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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication covered by the news media is considered as more credible and effective in shaping public perceptions toward corporations than CSR shared by corporations themselves. This is particularly true when CSR is about corporations with social stigma inherent in business practices. This study examines the CSR publicity of stigmatized industries from the journalism lens.

A content analysis was conducted with CSR stories from 2019 to 2020 by USA newspapers (n = 348).

Results of this study showed that the overall volume of CSR from stigmatized industries has decreased, with fewer responses to the recent pandemic. Further, the media brought promotional CSR activities and the business motives behind the activities into focus. Opposing patterns were found for CSR of non-stigmatized industries presented with philanthropic activities based on corporations' social motives to help communities. Similarly, economic and legal responsibilities reflected in the CSR pyramid were more prominently reported for stigmatized industries, and ethical and discretionary responsibilities appeared more frequently for non-stigmatized industries.

Integrating business and media literature, this study enriches scholarly discussions on media processes and effects for CSR communication. This study also provides practical implications for stigmatized industries by highlighting more authentic and careful approaches for CSR communication to earn positive publicity.

This study provides social implications by highlighting the importance of CSR communications through the lens of news media when corporations are socially stigmatized.

Stigmatized industries are known to be active in CSR communication to nullify social stigma surrounding themselves. The authors' findings provide empirical evidence suggesting that not all publicity benefits CSR communication for stigmatized corporations.

Nowadays, the event detection is so important in gathering news from social media. Indeed, it is widely employed by journalists to generate early alerts of reported stories. In order to incorporate available data on social media into a news story, journalists must manually process, compile and verify the news content within a very short time span. Despite its utility and importance, this process is time-consuming and labor-intensive for media organizations. Because of the afore-mentioned reason and as social media provides an essential source of data used as a support for professional journalists, the purpose of this paper is to propose the citizen clustering technique which allows the community of journalists and media professionals to document news during crises.

The authors develop, in this study, an approach for natural hazard events news detection and danger citizen’ groups clustering based on three major steps. In the first stage, the authors present a pipeline of several natural language processing tasks: event trigger detection, applied to recuperate potential event triggers; named entity recognition, used for the detection and recognition of event participants related to the extracted event triggers; and, ultimately, a dependency analysis between all the extracted data. Analyzing the ambiguity and the vagueness of similarity of news plays a key role in event detection. This issue was ignored in traditional event detection techniques. To this end, in the second step of our approach, the authors apply fuzzy sets techniques on these extracted events to enhance the clustering quality and remove the vagueness of the extracted information. Then, the defined degree of citizens’ danger is injected as input to the introduced citizens clustering method in order to detect citizens’ communities with close disaster degrees.

Empirical results indicate that homogeneous and compact citizen’ clusters can be detected using the suggested event detection method. It can also be observed that event news can be analyzed efficiently using the fuzzy theory. In addition, the proposed visualization process plays a crucial role in data journalism, as it is used to analyze event news, as well as in the final presentation of detected danger citizens’ clusters.

The introduced citizens clustering method is profitable for journalists and editors to better judge the veracity of social media content, navigate the overwhelming, identify eyewitnesses and contextualize the event. The empirical analysis results illustrate the efficiency of the developed method for both real and artificial networks.

Public and private sector organisations are widely endorsing digital transformation processes, but little is known about the level of digitalisation of an organisation as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework to assess an organisation’s level of digital transformation as a whole, taking the field of museums as an exemplary case of application.

The framework draws upon a scoping literature review of studies examining dimensions, metrics and methods for the assessment of the digital transformation of organisations. The framework has been validated by applying it to a sample of 400 Italian museums and further interviews with museum directors.

The authors propose an assessment framework composed of five main dimensions: people, technology, process, customer and strategy and investment. These dimensions are further deployed in sub-dimensions measured through a set of questions. The weighted average of results per dimension and sub-dimension supported the development of a composite index of organisational digital readiness.

The developed framework contributes to the current debate on the measurement of an organisation’s level of digital transformation as a whole, and it can offer practitioners a managerial tool to assess the organisation’s digital readiness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perception and adoption of blogs among public relations practitioners and how blog use relates to roles and status.

A national e‐mail survey of 216 US public relations professionals was used.

While blog use was similar to national audiences, practitioners were maintaining mostly personal blogs and using blogs professionally at low levels. Furthermore, women lagged behind men in the strategic use of blogs. Finally, cluster analysis challenged Porter and Sallot's roles typology, reverting to the previous manager‐technician dichotomy.

While practitioners use blogs at a similar level to that of the general population, they may be missing an opportunity to reach publics directly both through blogging and placing stories in blogs.

The paper provides an early look at an emerging technology that most practitioners agree will have a substantial impact on the industry.

In an experimental setting, we investigate the impact of religious social identity on whistle-blowing. We hypothesize and find that individuals are less likely to perceive others in their religious group as being behaving unethically. However, we find that once individuals perceive wrongdoing, they are incrementally more likely to whistle-blow when the perpetrator is a member of their religious group.

The purpose of this study was to investigate South Korean women entrepreneurs’ motivations to start a business, the challenges they faced in business development and key factors that contributed to their career success.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 women entrepreneurs to gather qualitative details on their experiences and performed a survey with 125 women Chief Executive Officers who are affiliated with the Korean Venture Business Women’s Association.

The authors found necessity-driven push (e.g. economic necessity for family) and opportunity-based pull (e.g. a strong sense of self) motivational factors, challenges (e.g. gender stereotypes) and opportunities (e.g. creating a family-like organizational culture) and key success factors (e.g. personality and loyal employees) for their career success.

There is a strong need to emphasize the import of culture at the national level that would impact women entrepreneurs’ careers and business success. A majority of the studies on HRD in small- and medium-sized enterprises shed light on individual owners’ perspectives only. Researchers need to take multiple-level (i.e. national, organizational and individual) factors into consideration in research on women’s entrepreneurship. Quantitative analysis in this study did not have any statistical significance and there were a few inconsistent findings (e.g. disadvantage as woman Chief Executive Officers) between quantitative and qualitative analysis. Future research is called for to investigate where and why different results occurred by using a mixed-methods research design and inferential statistical analysis for significance.

The increased support at the national level for entrepreneurship education before and after school that has not received sufficient attention in Korea will allow aspiring women to embark on entrepreneurial career paths from early on. At the organizational level, women entrepreneurs’ efforts to create a family-like organizational culture can be used as references for aspiring women who want to start and develop a business. At the individual level, HRD practitioners can develop leadership programs to share internal and external success factors so that aspiring women entrepreneurs can develop required individual (e.g. personality attributes) and social competencies (e.g. networking) in business development.

The two unique study findings that reflect the importance of cultural context include: our study showed how women entrepreneurs in Korea transformed the challenges they faced in business development into opportunities that can be used for entrepreneurship education for aspiring women entrepreneurs; and women entrepreneurs in Korea were humble enough to ascribe their career and business success to their loyal employees who have stayed in their companies with commitment, which has not been captured in research on women’s entrepreneurship in western contexts.

China has become a driving force in the world economy, yet East‐West cultural differences remain a problem area for many managers. This paper examines the importance of Confucianism in shaping societal values in China and how these values have affected the Chinese style of management. Confucian principles are extracted from the extant literature and used to explain the cultural underpinnings of Chinese leadership patterns, interpersonal behaviors and individual values. The longevity of Confucian influences throughout Chinese culture is a major factor in China’s resistance to Western management practices. There is also evidence that mainstream Confucian principles emphasizing teamwork, relationships and strong corporate cultures are gaining traction in the West. Future Western researchers should pay increased attention to East Asian philosophies and Asian‐based religions in their attempts to understand non‐Christian lifestyles and management methods.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine what it means for students with extensive support needs (ESN) to have opportunities to learn (OTL), why OTL is inexplicably tied to inclusive practices, and the in-school and post-school outcomes when students have OTL. Research will be provided that supports positive in-school and post-school outcomes, when students are provided equitable learning opportunities in inclusive contexts. Given the difference in possible outcomes for students with ESN when they do and do not have OTL, excluding them from general education contexts, where they have the best access to the intended and enacted curricula, is both unethical and limiting to society as a whole.

Investors are called to be good stewards/trustees of their investments, often on behalf of third parties. In light of this fiduciary responsibility, and the conundrum of public criticism potentially impacting on share price, this paper aims to use the basis of the UK governance code to explore what important dialogue investors really have with their holdings to support good governance.

Semi-structured telephone interviews with eight institutional investors explore governance issues and investor company dialogue, giving insights into the aspects of the importance of their part in the UK corporate governance code.

Rather than being sleeping lions, investors positively engage with companies, with regular communication being high on their agenda and not always via the annual general meeting. There is a preference to engage directly with the company rather than in public view or via share dumptin. Thus, we often do not see their actions around their fiduciary duties as often they avoid public criticism or any visibility that could do reputational harm and decrease company value.

This dialogue was just before the point of the exposure of the financial crisis; however, it shows the importance that investors give to taking their responsibilities seriously. Importantly, it provides a springboard for further debate following the financial crises and the updates of the financial environment.

Even though policy seeks engagement, the nuances of the investor dialogue are under explored compared to visible quantitative metrics. This dialogue assures that investors are active, even if their engagement is not public and can be deemed as hidden.

Complementing quantitative studies, this paper explores a qualitative approach, uniquely sharing insights into a hidden and little explored world of fiduciary dialogue.