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AUTHOR

Mark Badham

Organisational Legitimation Strategies in Social Media : How Business Schools Address Declining Ranking

Public relations scholarship has drawn on organisational legitimacy theory to show how organisations appeal to stakeholders’ acceptance of their existence and importance in society. Studies have shown how different types of organisations utilise communication strategies in social media to gain legitimacy. This chapter contributes to public relations research by examining how a sample of business schools implemented legitimation strategies in their social media posts when their legitimacy was threatened. The findings show that when ten world-class European business schools faced declining institutional rankings between 2016 and 2019, they made use of four legitimation strategies—authorisatio…

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Love Wins : A Love Lens Approach to Cultivation of Organization-Stakeholder Relationships

This chapter adds to emerging research exploring the construct of joy by drawing attention to the value of more loving stakeholder relationships. Relationship management research has focussed attention on the antecedents, outcomes and quality of an organization’s relationships with various publics and stakeholders and has examined strategies that can nurture these relationships. However, not much of this research has addressed intimacy and passion in these relationships. Accordingly, this chapter draws on the theory of brand love developed in relationship marketing research and the theory of love from psychological research to build a theoretical framework of organization–stakeholder love (…

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Digital strategic communication through digital media-arenas

Digital technologies have empowered an increasingly participatory communication environment that challenges the ability of organizations to maintain control over their messages. In this new environment, stakeholders not only receive these messages through organizational digital media, which this chapter argues are typically understood as transmission channels, they also are able to re-interpret and re-communicate these messages across multiple participatory, omni-directional digital arenas seemingly beyond organizational strategic control. This chapter examines the tension in strategic communication between a traditional message-controlling approach through digital media and a more nuanced …

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Four News Media Roles Shaping Agenda-building Processes

This chapter identifies, defines and explores four news media roles of conduit, facilitator, mediator and political actor through which the media participate with corporate, social and political actors in agenda-building processes. The framework of the media’s four agenda-building roles sheds light on how the news media perform their various roles as well as how other actors, such as organizations and media audiences, are able to mobilize the media performing these roles. This framework helps explain how and why media roles affect the way actors are able to influence the media agenda with the intention of shaping the public agenda. peerReviewed

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A Relational Approach to How Media Engage With Their Audiences in Social Media

People are increasingly turning to social media for their news and for sharing and discussing news with others. Simultaneously, media organizations are becoming platform-dependent and posting short forms of their news on their social media sites in the hope that audiences will not only consume this news but also comment on and share it. This article joins other media and journalism studies exploring this phenomenon through a relational approach to media audiences to better understand how media organizations, particularly newspapers, are cultivating relationships with audiences via social media. Drawing on public relations theory about organization–public relationships, the article examines …

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Does Culture Matter? : Measuring Cross-Country Perceptions of CSR Communication Campaigns about COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought several challenges to businesses and societies. In response, many corporations have supported local communities and authorities in the management of the pandemic. Although these initiatives, which can be considered forms of corporate social responsibility (CSR), were highly coupled with explicit CSR communication campaigns, little is known about whether these campaigns were effective. Previous research indicates that culture can shape people’s perceptions of CSR initiatives and communications, suggesting that businesses pay attention to careful consideration of cultural norms for effective CSR communication. However, the COVID-19 pandemic as a new CSR setti…

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