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The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper aims to examine the impact of brand self-congruence on brand advocacy. In addition, the roles of brand love and attachment are examined through a serial mediation model.

A total of 324 valid and useable responses collected from an Australian consumer panel were analysed through IBM SPSS. Underpinned by social identity theory and self-expansion theory, a set of hypotheses was examined in a research model.

The findings show that consumers' brand self-congruence positively impacts brand love, attachment and advocacy intention. Moreover, brand attachment and love mediate the relationship between brand self-congruence and advocacy.

The findings of this research suggest that brand managers should cultivate emotions to build a strong consumer–brand relationship.

This research advances the current understanding of brand advocacy literature concerning brand self-congruence, love and attachment. The findings suggest that consumers' brand self-congruence, combined with brand love and attachment, will generate greater advocacy.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the current state of literature on peer parental advocacy, offering practical insights and ideas for researchers and practitioners interested in this evolving field.

This narrative review is a comprehensive, critical and objective analysis of the current knowledge on peer parental advocacy.

Parental peer advocacy (PPA) has seen growing interest, with increasing research detailing the benefits and challenges. It is now being considered within children’s services across the UK, drawing upon the success of similar initiatives, especially in the USA. There is a compelling case for PPA, not least as it may contribute to resolving the longstanding challenges within children services of families having the opportunity to meaningfully participate in decision-making (Corby et al., 1996; Muench et al., 2017; Bekaert et al., 2021).

Parental advocacy (PA) continues to be an evolving area of academic research and policy development both in the United Kingdom and internationally. Emerging research suggests a compelling case for an expansion in PPA within child welfare and protection systems, specifically in case, program and policy advocacy.

PA continues to be an evolving area of academic research and policy development both in the United Kingdom and internationally. Emerging research suggests a compelling case for an expansion in PPA within child welfare and protection systems, specifically in case, program and policy advocacy.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first UK-based narrative reviews that critically analyses the research, highlighting the limitations and strengths of adopting PPA as an approach.

The purpose of this paper is to address a knowledge gap on advocacy outcomes from mental health service users’ perspective, and the implications for evaluating advocacy impact. The studies discussed highlight challenges for measuring the outcomes of advocacy, but underline the importance of doing so, and of involving service users alongside other stakeholders in co-designing evaluation systems.

The paper uses findings from three qualitative studies of independent advocacy involving focus groups and interviews with: 30 African and African Caribbean men who were mental health service users; 90 “qualifying patients” in a study of Independent Mental Health Advocate services; and nine young women in children and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).

A comparative analysis and synthesis of findings from three studies identifies four common dimensions: how mental health advocacy is conceptualised and understood; how service users define advocacy outcomes; wider impacts; and, user involvement in evaluating advocacy outcomes. Advocacy outcomes were conceptualised as increasing involvement, changing care and treatment and supporting personal development. There was evidence of advocacy acting to empower mental health service users, and of broader impacts on service regimes and policies. However, there was limited evidence of transformational impact. Evaluating advocacy outcomes is increasingly seen as important.

Few researchers have focused primarily on the perspectives of people using independent mental health advocacy, or on the experience of “advocacy as empowerment”, and none have done so across diverse groups. This analysis adds insight into the impact of independent advocacy. Data from empirical studies attest to the important role independent advocacy plays in modern mental health systems.

This study introduces three variables related to brands that have the potential to enhance university students' advocacy intentions. The research explores how university brand identification, the perceived prestige of the university brand and the social benefits associated with the university brand impact students' advocacy intentions. Additionally, the study examines the moderating role of gender in these relationships.

Cross-sectional surveys of 326 undergraduate students enrolled in a Spanish university, and structural equation modeling was used to test and validate the conceptual model.

The findings from the structural equation modeling indicate that university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits significantly influence students' advocacy intentions. Furthermore, the multigroup analysis reveals a gender difference in the factors influencing advocacy intentions. Female students demonstrate significance in all three antecedents, whereas male students only show significance in university brand identification and perceived university brand prestige.

The current study's findings provide several insights for higher education institutions in developing enduring and committed relationships with their students.

This study offers relevant insights into the body of research on university branding, explaining the students' advocacy intentions through the variables of university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits. Also, this study is a novelty in introducing empirical evidence for the importance of the moderating role of students' gender.

Many organizations expect their service engineers, or frontline employees (FLEs), to behave as brand advocates by engaging in favorable communication about the brand and its offerings toward customers. However, this approach is not without risk as customers may be disappointed or even frustrated with brand advocacy behavior in many service encounters. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of FLEs’ brand advocacy on customer satisfaction with the service encounter, and identify the conditions under which the effects are detrimental. This paper specifically considers service issue severity and product newness as contingency conditions.

Building on social identification theory, the paper builds a conceptual model, which is empirically tested using a data set that matches data from service engineers, customers, and archival records from the after-sales service department of a globally operating business-to-business print and document management solutions provider.

This paper finds that brand advocacy behavior harms customer satisfaction especially in service encounters that involve simple service issues (e.g. maintenance) for products that are new to the market. Fortunately, brand identification can compensate this negative effect under many service conditions. While the joint effect of brand identification and advocacy is most beneficial for severe service issues of new products, no effect on customer satisfaction was found for established products.

This paper identifies those service situations in which brand advocacy is advisable and guides managers toward achieving more favorable customer evaluations.

Past research has considered several FLE branding activities in the frontline but the effects of brand advocacy have not been isolated. In addition, most studies have assumed the effects of employee brand-related behaviors on customer satisfaction to be universally positive rather than negative and focused on antecedents and not on moderators and consequences.

This paper seeks to examine executive directors' perceptions of the relationship between access to funding and an organization's programmatic and advocacy activities.

This study is based on data from a national survey of executive directors of non‐profit advocacy organizations in the USA. The organizations were selected because they served minority and disadvantaged groups, and were heavily reliant on public funding.

The findings indicate that several factors are associated with how organizations balance their programmatic and advocacy activities. They include dependence on public funding, constituencies served, and perception of funders. Despite evidence for institutional pressures to reduce advocacy activities, the results indicate that such activities are sustainable in organizations with a strong individual donor base. In essence, a stable source of grassroots resources can counter institutional pressures to reduce advocacy.

This study focuses on a specific subgroup of advocacy organizations. Although it offers insights into their perceptions, the findings do not necessarily reflect more general perceptions.

The findings enhance understanding of impediments to non‐profit advocacy that stem from trends in public funding and regulations related to non‐profit lobbying and advocacy activities. The findings also enhance understanding of the extent to which the influences of the emerging non‐profit industrial complex are offset by traditional grassroots support for non‐profit advocacy.

This paper adds to the body of research on non‐profit decision making in relation to the balance between programmatic and advocacy work. It adds to the understanding of how organizations interface with larger institutions in society and the constraints that institutional ties entail.

Enterprising projects require a mixture of the imaginative and rational, not the rejection of one in favour of the other. Where a clear distinction is made, the imaginative and rational may support different doctrines on how knowledge and understanding should be acquired. Where attempts are made to draw on both as analytic and creative resources, e.g. as in the qualitative treatment of new social data, researchers may have the task of developing a complementary approach to social enquiry which combines objectivity with intuition and detachment with feelings of rapport. The data obtained often require an advocacy approach to argument, one where a persuasive line of argument is designed to establish the relative strength of a case in what may well be an adversarial context of claims and counter‐claims. Where research deals with various kinds of evidence, e.g. objective and subjective, research methods must be argued as compatible with a research problem and its context, and not dictated arbitrarily by research doctrine. An example is given of what is claimed to be a rational, linear approach to developing the internal logic of a research report; the claim is discussed that rationality and imagination may be complementary in speculative research; and an advocacy approach to presenting a research case is discussed.

This paper aims to examine characteristics that contribute to leaders' emergence and development as social advocates in their organizations and communities.

Building on theories of social problems, influence, and impression management, this paper examines how advocacy is affected by needs and situational conditions. Advocacy is the act of supporting an idea, need, person, or group. Advocates use cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies to influence attitudes, behaviors, and/or decisions for the benefit of individuals or to promote organizational change and/or social welfare. Social advocacy occurs within organizations in the form of corporate social responsibility, and it occurs within communities in the form of social entrepreneurship.

This theoretical paper argues that motivation of leaders of social ventures is a function of their conviction, self‐confidence, and extroversion. Advocates' beliefs about people are likely to shape their advocacy strategies, in particular, their beliefs about whether people are likely to change their attitudes and behavior, are sensitive to possible losses and gain, and respond to information about the probabilities and outcomes of actions and events. Advocate's resilience and transformational abilities (communications and political skills, knowledge of change management, and learning orientation) are predicted to influence their success.

The paper discusses directions for management development research and practice to promote involvement in social ventures.

Purpose: This chapter proposes narrative allyship across ability as a practice in which nondisabled researchers work with disabled nonresearchers to co-construct a process that centers and acts on the knowledge contained in and expressed by the lived experience of the disabled nonresearchers. This chapter situates narrative allyship across ability in the landscape of other participatory research practices, with a particular focus on oral history as a social justice praxis.

Approach: In order to explore the potential of this practice, the author outlines and reflects on both the methodology of her oral history graduate thesis work, a narrative project with self-advocates with Down syndrome, and includes and analyzes reflections about narrative allyship from a self-advocate with Down syndrome.

Findings: The author proposes three guiding principles for research as narrative allyship across ability, namely that such research further the interests of narrators as the narrators define them, optimize the autonomy of narrators, and tell stories with, instead of about, narrators.

Implications: This chapter suggests the promise of research praxis as a form of allyship: redressing inequality by addressing power, acknowledging expertise in subjugated knowledges, and connecting research practices to desires for social change or political outcomes. The author models methods by which others might include in their research narrative work across ability and demonstrates the particular value of knowledge produced when researchers attend to the lived expertise of those with disabilities. The practice of narrative allyship across ability has the potential to bring a wide range of experiences and modes of expression into the domains of research, history, policy, and culture that would otherwise exclude them.