s. Senyo Ofori-parku

• University of Oregon

Corporate social responsibility, and its other conceptual variants such as corporate sustainability, encourages businesses to act on a range of issues outside what the law and shareholders require. But what are the limits of the concept and its discursive practices in a globalizing world marked by accentuated asymmetrical power relations between bu...

This study examines how Ghana’s Daily Graphic, a public newspaper operating as a limited liability company, balances its public service mandate with its economic rationality. The case study combined data from interviews with the newspaper’s reporters, editors, managers, and advertising agency executives with a study of official documents and analys...

Corporate social responsibility, and its other conceptual variants such as corporate sustainability, encourages businesses to act on a range of issues outside what the law and shareholders require. But what are the limits of the concept and its discursive practices in a globalizing world marked by accentuated asymmetrical power relations between bu...

This research uses a discursive psychology and social constructionist approach to examine how organic food patrons think about, experience, and make sense of the organic label as a “boundary concept.” Based on data from 30 in-depth interviews with self-identified organic food consumers, emic and etic coding of consumer narratives reveals the social...

Background Substandard and falsified medicine (SFM) sales (an estimated > $200 billion) has become one of the worlds’ fastest growing criminal enterprises. It presents an enormous public health and safety challenge. While the developed world is not precluded from this challenge, studies focus on low-income countries. They emphasize supply chain pro...

This article attends to the debate of what motivations – instrumental or altruistic – should drive corporate social responsibility (CSR) decisions and practice; I offer an integrated instrumental and duty-based framework. While the win-win instrumentalism that underlies much of CSR practice is problematic and needs addressing, the notion of altruis...

In Ghana, the year 2018 saw many news articles about the youth, market women, and students increasingly abusing two opioids: tramadol and codeine-containing cough syrups. Our study examines Ghanaian news media framing of the opioid abuse crisis in Ghana to determine if and how the amount and framing of media coverage may have helped push the issue...

Research suggests that cultural worldviews bias how and what people think about various societal risks. But how does this mechanism manifest when people receive balanced information about a highly publicised health issue such as cigarette smoking? Using the cultural cognition worldview scales, we demonstrate that despite the considerable interventi...

There remains broad agreement on the principles and norms of journalism. However, what the practice means also emerges in context, manifesting in and constituted by the language actors use to contest or affirm the boundary of acceptable practices. Using Ghanaian undercover journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ 2018 report on football and corruption as a c...

Researchers have argued that social media such as Twitter redistribute news media's power over how issues are framed to scattered networks of activists and citizens. But what happens when an online campaign such as #BringBackOurGirls against Boko Haram's kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls garners global media coverage? Using qualitative frame analy...

This study examines how local residents make sense of offshore oil production risks in Ghana's nascent petroleum industry. From a naturalistic-interpretive perspective, it is primarily based on in-depth interviews with community residents: 8 opinion leaders, 15 residents, and 1 journalist. Residents associate Tullow's oil activities with health con...

The past several decades have seen a shift in environmental and risk communication that emphasizes harnessing local knowledge to enhance environmental advocacy. As a result, one would expect local advocacy organizations to manifest this shift. Using Friends of the Nation (FoN; a Ghanaian local advocacy organization) as a case study, this research e...

Discovery Channel’s Jungle Gold follows two American real estate moguls who lost their fortunes in the 2008 economic collapse to the Ashanti region of Ghana, West Africa, where they unabashedly engage in illegal gold mining (galamsey). This article examines the dialectic between the forces of hegemonic globalization and resistance by critically exa...

Mass media have a responsibility to popularise social and developmental issues. This is a central thesis of the normative view of mass media and development. Given the precarious nature of environmental sanitation in the West African country, Ghana, what is the nature of media coverage of environmental sanitation? And how does media coverage relate...