iverson Ed.D (Committee Chair); Martha Merrill Ph.D (Committee Co-Chair); Alicia Crowe Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Education Policy; Health Sciences; Higher Education; Nutrition; Sociology; Womens Studies

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Arts and Sciences: Anthropology

Since the inception of the discipline, anthropologists have been interested in expertise. We have long recognized our informants as vital sources of knowledge that only they, as experts in their culture, can convey. Over time, this attunement to expertise has become a distinct field of study, one that seeks to answer questions about how the designation of “expert” is acquired through socialization, evaluation, validation, and authentication within institutions and other authorizing bodies (Carr 2010). Anthropological studies of expertise have predominately focused on either “skilled knowing,” or expertise marked by a possession of specialized, institutionally-sanctioned knowledge (e.g., scientists, lawyers, doctors), or “skilled doing,” expertise predicated on mastery of corporeal skills (e.g., designers, craftsmen, agriculturists), setting up an implicit, if unintended dichotomy of expertise between knowing or doing, mind or body (Boyer 2008). My study investigates a form of expertise that sits between skilled knowing and doing. I examine the learning practices of design researchers, professionals who possess a blended expertise that draws from the fields of design and social science. As an emergent discipline, there are few pathways to design research within the academy so aspiring design research professionals, often previously-trained designers, learn to do research on the job through what I call “corporate apprenticeships.” By studying the blended professional vision of design researchers, individuals whose training and work practices include both design (skilled doing) and research (traditionally regarded as skilled knowing), this thesis extends the literature of expertise by drawing attention to the uninvestigated space between the two dominant themes and provides evidence of the complexity of expertise beyond the current dichotomy. To understand how design research as a discipline is teaching its members, I used an ethnographic approach that all (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephanie Sadre-Orafai Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Clement Jeffrey Jacobson Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, Psychology

Are the perceptual and cognitive changes associated with expertise due to improvements in domain-general abilities or changes to domain-specific representations? Elmer et al. (2014) measured how controls, language experts, and musicians categorized perceptually ambiguous sounds (blends of speech and music) and concluded domain-general changes underlie expertise. Acoustic and perceptual analyses of their stimuli suggested their stimulus creation methodology might have distorted the results. An experiment replicated and extended their findings with revised stimuli. Results of that experiment suggest that expertise leads to domain-specific changes in representational weighting or selective attention. However, in a generalization experiment designed to replicate these results and extend findings to new sounds, musicians and controls showed a consistent reversal in performance. Possible reasons for the inconsistency and suggestions to eliminate these problems are explored within.

Committee: Mark Pitt Ph.D. (Advisor); Leber Andrew Ph.D. (Committee Member); Lee Yune Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Psychology

BA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

During silent reading, multiple properties of a word are activated when a word is first encountered in print, including the word's orthography (spelling), its meaning, and its phonology (sound). Additionally, words can be ambiguous with respect to these properties. For example, CALF (cow/part of a leg) has multiple meanings, and SEWER (drain/tailor) has multiple meanings associated with different pronunciations. Readers process these different types of ambiguous words in different ways (Folk & Morris, 1995). Readers can use sentence context to help resolve ambiguity. However, recent research suggests that higher- and lower-skill readers may use context in different ways to determine which meaning of an ambiguous word is intended (Abraham, Folk, Eskenazi, & Jones, 2016). This study investigated the role that the phonology (sound) of a word plays in activating meaning during silent reading and how reading skill affects this process. Two types of ambiguous words were embedded in sentences: noun-verb ambiguous homophones and heterophones. The noun-verb homophones had distinct meanings attached to different parts of speech (e.g. DUCK-bird/bend), and the noun-verb heterophones had distinct noun and verb meanings that were also pronounced differently (e.g., SOW-pig/plant). Sentence context that indicated the part of speech of the ambiguous word preceded it. Results indicate that heterophones were more difficult to process, despite the prior context, indicating that the sound of a word is activated early in word processing, even in silent reading. Thus, phonological activation contributes to activating word meaning during silent reading. Additionally, reading skill influenced how readers processed ambiguous words.

Committee: Jocelyn Folk Ph.D. (Advisor); Shannon Ciesla Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jennifer Roche Ph.D. (Committee Member); Alison Smith Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Cognitive Psychology; Linguistics; Psychology; Speech Therapy

BA, Oberlin College, 2018, Anthropology

This thesis examines the production and circulation of discourses related to (counter)terrorism at a university-affiliated terrorism and security studies research center in eastern Massachusetts. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with faculty and students at the research center, I suggest that expert discourses of (counter)terrorism at the center traffic in an archetypal construction of the terrorist that I call the “depoliticized radical.” This construction locates the root of terrorism in individual morality and psychology, tending to abstract the terrorist from the political conditions in which they enact violence. I further propose that the depoliticized radical functions as a boundary object in Star and Griesemer's (1989) conception, serving the interests of both expert regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be known and counterterror regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be controlled and/or corrected. Through fine-grained case studies, I track the strategic deployment of the depoliticized radical by different actors at the center within distinctive professional contexts. My discussion of the practices by which actors at the center seek to consolidate their expertise within the contested fields of terrorism studies and security studies draws on and develops Gieryn's (1983) concept of “boundary-work” as a rhetorical and theatrical strategy for demarcating legitimate from illegitimate knowledges. I conclude by contemplating the political stakes of terrorism expertise as a project of knowledge production that seeks to establish the "terrorist" as an archetypal subject to be both known and controlled.

Committee: Crystal Biruk (Advisor) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Higher Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

This dissertation examines literacy volunteer preparation historically and comparatively for two contemporary case study organizations: one that coordinated a university service learning/study abroad program and one that ran a family literacy program. The author reviews major contributions literacy studies has made to literacy theory and practice and identifies gaps in literacy studies' influence and relevance towards literacy organizations. This study argues that volunteer preparation can be a site for literacy researchers and organizations to put their insights and expertises into practice by training volunteers using historical contexts as the basis for volunteers' critical reflective practice. The study also highlights historical and pedagogical differences between preparing expert versus non-expert volunteers. In the two case study organizations, the Working With Project for Haiti (WWPH) trained non-expert college students to utilize a critical process of engagement to work collaboratively in Haiti. The author refers to this pedagogical goal as “competence” for non-expert student volunteers' engagement in Haitian communities. Early Reading's Family Literacy Program trained expert volunteers with backgrounds in teaching and child development to deliver their family literacy training in a Southern U.S. city and state that had multiple other literacy initiatives. This pedagogical goal the author calls training expert volunteers for “consistency.” Based on the study's findings from case study data collection and historical research, the author proposes that greater collaboration between literacy research and practitioners could occur through volunteer preparation that: attends to histories of literacy campaigns, recognizes the differences between expert and non-expert volunteers, understands that literacy organization goals serve different purposes (which researchers and practitioners should specify), and identifies the major processes in which the organization e (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Beverly Moss (Advisor); Molly Farrell (Committee Member); Harvey Graff (Committee Member); Kay Halasek (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Literacy; Teaching

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, East Asian Languages and Literatures

The U.S.-China relationship is “the” most consequential bilateral relationship in the world. As the U.S. and China engage, even if both sides do not see eye-to-eye on all issues, it is extremely important to find areas of cooperation that are able to have a positive influence on the world. In its role as a superpower, the U.S. is constantly taking on problems that are global in nature, and there is an increasing need for China to play a greater role in addressing global issues. There is an undeniable element of asymmetry in the U.S.-China relationship where the Chinese seem to have the upper hand when it comes to trade, educational exchanges, and ultimately, the amount of information flow from one country to the other. This asymmetry can never be overcome by quantity. The only alternative is for the U.S. to focus on quality. This focus on quality will result in the need to develop individuals who are trained to understand, appreciate, and interact with Chinese counterparts at an advanced level. Constructive and stable military-to-military ties between our two countries is vital to our relationship's success and could be the key to alleviating some of the asymmetry in the relationship. This means that the U.S. military needs the vision to develop many of its operators and leaders not only to possess “expertise” in their respective military career fields, but also to be able to function with “expertise” in Chinese language and culture while practicing their individual careers. The preponderance of our Chinese language-trained military members serve in the “intelligence community,” but there is a group of military members known as Foreign Area Officers (FAO) whose focus is developing language and cultural expertise that might ultimately aid in national security efforts through direct engagement with Chinese counterparts. The Department of Defense (DoD) wants these FAOs to function as our “experts” and to conduct the necessary face-to-face inte (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Galal Walker (Advisor); Xiaobin Jian (Committee Member); Marjorie Chan (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; Foreign Language; Military Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2017, Human Factors and Industrial/Organizational Psychology PhD

Task-specific performance measures informed by incomplete theories of expertise do not capture the full range of domain-relevant behaviors, threatening content validity. Surgery is a particularly good example of a domain that has neglected cognitive accounts of performance in favor of task-specific measures of technical skill and experience-based definitions of expertise. Likewise, cognitive accounts of performance tend to neglect skilled performance, including the interaction between automaticity and cognitive control. The present study merges cognition and psychometrics in the context of a surgical task. I analyzed archival surgical performance data from a study of surgical training, including video of human cadaver procedures, think-aloud, self-ratings, and performance evaluations. This rich data set provided a unique opportunity to address both theoretical and methodological issues within expertise research, such as the ability of generalizable constructs to account for task-specific performance measures, the cognitive penetrability of skilled performance, the contribution of experience to the development of expertise, and the impact of evaluator cognition on performance ratings. My analyses indicate that general constructs related to goal establishment and goal enactment can account for task-specific performance metrics, highlighting the cognitive penetrability of skilled performance in the process. My analyses also call into question the necessity of experience in the development of expertise, and illustrate the influence of the evaluators on performance ratings. Accounting for these elements will strengthen theories of performance and subsequently help promote measures of performance that will generalize within a domain rather than emphasize any particular task.

Committee: Valarie Shalin Ph.D. (Advisor); John Flach Ph.D. (Committee Member); Joe Houpt Ph.D. (Committee Member); David LaHuis Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Medicine; Psychology

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2016, Arts and Sciences: Anthropology

Studies of experts and expertise have traditionally been undertaken by cognitive psychologists as a way to discover the mechanisms by which individuals can be experts, and they have conceptualized expertise as something individuals possess. More recently, however, anthropologists and other social scientists interested in language and discourse have begun examining expertise in terms of discursive practices, wherein individuals enacts expertise by utilizing available discursive resources. The purpose of this study is to discover the ways in which pain assessment expertise is discursively enacted in ten research interviews conducted with key informant “pain experts” as part of a broader study aimed at developing and testing pediatric pain assessment measures. An analysis of these interviews within the framework of discursive psychology reveals that pain experts enact their expertise in three ways: statements and discussion of credentials, the use of domain-specific language (jargon), and the utilization of expert knowledge (where individuals put their specialized knowledge into practice, such as critiquing traditional assessment techniques and creating new techniques) This study also addresses some of the special issues associated with pediatric pain assessment. Because of the subjective nature of pain, especially among children, it is important to address how individuals can be experts on other's mental states. Physicians and researchers must be mindful of the effectiveness of current assessment and management techniques for their ability to understand pain as clearly as possible. There has been a recent interest in incorporating patient's voice into the process which has produced better outcomes for all parties involved.

Committee: Clement Jeffrey Jacobson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Stephanie Sadre-Orafai Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Linguistics

MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of the Arts / School of Art

As readership of fashion blogs has increased, so too has their influence on ordinary people, or so one would believe. The objective of this research is to gain a better understanding of the perceived influence of fashion bloggers through examination of several industry-recognized “influential blogs” and a survey of blog reader's perception of influence. This study seeks to identify the key elements of blog content that fashion bloggers must possess at a minimum to have any significant degree of influence on their readers. Four key elements have been identified as fundamental to having and sustaining influence among blog readers, in general; (1) Trustworthiness (2) Expertise (3) Personal Relevance and (4) Authenticity. A survey of 159 fashion students at Kent State University's Fashion School was conducted to gain further insight into the fashion blog readers' perceptions of influence in the context of these four key elements. The presence (or absence) of the four elements do appear to positively (or negatively) impact influence on a typical fashion blog reader or subscriber. The essential findings from the survey demonstrate that a blog's influence remains linked to readers' perceptions, particularly in the context of these four elements, and may well be evaluated and ranked on such key elements. This study also found that fashion bloggers are progressively more influential as a result of the interactive elements of prevailing social media platforms and the proliferation of digital technology, which tend to increase electronic word-of-mouth and further contribute to the fashion blogger's level of influence. The practical implications are clear for fashion bloggers and personal style bloggers who strive to have any degree of influence on readers and subscribers to their blogs, as well as those who seek to attract and sustain an audience as a successful business model within the increasingly competitive world of fashion blogs.

Committee: Kim Hahn Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Entrepreneurship; Marketing; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Personal Relationships

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2016, Experimental Psychology (Arts and Sciences)

The way in which category specific knowledge is acquired over time has been a longstanding central topic in the cognitive and perceptual sciences. Accordingly, the influence of training and experience on learning has been the focus of much empirical work. This research often involves accounting for the results of concept learning tasks that necessitate classifying category members and non-members. Studies in this area explore questions like the following. Can different concepts be ordered by their relative learning difficulty? Does repeated exposure to a concept result in perceptual expertise and/or expert classification? Is concept acquisition inherently easier for some individuals? The relative difficulty between categories tells us something fundamental about the conceptual system by revealing which relational structures humans are most sensitive. As such, concept learning difficulty orderings for categorical stimuli form an important part of the empirical foundation of concept learning research. However, it is rare that the stability of such orderings is tested over a period of extended learning. Further, this research rarely explores dependent variables beyond classification accuracy that may also indicate relative learning difficulty. Accordingly, this investigation explores the relationship between accuracy and response times (RTs) when practice is gained over multiple category learning sessions. Of particular interest is the extent to which the relative learning difficulty between categories remains stable over sessions of learning. Of additional interest are measures of perceptual fluency (classification RTs) that might reflect category difficulty. Learning difficulty orderings in terms of classification RTs provide an alternative to the conventional approach that construes difficulty solely in terms of mean proportion of correct/incorrect responses. In light of recent empirical support for an invariance–based structural account of conceptual representation (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ronaldo Vigo (Committee Chair) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, Organizational Behavior

Although experts are valuable assets to organizations, they suffer from the curse of knowledge and cognitive entrenchment which prevents them from being able to adapt to changing situational demands. Research using the cognitive approach to study expertise has little to offer in resolving these problems. In this study, I use Dweck's (1988) goal orientation framework to offer alternative explanations and solutions for expert performance pitfalls. I propose that experts' performance goal orientation resulting from social pressures to perform is what makes them inflexible, but this mechanism can be moderated by learning goal orientation, learning identity, and humility. In study 1 and study 2, I developed and validated a scale measuring learning identity, the degree to which individuals see themselves as learners and enjoy the learning process. Learning identity complements learning goal orientation to capture individuals' holistic motivation to learn. Results yielded a six-item scale with good factor structure and sufficient evidence of construct validity. In study 3, data from a small sample of healthcare professionals in Northeast Ohio suggested that performance goal orientation partially explained the mechanism of why experts may be inflexible. Humility, both as self-report and other-report measure, was found to be the most consistent moderator of this indirect effect. Experts with low levels of humility suffered from the negative effects of performance goal orientation, leading them to be less flexible compared to their counterparts with higher levels of humility. Experts who reported high levels of humility, on the other hand, were perceived to be more flexible as their expertise increased. Meanwhile, learning goal orientation partially moderated the indirect effect of expertise on flexibility through performance goal orientation, and learning identity did not moderate this effect. These findings lead to new ways to resume conversations on how to get experts (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Corinne Coen PhD (Committee Co-Chair); David Kolb PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Ronald Fry PhD (Committee Member); Christopher Burant PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Organizational Behavior

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 0, Management

It is well known that corporate leaders, who acquire expertise by honing their intuition and expanding their knowledge through years of professional experience, are susceptible to a liability of expertise indicated by entrenched thinking and action. However, comparatively little is known about how leaders break free from this liability. This research seeks to better understand what leaders do to disrupt the liability of their expertise and enhance innovative decision making, by developing new knowledge in three areas. First, this research aims to understand the self-knowledge of entrenchment that organizational leaders experience. Second, this research discovers what organizational leaders do to break the cycle of entrenchment to innovate and lead their organizations effectively. Third, building on this discovery, I conduct an experiment with corporate leaders to examine how exposure to disruptive stimuli impacts innovative decision-making outcomes. This dissertation is a three-part research effort comprised of qualitative, quantitative and experimental studies in a corporate leadership context. Using a grounded study with data from corporate leaders in a single functional area, I identify five distinct types of entrenchment experiences that relate to different liabilities of expertise and find six broad disruption strategies that corporate leaders deliberately implement to cope with their experienced entrenchment. In a quantitative study, I develop and validate a multidimensional measure of different decision styles used by corporate leaders for strategic decisions related to new opportunities. Then, in a 3-group experimental design, I test the hypothesis that exposure to disruptive stimuli will enhance the innovative decision-making outcomes among corporate leaders. Executives are randomly divided into three groups, two of which are exposed to different disruptive stimuli, while the third group is a control condition, utilizing their own strategy. I utilized dis (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jagdip Singh (Committee Chair); Kalle Lyytinen (Committee Member); Erik Dane (Committee Member); Christine Moorman (Committee Member) Subjects: Management