Apple's Labor Issues and Pr Miseries

Apple is an American multinational corporation which designs, manufactures and markets a range of consumer electronics and software products (Apple Inc., 2008). At the end of last fiscal year, Apple’s worldwide annual sales amounted to $32.5 billion, an increase of 35% from 2007 (Apple Inc., 2008). Not surprisingly then, was Apple voted America’s most admired company, also topping the global survey (Fortune,

Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence is a theory that was developed in 1974 and as the founder and the director of the Public Opinion Research Center in Allensbach in Germany; she has found evidence of how the spread of public opinion is formed. The term spiral of silence refers to the increasing pressure people feel to conceal their views they think they are the minority. People will be unwilling to publicly express their opinion if they are in the minority and they will also be more vocal if they believe they are a part of the majority. Thus, the more marginalized you become, the less you speak and so you spiral into a fully marginalized position. Neumann’s claim are based on previous collaborative

The perpetuation of misinformation can be very difficult to correct and may have lasting effects even after it is discredited. For instance, if an audience is reliant on the information provided by the media to make an informative decision about a topic involving their morals, the validity of the author’s claims will determine the mass majority of their decisions they make in the future. As a result, false information may continue to influence beliefs and attitudes even after being debunked if it is not replaced by an alternate causal explanation.

In his book entitled Public Opinion Walter Lippmann presents some very profound arguments on how public opinion is formed and how mach value it has. He describes in great detail the decision making process and how our own stereotypes affect our perception of events. Lippmann expresses his disillusionment with mass democracy, his concerns about propaganda and how the press could not be trusted to provide unbiased information. Contrary to what one would expect form someone holding such views Lippmann also questions the trustworthiness of the chief executive to make good foreign policy, even when he has all of the "inside" information and knows the true nature

Popular opinions of the general public are how most of today’s society is influenced. When something is popular, many choose to believe the idea to fit in and avoid standing out. Many also believe these opinions because individuals view faulty evidence as true. As Sir Winston Churchill said, “...one may call world public opinion, most powerful, most persuasive…” meaning that the most powerful influence is not facts, but is instead the public's opinion. These opinions shape society and cause humans to be less virtuous. Public opinion is the largest influential source in the world today. Opinions cause people to change their views to fit in, and others to ignore facts, both of which make humans less virtuous.

First, with the many organizations targeting to take the position of apple in the market it has been a base to strategies market strategies for the different competitors. The marketing strategies are crucial for the improvement of the market performance and the competitors maximize on the disadvantages of Apple it is face with high market competition (Gary, 2014). On the issue of poor working condition, high employee turnover has emerged, which is risky for the performance of the company. Taking political side has also had great impact on the performance of the organization for those of a different political opinion may change their preference for the Apple’s products.

The development of opinions, attitudes and political values results from the interaction that occurs within the social environment of an individual through contact with family, friends, at school, work and church. Families especially help shape interest in politics and party affiliation while educational institutions encourage support of the political system. The mass media also influences public opinion through newspapers, radio, television and the Internet by reaffirming attitudes and opinions that individuals have already established. According to Doris Graber, author of Mass Media and American Politics, “people do not necessarily adopt the precise attitudes and opinions that earn the media’s praise: rather, mass media information provides the ingredients that people use to adjust their existing attitudes and opinions to keep pace with a changing world” (11). Therefore, the news media focuses the attention of the public on certain issues or individuals, which causes individuals to form opinions on these particular topics.

The spiral of silence theory (Noelle-Neumann, 1974; Noelle-Neumann, 1993) proposes that individuals fear social isolation and only therefore speak out in public if they perceive themselves to be in the present or future majority on an issue. In order to assess the climate of opinion, people closely monitor their social environment via the mass media. The effect of

Many of the views and actions of society and politics today are centered around the media, which keeps the public well informed on current events so that the public can make educated decisions based on the information they have accrued to make change in the functions of our society, whether small or large. However, misinterpreted bias in mass media causes the creation and spread of misinformation to the public, which causes members of society to have a skewed vision of what is fact and what isn’t. This can cause members of society to make decisions based on incorrect information, which affects the running of our society as a whole.

Public opinion is recognized for its power, although it is ever changing, hard to measure, harder to predict, and nearly impossible to control (Newman & Davis, 2016). Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs about certain issues or individuals, and it is the foundation of any democracy. Today, surveys of public opinion, or polls, are the most reliable indicators of what the public is thinking.

Social desirability is the way and manner people form an opinion which stigmatizes their interest based on what they visualized as the popular idea. Based on media agenda setting and media framing, most often a particular opinion gets repeated over and over again with various news mediums and social networking sites, until it purported a fake perspective which was not actually the vision media portrayed for the people. Consequently, based on our little knowledge today most of us now know and see how public opinion can be influenced by public relations and the political media. In conjunction with the mass media, utilizes various ways of advertising techniques to get their message - across solely with the notion to change people views perception. A few years ago politics and media have been intimately engaged with each other, with media vigor setting and agenda in which politics is very crucial. According to (Harris 1999, p.167) “Our perceived reality of the real world is largely a product of the media.” (Harris 1999, p.186) It is not known which influences more but there are definitely two sides to the story.

In spite of that, forestalling the political debate by journalists or other such individuals may influence the way public opinion acts; in that case it is no longer an individual phenomenon, but a collective one, on a very different scale.

Agenda-setting is one of the most important factors in shaping public opinion. Agenda-setting can be defined as the ability of the media to direct public attentions toward the issues they believe are important to the public. But whose choice is it that determines which issues are more important over others? The news media can set an agenda-setting by focus attention on selected issues on which the public will form opinions from (McCombs). The media can paint a memory in your head by repeatedly repeating the issues on different media sources as Internet, network televisions, newspapers, etc. Since these sources are the cheapest and easiest to access, the information can be view by vast number of audiences. As quoted in a 1922 classic called “Public Opinion” by Walter Lippmann,

"If industry is to be successful in dealing with public opinion . . . it must learn the language of the people, it must consider the study of public opinion as important as any phase of its operations. It must recognize that public opinion can be measured, and utilize the increasingly scientific methods developing today for gauging it"(Ross)

Despite its global recognition and status, Apple Inc. has come under scrutiny in recent years. Criticism concerning Apple’s unethical labour conditions (causing both physical and emotional distress to employees) on a considerable number of occasions has led to this. Unethical labour conditions has not been an isolated incident, rather a disapprovingly common occurrence for such a well-regarded global brand.