Browsing by Author "Dumitriu, Diana Luiza"

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Media Construction of Sport Celebrities as National Heroes
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2018) Dumitriu, Diana Luiza
Within the broader media-sport nexus framework, sport is known for providing not only engaging performances for the entertainment market, but also important symbolic capital in terms of national identity and public diplomacy. The present paper looks at how these dimensions overlap, focusing on the centrality of the media logic within the dynamics of the social field of sport and its corollary celebrization imagery. The aim of the paper is, thus, to identify the contextual aspects and the legitimation strategies mobilized through media discourses in the overlap of the star status and the national hero image of a sport actor. When and how does media crown an athlete with the national hero aura? What does this national hero status involve in terms of identity and identification mechanisms? Focusing on a corpus of 310 online articles and 12 Facebook highlights published by two main Romanian sport newspapers during the 2014 Roland Garros Tournament, the study discusses the media construction of the raising sport star, Simona Halep (i.e. first Romanian tennis player to enter Top 3 WTA), as national hero. The analysis examines not only the symbolic power of the sport performances as national identity resources and celebrity input, but also the engaging deliberative spaces that emerge along with the national hero frame and the hybrid form of civic celebrity practices involved in legitimizing it.
Self-perceived Occupational Prestige among Romanian Teaching Staff: Organisational Explicative Factors
(National School of Political Science and Public Administration. Faculty of Management, 2015) Frunzaru, Valeriu; Dumitriu, Diana Luiza
Most studies discuss occupational prestige by stressing out the macro-social aspects related to specific social stratification models. This paper aims to address the impact of organizational aspects on how teachers perceive the prestige of their occupational group, moving the focus on the micro-social context of their daily activity. The way teaching staff evaluate the social prestige of their profession fulfils normative and motivational functions and is, hence, reflected in how they actually perform their professional roles, serving both explicative and prospective purposes. In trying to identify the main factors that can explain the self-perceived level of occupational prestige among educators and teachers, we conducted a national level study among Romanian teachers (N=2165) from preschool to high school educational stages. Within the explicative model (R²=0.38), we were able to group the factors in three main categories: material conditions, bureaucratic and relational aspects. The findings reveal that teachers’ involvement in bureaucratic activities such as elaborating different reports, as well as a lower level of satisfaction regarding the relation they have with students, parents and representatives of the school's management end up decreasing the self-perceived occupational prestige. Our study lays emphasis on the fact that organizational factors influence teachers' selfperceived prestige and, thus, can affect the overall quality of the educational act. Therefore, to improve this, a greater involvement of national and local authorities in providing better material conditions in schools, in supporting the debureaucratization of the educational system and re-evaluating the role of teacher-student-parent communication triad is needed.