No abstract

New mothers experience social isolation, and they sometimes lack experience in interacting with their babies. Social support accessed via information and communication technologies (ICTs) can help mitigate such difficulties. Social media groups, in particular, offer opportunities for interacting with other mothers, thus locating an alternative and potentially powerful source of support. In this study, we describe such an online community of mothers in Romania, aiming at capturing the mechanisms of social support in the group, and also, schematically, the changing norms of motherhood they are related to. The paper expands on a four-dimensional analysis of social support – informational, emotional, affirmational, and instrumental components (Langfort et al., 1997; Leger & LeTourneau, 2015). It then introduces the results of the netnography we conducted in the context of a three-week data gathering period in the observed community. We suggest that the physiognomy of support we observed is related to changing normative models of motherhood in this Eastern-European nation. In helping each other, the mothers we observed also expressed their difference from older generations, and their personal and professional aspirations.

The paper aims to explore new methods and practices for looking into crises in online environments by using social media listening tools and methods. Based on the case of two privately owned hospitals in Romania facing boycotts due to their response to the COVID-19 outbreak, we study the social media conversations on the topic, the emerging themes, the visibility triggered and the impact on the brand and actors involved. Drawing on a social media listening and crisis communication framework, our research looks to unveil the relationship between stakeholders’ expectations and brand promise, aiming to foresee predictive crisis communication and management models.

This paper aims to shed a light on the importance of looking on the epistemological and methodological grounds of communication as a discipline in Romania in order to be able to discuss about the professionalization of the domain. We start from the widely acknowledged idea that communication is a new and emerging field, drawing its concepts, theories, and methods from diverse other fields and domains. In Romania, as well as in other former communist countries, after 1990 the changes in the political and economic situation created the premises to establish university programs in communication and to create jobs for people working in communication. All these were possible with the help of “imports” from the Western world, imports that transferred not only concepts and theories, but also the epistemological dispute and weakness of the field. This paper explores the development and the current state of communication as an academic discipline in Romania. Through an analysis of the social documents available on the University program’s website, we seek to understand the theoretical roots of the discipline of communication, as well as its current development.<div id="mouseposition-extension-element-full-container" style="position: fixed; top: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; bottom: 0px; pointer-events: none; z-index: 2147483647; font-weight: 400;"> </div>