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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the historical evolution of campaign finance laws and suggest the legal implications for public relations practitioners after the US Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

The approach of this paper examines appellate case law and federal statutes to provide a legal analysis of the history of campaign finance laws and potential impact on public relations practitioners.

This research provides an overview of the evolution of campaign finance case law and federal statues in the USA and provides analysis of how the 2010 Citizens United case and a recent 2012 case, American Trade Partnership, are altering both the political and corporate landscapes. By allowing far greater contribution rights to corporations than any time since 1907, Citizens United is changing the role corporations may directly play in elections at all levels. Implications for how these changes may affect corporate public relations practitioners both professionally and ethically are discussed.

In a post-Citizens United era, corporate PR may now legally be engaged with many forms of highly political communications. Corporate PR may have a more political tone and ethical dilemmas may face practitioners who may be legally asked to perform communications tactics that are at odds with their political values.

Despite the academic analysis of Citizens United no study has evaluated the effect Citizens United and campaign finance laws on public relations practice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of political connections surrounding an exogenous Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) that lifted long-standing restrictions on corporate political contributions.

This study examines key characteristics of politically connected firms compared to non-politically connected firms, including their market reaction to Citizens United, as well as cash holdings levels and governance characteristics before vs after the landmark decision.

The results indicate a significant negative market reaction to politically connected firms surrounding the announcement of Citizens United. Additionally, there is a significant increase in the cash holdings of politically connected firms relative to before the event and relative to non-politically connected firms. For politically connected firms, this result is exacerbated by poor corporate governance quality. Collectively, these findings are consistent with a positive association between agency costs and political connections.

This study provides novel evidence by exploiting an exogenous enhancement in the implications of political connections that accompanied the Citizens United decision. The use of this quasi-natural experiment offers an ideal research setting to extract fresh insights into the effects of corporate political connections.

In the context of an industrial complex where corporate political activity (CPA) and political corporate social responsibility (political CSR) are not related, this study aims to investigate the possible relationship between citizens’ perceptions of these two non-market strategies and residents’ trust in companies located in the industrial complex.

Data were collected from 740 citizens living near a petrochemical complex in Tarragona (Spain). The results were analysed using structural equation modelling.

Based on institutional theory, the key findings of the study are that CPA and political CSR are differently related to citizens’ trust in companies. The results also verify that the negative relationship (between CPA and trust) outweighs the positive one (between political CSR and trust).

The lack of fit between political CSR and CPA in the complex analysed suggests that firms are neglecting approaches shared by these non-market strategies, and thus wasting a huge opportunity to improve citizens’ trust in and acceptance of the complex firms. Moreover, the ethical dimension should always be present when these firms take on political responsibilities.

To date, CPA and political CSR have largely been dealt with separately in the literature. This study attempted to bridge this gap by examining a situation where there is no strategic relationship between CPA and political CSR to analyse, from the perspective of citizens’ perceptions, the relationship each strategy has with the important academic concept of citizens’ trust in companies.

This chapter examines the role that Citizens United v. FEC (2010) has played in shaping the current system of election spending in the United States. In Citizens United, the Court determined that individual rights to speech and expression can flow into the corporate entities they join. This chapter argues that the Court’s holding serves to redirect the focus of accountability away from those who seek to sway election outcomes through massive election spending and toward any efforts by government to regulate that type of spending. The practical result has been to allow for the creation of new organizations that can take in unlimited amounts of money while also effectively hiding the source of funds from disclosure. By muddying the waters of disclosure, these new entities – Super PACs and dark money organizations – lower the ability of citizens to maintain accountability over the electoral system. Finally, this chapter examines ways to encourage greater disclosure and accountability in government after Citizens United.

This paper aims to explore the relevance of the application of an environmental management system in creating the image of a good corporate citizen in the Australian construction industry.

The author applied a research method based on data collected from annual reports, corporations' websites and publicly available statistics; and interviews conducted with stakeholders of the leading Australian construction industry corporations.

The environmental management system has a part in creating the image of a good corporate citizen. Majority of the companies pursues the corporate governance structure that is concerned about healthy environment. None of the companies includes both suppliers and community representatives in the board of directors. There is a different interpretation as to what healthy working environment comprises, and how to sustain a healthy environment of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The implementation of the occupational, health and safety regulations varies from state of state in Australia.

All companies should pursue the governance structure that ensures the social values of the organization are aligned with those of the community; overall unique stakeholders' understanding of a healthy working environment should support sustainability; equal implementation of occupational, health and safety regulations for each state in Australia could contribute overcoming for much‐needed occupational, health and safety improvement.

The originality of the paper is in applying the framework for examining the environmental management system pertinence to the image of defined good corporate citizen. The paper is useful to construction industry practitioners, academics, and government.

Community impacts resulting from corporate facility new development, expansion, renovation, merger, consolidation, closure and disposition activities are under greater scrutiny by public officials, citizen, and special interest groups. The paper reports public sector views on municipal structure, most desired industries, community advantages, use of cost benefit studies and the methods used to evaluate development impacts.

The research presented is based on a national survey of US economic development officials and their methods for measuring project impacts and determining public costs and benefits associated with economic development projects.

The research found that the public sector emphasized community advantages that were abstract and hard to measure in response to the corporate need for hard data on facility and development costs. About 30 percent of the public administrators surveyed never or rarely used any measures to determine community impacts associated with facility development. The most common impact measures used were individual experience, public meetings, tax impacts, amount of private investment, and local planning goals. Infrastructure costs, environmental quality issues, traffic and public services were the most important cost areas.

Every corporate real estate project has unique characteristics and accordingly, community impacts vary. This research presents an overview of the analysis methods used or not used by public development officials. The corporate decision maker must learn to recognize needs and opportunities for additional data collection that will make a case for facility project support.

Understanding the public sector impact analysis perspective is important because it enables corporate real estate decision makers to understand key issues, frame and present projects to citizens, identify research gaps and negotiate greater subsidies, and fair terms in development and performance agreements.

Surprisingly, very little research exists in this area. The survey data indicate limited use of impact measures and methods. Future research into this area should investigate why impact analysis measures are not extensively used and how standard measures could be used to evaluate social, environmental and economic impacts.

The purpose of this paper is to critiques corporate public relations from the perspective of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

It uses an essay format.

The essay is critical of proposed “communitarian-style” initiatives to take advantage of what are referred to by some public relations theorists as “consumer communities”.

The essay details a more appropriate ethical approach to public relations by corporations.

This is the most extensive application of MacIntyre's ideas to public relations.

The citizen-shareholder approach in the capital market is considered a knowledge-enhancing and emerging concept in financial and accounting offerings. Its reliable background in management and human sciences makes it an essential basis for protecting the interests of shareholders and investors. Shareholders are considered a necessary part of the social platforms that are companies and regulatory institutions in the capital market; beyond being obligated to protect their material and intellectual rights, they are responsible for developing norms and facilitating investment values and gaining trust through mutual interactions based on respect for their interests. The purpose of this paper is to perform interactive qualitative analysis of the requirements for protecting the rights of citizens of capital market shareholders.

The methodology of the research is mixed, so that in the qualitative part, through content screening, the dimensions related to the protection of the citizen rights of the capital market shareholders were identified through a systematic review of 10 research in the period of 2017–2022. Then, the reliability of the specified dimensions was examined through Delphi analysis; in the quantitative part of the research, the criteria identified through the pairwise comparison matrix were first determined by the level of their relationships to determine based on the pattern of systemic representation of drivers and the consequences of requirements to protect the rights of citizens of capital market shareholders.

The research results in the qualitative part indicated the existence of 12 primary themes; during the two stages of Delphi analysis, three themes were removed, and a total of nine themes entered the quantitative phase. The results in a quantitative part indicate the creation of specialized and active committees of the board of directors as the primary driver and the reliability and timely disclosure of information in the long term as a systemic consequence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that presents the new concept of citizen shareholders to strengthen the requirements of protecting the rights of shareholders in the capital market while developing new theoretical literature.

The rate of alliance formation by firms has greatly increased over the past two decades. Congruently, firm interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives has also increased. Signaling theory suggests that firms may be increasing their CSR strategies in an effort to signal their willingness to operate within social mores. However, firms are faced with the problem of how to communicate their social commitment objectively to stakeholders. We argue that firms are forming CSR alliances in an attempt to signal an objective message to stakeholders concerning their commitment to CSR. To provide insight into these explanations, we compare the Total CSR performance (TCSR) scores of firms that form CSR alliances with those firms that do not. We control for firm size, leverage, profitability, and industry. We find that firms that form CSR alliances generally have higher TCSR scores, which suggests that one of the reasons that firms form these alliances is to publicize their stronger social and environmental records to stakeholders.