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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.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate whether or not public relations efforts in corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence the news media in corporate crisis situations.

The study conducted a content analysis of press releases and news media based on traditional human-coded cross-lag analyses and a machine learning technique, a novel method of big data analysis to test hypotheses.

Results indicate that CSR press releases indeed influenced the news media. During the crisis point, however, agenda-building was not observed.

Corporations need to continue CSR activities and provide public relations materials consistently even after a crisis, as an agenda-building role could be recovered.

The study examines the relationship between CSR and crisis situations in an agenda-building theoretical framework. The authors introduce agenda-building in the corporate sector with machine learning techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between public relations efforts and policymaking activity during a non-election setting.

Using a time-lag design, this study used content analysis to examine public relations materials and policymaking activity during the first six months of US President Barack Obama’s second term. The public relations data were collected from the official White House website and social media. The policymaking data were collected from congressional calendars of business.

The data revealed varying degrees of support across the three levels of agenda-building for issues, attributes, and issue/attribute co-occurrence. Contrary to the expected relationship that public relations drives policymaking activity, the data suggest that policymaking activity was a stronger predictor of public relations material.

This study provides modest support for time-lag agenda-building effects across three levels. However, future experimental research is needed to truly assess causal relationships. Future research should also explore alternative sources of data for policymaking activity.

This study demonstrates that the efficacy of information subsidy types is not uniform and should be chosen strategically. Traditional subsidy types were most effective for driving issues, while digital subsidy types provided more useful outlets for driving issue attributes.

This study contributes to political public relations scholarship by exploring the temporal relationships between public relations efforts and policymaking activity in a non-election setting. The time-lag design serves as an exploratory inquiry into the agenda-building process.

While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the interrelationships that exist between politicians' Twitter agendas, news websites agendas and public agendas at the first level during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections for the two front-runners of the elections, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras. Three researches were conducted to assess the issues agendas of candidates' tweets, news websites coverage as well as the issue importance of the public for an 18-day period prior to the elections. At the issue level, although Twitter and media agendas align more, they are distinct from public agenda. Overall, Twitter proved to be an ineffective tool for influencing the news websites and public agendas during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections with online media agendas being slightly more powerful. Moreover, the public agenda did play a role in shaping Twitter as well as media content but in a counterbalancing manner. In addition, this study confirmed that agenda building and setting dynamics at both levels vary based on the issue and candidate being analysed.

Universities in Malaysia, particular public universities, have been tasked not only with the traditional focus on the pursuit of knowledge, but also the important role of nation-building. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nation-building agenda in the development of Malaysian higher education in the globalisation era.

Grounded within the literature of nation-building and globalisation and neoliberalism, the approach of this paper examines the development of higher education in Malaysia across time.

Two particular aspects in the Malaysian higher education that have seen tension and changes emerging from the interaction between globalisation and nation-building are: the medium of instruction and hybridisation in universities.

The paper illustrates the ways in which universities have adapted in terms of the medium of instruction between the Malay language and English, as well as hybridisation that has taken place as a result of globalisation on the local vision, structure and characteristics of Malaysian universities.

This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.

This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls.

The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions.

The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability.

The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

The creation of public value is a topical debate for Dutch civil society organizations. Over the years, moving from government to governance, they supposedly have gained responsibility and space in meeting public needs. However, meeting the priority public needs and demonstrating actual public value creation has proved difficult. This has led to many discussions on how and if these organizations are creating public value. This study therefore investigated three practical cases to explore and explain how managers of housing associations create public value.

A case study method was employed.

Based on the different cases we can conclude that despite high ambitions, deviating normative views and the will to change displayed by the managers in the cases we investigated, we did not encounter situations where managers actually managed spaces for the creation of public value. The involved managers are still led by formal agendas and policies, rather than engaging in dialogues with their relevant stakeholders. They remain segmented in their approach and offering of services. Managers’ environment and stakeholders are not yet naturally seen as a place for sharing information and reframing boundaries for creating public value.

The opportunity in the investigated cases and for these managers lies in mobilizing and utilizing network relationships. This article provides a public value praxis model that focuses on involving stakeholders in investigating priority needs, collectively (re)designing services that meet these.

The built environment is a major source of carbon emissions. However, 80 per cent of the damage arises through the operational phase of a building’s life. Office buildings are the most significant building type in terms of emission-reduction potential. Yet, little research has been undertaken to examine the barriers faced by building operators in transitioning to a green operation of the office buildings in their care. This study aims to identify those barriers.

Building facilities managers with between 7 and 25 years’ experience in operating primarily Melbourne high-rise office buildings were interviewed. The sample was taken from LinkedIn connections, with ten agreeing to participate in semi-structured interviews – out of the 17 invitations sent out. Interview comments were recorded, coded and categorised to identify the barriers sought by this study.

Seven categories of barriers to effecting green operation of office buildings were extracted. These were financial, owner-related, tenant-related, technological, regulatory, architectural and stakeholder interest conflicts. Difficulties identifying green operation strategies that improved cost performance or return on investment of buildings was the major barrier.

Government, policymakers and facilities managers themselves have been struggling with how to catalyse a green transition in the operation of office buildings. By identifying the barriers standing in the way, this study provides a concrete point of departure from which remedial strategies and policies may be formulated and put into effect.

The uptake of green operation of office buildings has been extremely slow. Though barriers have been hypothesised in earlier works, this is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, that categorically identifies and tabulates the barriers that stand in the way of improving the green operational performance of office buildings, drawing on the direct knowledge of facilities experts.