Rong Wang

• Ph.D., Communication University of Southern California
• Professor (Assistant) at Vanderbilt University

This study applies the connective action framework and network analysis to analyze how counterpublics used social media to form cliques and mobilize support toward a local issue at the global stage. It presents a case study of the 2019 Hong Kong protest to uncover under what conditions hashtag activism can evolve into connective action. The network...

Guided by moral foundation theory and information virality theory, this study explored how moral framing, operationalized as the use of one of the five moral dimensions in tweets (i.e., care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity), is related to virality of social movement messages. It offered a case study of the 2019 Hong Kong protests by ana...

This study examines how the moral values individuals possess and organizational crisis response strategies influence sports organizations. It showed that two moral foundations (fairness and purity/sanctity) had positive effects on moral outrage while care had a negative effect. When predicting team reputation, only one moral foundation (care) had a...

Recent research has revealed the significant role of perceived cultural differences, or cultural novelty, in shaping the intercultural experiences of diverse individuals. Yet, our understanding of how cultural novelty influences the relationship between language and cultural adjustment remains limited. This study addresses this gap by examining the...

Guided by the Symbiotic Sustainability Model, this study examines how partnership characteristics influence people’s evaluation of corporate-nonprofit alliances and how attitude toward partner organizations and partnerships influence intention to support the corporation. Using the NFL’s partnership with a LGBTQ+ sports organization as a context, th...

Nonprofits have been described as resilient, though serving refugees in the U.S. is challenging due to the needs of vulnerable populations as well as contentious public debates over resources and policy. This study draws on different challenges that nonprofits face in serving refugees and uses a communicative, process-based approach to resilience t...

Given the critical role of legitimacy in attracting key resources for organizational survival and growth, organizational and strategic communication research has long sought to understand the mechanisms essential in improving organizational legitimacy. Guided by stakeholder research and configurational thinking, we examine three interconnected comm...

U.S. federal policy has created, at best, a gap and, at worst, a hostile environment for nonprofits serving refugees. We rely on frameworks of nonprofit-government relationships (institutional voids, structural holes, instrumental/expressive support) to explore government-nonprofit interactions in the refugee domain, and their impact on 34 refugee-...

Background: Conveners are crucial in coordinating interorganizational partnerships, particularly purpose-oriented networks. However, their roles may shift from initially recruiting organizational partners to overseeing and sustaining a network through periods of change. Extensive research has focused extensively on these early stages of the interor...

Guided by the contingency model of capacity-effectiveness, we examine the relationship between organizational capacities and performance indicators during COVID-19. We conceptualized operational capacity and board leadership capacity as process-oriented to ensure organizations’ effective functioning and to demonstrate accountability; technological...

Background Despite the increased accessibility and availability of technology in recent years, equality and access to health-related technology remain limited to some demographics. In particular, patients who are older or from rural communities represent a large segment of people who are currently underusing mobile health (mHealth) solutions. Syste...

BACKGROUND Despite the increased accessibility and availability of technology in recent years, equality and access to health-related technology remain limited to some demographics. In particular, patients who are older or from rural communities represent a large segment of people who are currently underusing mobile health (mHealth) solutions. Syste...

Literature on nonprofit governance and stakeholder engagement has focused on identifying individuals, groups, and organisations in unpacking communication strategies to effectively mobilize resources toward social missions. However, there is a gap in the literature to examine how nonprofits may collect outcome data for evaluation, and assess how ev...

Refugee concerns may be perceived as controversial or outside the business domain, yet some corporations publicly engage these issues in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This article relies on institutional and constitutive approaches to CSR to explore why organizations might declare their engagement in refugee issues, and utilize...

This study draws from the literature on workplace diversity, cultural intelligence, and creativity to examine the relationship between diversity climate and employees’ behaviors. With data collected from three multinational enterprise subsidiaries that operated in China for over 25 years, this study reveals that employees’ metacognitive cultural in...

Increasingly, nonprofits and corporations publicly communicate about their partnerships. Guided by Information Integration Theory, this paper examines how information about a nonprofit's relationship with a corporation relates to individuals' intention to donate and volunteer. This research used a two-study experimental design. Study 1 (N = 966) ex...

Guided by the framework of contentious publicness, this study examines the role of mass media organizations in facilitating digital activism during the 2019–2020 Hong Kong anti-extradition movement. We collected movement tweets targeting media organizations, conceptualized as public-media messages, to identify what media outlets and what narratives...

Guided by moral foundation theory, this study examines #StopAsianHate messages on Twitter to identify main narratives surrounding the campaign. It also aims to unpack how moral framing and strategic narratives are related to online engagement size in social justice campaigns. Mixed methods were used to analyze the sampled tweets, including computat...

Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are interested in evaluating the effectiveness of interorganizational networks. We use a configuration approach to study network effectiveness. This research is a mixed-method study of 26 education networks in the United States. We measure network effectiveness by comparing 4th-grade literacy, 8th-grade lite...

Guided by institutional theory, this study examines how homophily and institutional power influence the tie formation and dissolution of interorganizational collaboration networks. The analysis focuses on longitudinal network data collected from 174 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) whos...

Research has linked cultural differences between a sojourner’s home and host country with their cultural transformation. Nonetheless, the results of empirical studies are inconclusive due to different operationalizations of cultural differences and testing among different groups of sojourners. We extend previous investigations by examining the effe...

Taking advantage of 3 million English-language posts by Facebook public pages, this study answers the following questions: How did the amount of COVID-19 vaccine-related messages evolve? How did the moral expressions in the messages differ among sources? How did both the sources and the five moral foundations in posts influence the number of likes...

Purpose Guided by the collective action theory, signaling theory and social identity approach, this study examines backing behavior by individuals who have created projects under CC licenses. Two motivational mechanisms were examined: (1) identification via common interests in the CC space; (2) resource signaling by other users via their diverse pr...

Crowdsourcing social innovation refers to utilization of crowdsourcing to solve social issues. It faces two organizational communication challenges to attract contributions: the public’s short attention span and concerns about a project’s feasibility. Guided by configurational thinking, we combine agenda setting theory and signaling theory to explo...

(1) Background: This study introduces a novel computational approach to examine government capabilities in information intervention for risk management, influential agents in a global information network, and the socioeconomic factors of information-sharing behaviors of the public across regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (2) Methods: Citation n...

Data were collected from Kickstarter.com. Exponential random graph modeling was used to examine how the two reviewed mechanisms influence the tie formation probability between Creative Commons (CC) project creators and other creators. The analysis was conducted on two subnetworks: one with ties between CC creators; and one with ties from CC creator...

Purposes. This study investigates the complex relationship between corporate-nonprofit partnership characteristics (type, duration, and source of communication); attitude toward the corporation (pre-test and post-test); partnership evaluation; and stakeholders’ willingness to engage in anti-corporate behaviors when a corporation behaves irresponsib...

The value of crowdsourcing in solving problems is its ability to aggregate diversity from a crowd. The literature tends to define diversity as a general attribute of the crowd, without unpacking it as a multidimensional concept or measuring it as an attribute of members within a crowd. This study examines collaborative crowdsourcing where people fo...

Purpose CSR reporting is an institutionalized practice. However, institutionalization has been primarily examined in the context of limited social issues and largely restricted to the presence of CSR communication. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework to explore how institutional and organizational factors shape CSR programming in...

Moral framing; content analysis; moral foundation theory; digital activism ABSTRACT Moral framing is a mobilizing strategy in digital activism to raise awareness of a social issue. This essay discussed the strengths and weaknesses of multiple methods of extracting moral framing from media content. Two issues were highlighted from crowd- coding and...

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This study addresses a major challenge the nonprofit sector is facing: low organizational commitment from employees. In response to the call to take into consideration contextual and institutional factors, it draws from the stakeholder theory and the organizational support theory to investigate how internal and external organizational processes cou...

Collaborative governance research examines the role of individuals, organizations, and partnerships within a community to understand why particular interorganizational networks emerge. We take a different tact, arguing that communities adopt collaborative governance models based upon exposure to the models and the individual and organizational reso...

What predicts the formation and evolution of partnerships in unstable institutional contexts? We answer this question by examining the partnership field of environmental nonprofit organizations based in Lebanon. Employing descriptive and inferential network methods, we find organizational attributes such as scope, operations, and age to be signific...

Guided by the multi-theoretical, multilevel (MTML) framework, this study draws from the World Polity Theory and World System Theory to examine factors shaping the structure and evolution of an international human rights network which included INGOs, IGOs and countries as key players. Using a longitudinal research design and network modeling, this s...

The global refugee crisis has posed severe challenges to social stability and sustainable development around the world. While the business sector is expected to shoulder social responsibility in crisis relief efforts, our initial assessment shows that refugee‐related corporate social responsibility (CSR) significantly diverged across the Global For...

Existing studies on crowdsourcing have focused on analyzing isolated contributions by individual participants and thus collaboration dynamics among them are under-investigated. The value of implementing crowdsourcing in problem solving lies in the aggregation of wisdom from a crowd. This study examines how marginality affects collaboration in crowd...

The challenge in evaluating China's foreign aid has always been the unavailability of reliable data sets. This study constitutes the first analysis of the AidData data set from a communication network perspective. It examines China's development aid to Africa in the ICT sector from 2000 to 2014. Combining data mapping, network modeling, and regress...

The challenge in evaluating China's foreign aid has always been the unavailability of reliable data sets. This study constitutes the first analysis of the AidData data set from a communication network perspective. It examines China's development aid to Africa in the ICT sector from 2000 to 2014. Combining data mapping, network modeling, and regress...

Collaborative networks in response to social problems are a common area of research, but questions of who manages these networks and how they organize cross-sector partners represent new challenges for nonprofit organizations and their partners. This study draws upon interview data from 26 community-based education coalitions across the United Stat...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine innovative practices and emphasize the mechanism of knowledge transfer across knowledge boundaries. By comparing and discussing the emerging boundary issues in knowledge transfer among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) registered in the incubation centers in China, this paper identified the m...

“Collective impact” has gained prominence as a particular means for organizations to respond to social problems in their community, though there is some concern that the term is over-used or improperly applied. In this study, we draw from research on collective impact, collaborative initiatives and network governance to suggest that what constitute...

Nonprofits may see significant benefits for using outcome data to improve programs and managerial decisions. This paper investigates potential sources of organizational learning in regards to nonprofit professional data use. We hypothesize that greater network governance, higher data-sharing centrality, and greater nonprofit capacity can increase p...

In recent years crowdfunding has diversified and grown beyond most experts' projections. Originally aiming to serve venture ideas and entrepreneurs outside the focus of traditional capital markets, the crowdfunding marketplace has developed a complicated relationship with novel ideas. Yet, there is little to no research on the relationship between...

Introduction Multiparty cross-sector coalitions that are inclusive of businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies are a frequently adopted form of networking to address “wicked” problems (Provan & Lemaire, 2012). Coalitions are thought to improve public services like education by combining diverse expertise, building organizational capacity, al...

In this study, we examined U.S and China's participation in the global climate governance networks and the structure and evolution of these networks evolved around the two nations between 2008 and 2014. The study yielded a number of significant findings. First, the U.S-China climate governance network has a centralized structure. Second, the Chines...

This study examines how individual motivation and governance structure of online collaboration affect individual contribution and efficacy in a Commons-based Peer Production (CBPP) community. Using survey data and structural equation modeling, this study demonstrates motivational factors alone cannot fully predict CBPP outcomes. How people perceive...

This study applied collective action theories and network theories to examine the information sharing patterns among Twitter users to obtain sociopolitical legitimacy of their collective goal. The role of Twitter in facilitating private–public boundary crossing was defined in relation to main challenges of collective action. The hypotheses and rese...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the use of Twitter hashtag as a strategy to enhance the visibility and symbolic power of social movement-related information. It examined how characteristics of hashtag drove information virality during a networked social movement. Design/methodology/approach - Twitter data from two days durin...

This study applies an ecological perspective to the context of community-based participatory research (CBPR). Specifically, it examines how endogenous and exogenous factors influence the dynamics of CBPR partnerships, including the tendency toward reciprocity and transitivity, the organizational type, the level of resource sufficiency, the level of...

The current study explores the influence of communication variables on human rights protection. The effects of international and domestic mass communication and digital media were assessed among global social, economic, and political factors. The statistical analyses on a sample of 101 nation states over the most recent decade reveal several import...

Anthropogenic Climate Change (climate change or global warming that is caused by human activity) is considered to be one of the key global concerns moving forward this century. The ongoing flow of communication around an issue can be seen as a co-production of strategic messaging that encompasses the voice of multiple stakeholders who have differin...

This study examines how various ways of organizing online collaboration affect the structure of the engagement network in commons-based peer production. The main interest is in testing whether loosely structured collaborative practice, without defined roles and leaders, leads to less centralized engagement. We use network analysis to uncover and co...

In this paper, we propose an empirical study assessing how a country's openness affects its contribution to the global network of open sharing. It focuses on four dimensions of openness: openness to content, openness to people, openness to process, and the publicness of the openness [7, 11, 14]. This study will contribute to the evaluation of the o...

Guided by the Capability Approach, this study highlights the importance of assessing development in terms of people’s engagement in activities they want to do. It moves beyond the emphasis on economic growth and access to new technologies. Situated in the context of Internet use, this study examines how civil society associations and existing bondi...

This study examines environmental collective action in rural China which is mediated by ICTs and its political influences. Based on cross-case studies and fuzzy-set analysis of in-depth interview data, it is found that the level of ICT development does not correlate to the utilization of ICT for environmental movement on a collective basis, as fact...

This paper examines interest-oriented vs. relationship-oriented social network sites in China and their different implications for collective action. By utilizing a structural analysis of the design features and a survey of members of the social networks, this paper shows that the way a social network site is designed strongly suggests the formatio...

Many studies demonstrated that use of Internet could profoundly affect the balance of liberty and democracy in Western society, which has high level of Internet penetration. For the developing countries, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have huge potential to influence societies. This study is set in the context of China, a country...

1 The findings presented here are based on a preliminary dataset from an ongoing survey, and they are prepared for discussion at free culture research conference 2010. The results can change as more data comes in.