Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

In 2020, the nation was hit with a pandemic both physically and socially. Due to COVID-19, media interaction, social media engagement, and online consumerism became necessary. In relation to widespread disease, social outbreaks concerning the black lives matter movement, police brutality, the presidential election and diversity & inclusion, set a call to action for Americans. Top fashion and shoe-manufacturing companies that engage with the public socially, financially, personally and for entertainment were evaluated on their contributions to Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. Through external marketing and communication strategies, shoe-wear companies display their approaches to social justice, equity and/or social responsibility. Inclusion & Diversity has different facets including, socioeconomics, gender roles, and race that contribute to how<br/>consumers interact with companies. This paper consists of a literary review, three company audits and analysis, and recommendations. The literary review in the introduction of my paper, explores the approaches to Diversity and Inclusion of shoe-wear companies as a response to social inequity. I conducted three audits to assess the history of Diversity and Inclusion at Nike, Adidas and PUMA to their approaches and commitment to Inclusion and Diversity through their marketing and communication strategies. I then conducted a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis based on the marketing and communications of the<br/>respective companies to gain depth in my findings of sentiment, message strategy, corporate hierarchy, and suggestions for future communications. My analysis provided a conclusion that Diversity and Inclusion in marketing and communication strategies is an essential factor in the growth and success of the company. I identified that each company has areas of opportunity to create more visibility for the LGBTQIA+ ( Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and nonbiary people) community, should continue to produce reports that analyze exactly how they plan to support Diversity and Inclusion and continue displaying their<br/>commitment on social media.

Something Like Human explores corporate social responsibility through a triple lens, providing a content analysis using previous literature and history as the standards for evaluation. Section I reviews the history of corporate social responsibility and how it is currently understood and employed today. Section II turns its focus to a specific socially conscious corporation, Lush Cosmetics, examining its practices considering the concepts provided in Section I and performing a close analysis of its promotional materials. Section III consists of a mock marketing campaign designed for Lush in light of their social commitments. By the end of this thesis, the goal for the reader is to ask: Can major corporations be something like human?

Coverage of Black soccer players by Italian media outlets perpetuate narratives rooted in anti-Black racism. These narratives reflect the country’s changing attitude toward immigration. Historically a country from which citizens emigrated, it is now a recipient of immigrants from Africa. These changing demographics have also caused a shift in the focus of racism in Italy, from discrimination against southern Italians to anti-Black racism. As the country has explored what defines a unified Italian identity, Afro-Italians have been excluded. This study evaluates how these perceptions of Afro-Italian soccer players manifest according to various racial frames, and the frequency with which they do so in three Italian sports dailies: La Gazzetta dello Sport, Corriere dello Sport – Stadio, and Tuttosport. In this context, Afro-Italian refers to an Italian citizen of African descent, and anti-Black racism denotes any form of discrimination, stereotyping, or racism that specifically impacts those of African descent. For this study, a representative sample was collected consisting of website coverage published by the three sports dailies: articles devoted to Mario Balotelli that appeared between 2007 and 2014, and articles devoted to Moise Kean between 2016 and 2019. Three coders recorded the content of the sample articles on a spreadsheet organized by the type of racial frame applied to Black athletes. The analysis reveals that the players were frequently portrayed as being incapable of self-determination and of having an innate, natural athletic capability, rather than one honed through practice. The coders noted that in addition to explicit racial framing, there were also instances of implicit and subtle ways these racial frames manifest. In future research, the coding procedure will need to be adapted to account for these more layered and nuanced manifestations of anti-Black racism.

In recent years, advanced metrics have dominated the game of Major League Baseball. One such metric, the Pythagorean Win-Loss Formula, is commonly used by fans, reporters, analysts and teams alike to use a team’s runs scored and runs allowed to estimate their expected winning percentage. However, this method is not perfect, and shows notable room for improvement. One such area that could be improved is its ability to be affected drastically by a single blowout game, a game in which one team significantly outscores their opponent.<br/>We hypothesize that meaningless runs scored in blowouts are harming the predictive power of Pythagorean Win-Loss and similar win expectancy statistics such as the Linear Formula for Baseball and BaseRuns. We developed a win probability-based cutoff approach that tallied the score of each game once a certain win probability threshold was passed, effectively removing those meaningless runs from a team’s season-long runs scored and runs allowed totals. These truncated totals were then inserted into the Pythagorean Win-Loss and Linear Formulas and tested against the base models.<br/>The preliminary results show that, while certain runs are more meaningful than others depending on the situation in which they are scored, the base models more accurately predicted future record than our truncated versions. For now, there is not enough evidence to either confirm or reject our hypothesis. In this paper, we suggest several potential improvement strategies for the results.<br/>At the end, we address how these results speak to the importance of responsibility and restraint when using advanced statistics within reporting.