Spinach Crisis in the US - Essay Example

The strength of this section is that the authors have titled the various sections of information within the abstract with their respective headings which makes it easy for the audience to make an objective assessment of the nature of research and its value. This is unlike most research papers in which the authors present all information under one heading of the abstract. The conventional approach to writing the abstract is inconvenient as compared to the one adopted by the authors in this research paper. Another strong point of this abstract is that the authors have depicted the audience of this research paper within the abstract, which happens to be the public relations practitioners. This increases the chances of this research paper being read by public relations practitioners as they will know right from the start that this is something that addresses their concerns even if they may not be able to relate to the title. However, the authors could have used better words to summarize their findings within the abstract. The statement, “Korea used a more aggressive strategy than was expected” in a way shows that the authors had preformed perceptions about the Korean strategy which might have kept them a little biased towards its analysis as compared to the other strategy.

The biggest weakness of this section is that it is not there in the research paper or even if it is, it is not distinguishable from the literature review. The background of a research and its literature review are two completely different sections with the former developing a framework of thought for the audience and the latter reflecting upon the research done on the topic so far. But in this research paper, the authors have directly put the headings of the various events that have been discussed which puts the audience into confusion about whether it is background or the literature review. Nonetheless, the same point can be considered a strength in a way because it directly gives the audience idea about what a certain paragraph or a set of paragraphs in the background/literature is about. The authors have drawn upon numerous reliable resources to sufficiently acquaint a reader with both events of crises i.e. the US spinach crisis and the dumpling crisis of South Korea. Statements made therein are supported with numeric statistics, facts, and figures which make the information more specific and reliable than generic. It seems like the background section encapsulates the discussion of the two events of crises while the literature review starts from the heading of “Theoretical foundations”.