مطالب

Impoliteness has become a crucial aspect of digital communication, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram. Despite the vast expansion of online discourse, research on gender-based differences in impoliteness strategies remains limited, especially in the context of English comments on Instagram’s broadcast pages. This study fills this gap by examining the impoliteness strategies employed by female and male’ Instagram users.  For doing this study, a corpus of 520 comments (17,850 words) posted by 256 female and 264 male users on CNN, BBC, Fox News, and The New York Times Instagram pages between 2022 and 2025 based on Culpeper’s (2011) five impoliteness strategies was analyzed. After coding and analyzing comments, a Chi-square test was conducted to determine the significance of gender differences. Results indicated that the bald-on-record strategy was the most frequently used strategy (29.9%), and withholding politeness was the least frequent (11.81%). The results of this study also revealed that, although females exhibited a slightly higher usage of negative impoliteness strategy (19.90%) than males (18.79%), the overall gender differences in the employment of impoliteness strategies were not statistically significant. These findings showed that impoliteness on Instagram is influenced more by platform norms than by gender differences. The study highlights the importance of understanding impoliteness in online discourse for language instructors, online communicators, and digital content developers. For future studies, researchers can explore nonverbal cues, cultural differences, and the evolving nature of impoliteness strategies across multiple social media platforms to gain a more comprehensive understanding of gender and online discourse.

Objectives: This study aims to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the speed of adjustment of trade credit among companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), with particular attention to the moderating role of managerial ability. Methodology/Design/Approach: The research sample includes 131 listed firms observed over a ten-year period (2013–2022), selected using the systematic exclusion method. A multivariable linear regression model was employed to test the research hypotheses. The model developed by Luo (2022) was used to measure the speed of adjustment of trade credit before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, while the model of Demerjian et al. (2012) was applied to evaluate managerial ability. Findings: The results indicate that, on the demand side of trade credit, the speed of adjustment of accounts payable increased by approximately 17% after the COVID-19 outbreak, with capable managers further accelerating this trend. Conversely, on the supply side, the speed of adjustment of accounts receivable declined by nearly 50%. This decline is attributed to rising inflation and economic instability during the post-crisis period, which led managers— including highly capable ones—to deliberately slow the adjustment of credit sales in order to benefit from inventory retention and mitigate risks in inflationary conditions. Innovation: This study extends the literature by demonstrating how crises such as COVID-19 reshape trade credit dynamics in emerging markets. It highlights the asymmetric effects on the supply and demand sides of trade credit and underscores the role of managerial ability in adapting financial policies under conditions of uncertainty and economic instability.