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This paper aims to provoke a conversation in marketing scholarship about the overlooked political nature of doing research, particularly for those who research issues of social (in)justice. It suggests a paradigmatic shift in how researchers might view and operationalise social justice work in marketing. Emancipatory praxis framework offers scholars an alternative way to think about the methodology, design and politics of researching issues of social relevance.

This is a conceptual paper drawing on critical theory to argue for a new methodological shift towards emancipatory praxis.

As social justice research involves a dialectical relationship between crises and critique, the concept of emancipation acts as a methodological catalyst for furthering debate about social (in)justice in marketing. This paper identifies a set of methodological troubles and challenges that may disrupt the boundaries of knowledge-making. A set of methodological responses to these issues illustrating how emancipatory research facilitates social action is outlined.

Emancipatory praxis offers marketing scholars an alternative methodological direction in the hope that more impactful and useful ways of knowing can emerge.

The paper is intended to change the ways that researchers work in practical and concrete terms on issues of social (in)justice.

Although this paper is theoretical, it argues for an alternative methodological approach to research that reorients researchers towards a politicised praxis with emancipatory relevancy.

Emancipatory praxis offers a new openly politicised methodological alternative for addressing problems of social relevance in marketing. As a continuous political and emancipatory task for researchers, social justice research involves empirical encounters with politics, advocacy and democratic participation, where equality is the methodological starting point for research design and decisions as much as it is the end goal.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to clarify the conceptual building blocks of relationship building between non-governmental groups (NGOs) and news media, which is essential for the development of civil society where dialogue is a product of ongoing communication and relationships.

The paper is based on an online survey with a sample size of 296 NGOs from India. The data are analyzed with SPSS to test six hypotheses related to dialogic orientation, media relations, relationship quality and the NGOs’ structural characteristics.

The study found that an organization's dialogic orientation has a positive impact on media relations knowledge and strategy but not on the action dimension that focusses on providing information subsidies to journalists. A stronger dialogic orientation is also associated with better organization-media relationships. A stronger engagement in media relations also has a more positive impact on the quality of organization-media relationship. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The findings of this study are limited to a sample of NGOs from India. Future research should address more diverse samples to better understand the dynamics of media relations in NGOs, and how their patterns of media relations, use of information subsidies, culture and media choice shape news coverage and their impact in developing civil society.

By approaching media relations from an organizational perspective to investigate media relations in the NGO sector to address an under-researched area, the study is able to draw out the significant relationships between and among three distinct and yet connected conceptual building blocks of public relations.

Anthropomorphized brands have been widely used as marketing communication tools to engage consumers on social media, especially on Twitter. Guided by the social exchange theory (SET) and the dialogic theory, this study aims to investigate how anthropomorphized brands leverage different communication strategies on Twitter and how these strategies are related to consumer engagement.

Supervised machine learning was used to identify the communication strategies (i.e. message types and dialogic principles) of 125,887 tweets from 21 brand characters. Some statistical analyses (e.g. frequency analysis, Chi-square analysis and Poisson regression analysis) were performed to explore the relationships between communication strategies and consumer engagement (i.e. retweets and replies).

The majority of anthropomorphized brands’ tweets belonged to the socioemotional category and the most adopted dialogic principles were generation of return visits and conservation of visitors. Consumers engaged more with socioemotional tweets as well as the tweets that adopted the principles of dialogic loop and conservation of visitors. There were clear relationships between message types and dialogic principles in anthropomorphized brands’ tweets, and certain dialogic principles were found to effectively improve consumer engagement with certain message types.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the communication strategies of anthropomorphized brand characters on Twitter using computational research methods. It not only provides brand managers a systematic review of how current anthropomorphized brands communicate with consumers on Twitter and what strategies work more effectively to trigger consumer engagement but also contributes to theory building in brand management by integrating the SET and the dialogic theory in brand anthropomorphism research.

With the prevailing use of online communication platforms, this study revisits the definitions of trust in an online context. By exploring organizational online communications from a practitioners' perspective, a conceptual framework that illustrates the nature of trust and its relationship with dialogic communication between organizations and organizations' stakeholders in the digital era is proposed.

A total of 27 in-depth interviews were conducted with public relations and marketing practitioners involved in coordinating organizational online communications in Hong Kong.

From the practitioners' perspective, stakeholders' online trust toward an organization, which is a hybridity of initial and rapidly evolving trust, begins with stakeholders swift and initial judgment of the organization according to category-based cues (including knowledge-based attributes of the organization, institutional cues, and particular attributes of online dialogic communication) available on online platforms and further develops over time. Practitioners regard the integration of online and offline communication platforms to be the most effective way to build trust in organization–stakeholder relationships in the digital era, while dialectical tensions can hinder trust formed in online communication.

Along with the proposed conceptual framework, this study advances the discussion of online trust in public relations practices from the practitioners' perspective. A qualitative approach provides rich descriptions that may help to enrich theories in public relations and communication management regarding the interplay of trust and dialogic communication in organizational practices in the digital era.

Social space, the central construct in field theory, offers dialogic organization development a generative image similar to open systems for diagnostic OD. Social space imagery enables people to think, feel, and act in ways that exercise greater choice over the realities they construct and that construct them. This process is illustrated through a “transitional space” that enabled people with severe disabilities to overcome stigma and isolation. Social spatial imagery moves dialogic OD away from systems imagery and language, addresses ambivalence about self and mind, clarifies the meaning of reality, and reconnects it to its Lewinian roots.

Extending the argument made in Bushe and Marshak (2009) of the emergence of a new species of Organization Development (OD) that we label Dialogic, to differentiate it from the foundational Diagnostic form, we argue that how any OD method is used in practice will be depend on the mindset of the practitioner. Six variants of Dialogic OD practice are reviewed and compared to aid in identification of a Weberian ideal-type Dialogic Mindset, consisting of eight premises that distinguish it from the foundational Diagnostic Mindset. Three core change processes that underlie all successful Dialogic OD processes are proposed, and suggestions for future research offered.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the dialogic theory of public relations can help strategic communication practitioners support and enhance the relationship between individuals and organizations.

This inquiry applied the dialogic theory of public relations by investigating leading media companies’ context-based strategic use of Twitter. Researchers conducted a qualitative content analysis of 1,800 tweets from 18 top-performing media organizations.

This study identified strategies, rooted in dialogic theoretical principles that media organizations used to engage stakeholders. Media companies employed strategies based on dialogic principles, including promoting organizations as industry and thought leaders, integrating social media, and using an interactive, synergistic organizational voice.

These strategies support the need to expand theoretical conceptualizations and use of dialogic principles to study online communication.

Findings offer practical strategies for practitioners managing organizations’ Twitter communication to foster engagement. In particular, practitioners should consider organizational context and subsequent content advantages.

Findings offer practical and theoretical contributions to the debate of interactivity.

The study explores the role of dialogic public communication and information quality (IQ) in evaluating the operational performance of donation-based crowdfunding (DBC) tasks. These tasks are primarily used to support disaster relief operations. The authors also test the influence of cognitive trust and swift trust as moderating variables in explaining the relationship between both IQ and dialogic communication with operational performance.

The authors used a primary survey to test the hypotheses. A total of 203 responses were collected from multiple crowdfunding platforms. The authors used archival data from task creators on donation-based crowdfunding platforms, and a structured questionnaire is also used to collect responses. Data are analyzed using Warp PLS 6.0. Warp PLS 6.0 works on the principle of partial least square (PLS) structured equation modeling (SEM) and has been used widely to test path analytical models.

The authors found out that the operational performance is explained significantly by the quality of information and its association with dialogic public communication. The results support the arguments offered by dialogic public communication theory and trust transfer theory in assessing the operational success of DBC. The study also confirms that cognitive trust positively moderates the relationship between IQ and organizational public dialogic communication and operational performance. It is also revealed that the duration of the DBC task has no significant control over dialogic public communication.

The study lays practical foundations for task creators on DBC platforms and website designers as it sets the importance of both IQ and dialogic communication channels. The communication made by the task creator and/or the DBC platforms with the donors and potential donors in the form of timely and appropriate information forms the key to the success of any DBC task. The study also helps task creators choose a suitable platform to improve performance.

The authors propose a unique framework by integrating two theoretical perspectives: dialogic public relation theory and trust transfer theory in understanding the operational performance of donation-based crowdfunding tasks. The authors address DBC tasks catering to disaster relief operations by collecting responses from task creators on DBC platforms. The study uniquely positions itself in the area of information and communication.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to discussions about engagement in social and environmental accounting, drawing on dialogic theory and philosophy. A dialogic approach, building on existing critical inquiries, is introduced to derive principles to inform “on the ground” engagements. Applying dialogic thinking to social and environmental accounting encourages the development of dialogic forms of accountability, more authentic engagements and is more likely to contribute to sustainable social and environmental change.

Contains a synthesis of literature from within and beyond social and environmental accounting to shed light on the issues addressed by the special issue.

Research engagements in social and environmental accounting need not be taken in a haphazard manner uninformed by theory. In particular, the “learning turn” in social sciences has generated a large body of theorizing (informed by concrete engagement activities) that can be used to shape, guide and support engagement.

The principles developed can be used to inform future research design, with the aim of increasing the likelihood that such engagements will yield outcomes of “value” usually defined as emancipatory changes.

This paper develops a new (to accounting) theoretical perspective.

This paper aims to explain the development of the dialogical conference, develop a framework for understanding the social construction of the dialogical conference and provide research priorities for further developing the practice in the services marketing discipline.

The growing challenge for service researchers is to generate new theory and knowledge to solve complex problems. Dialogical conferences offer an avenue to develop solutions in response to this challenge. Value co-creation provides a useful lens through which to view dialogical conferences. We draw on Ranjan and Read’s (2016) value-in-use and value co-production and Ramaswamy and Ozcan’s (2018) interactive engagement platforms for value co-creation. Mindful of the contributions of both, the paper presents an integrative framework that describes the relationships between the concepts to provide a firm grounding for developing dialogical conferences.

By mapping value co-creating activities in dialogical conferences according to the APPI framework – artifacts, persons, processes and interfaces – on to value-in-use and value co-production, we propose a new category of value-in-use, equality, to the conceptualisation of value co-creation outcomes. Equality in contribution, attribution and effort is under-represented in value co-creation.

Dialogical conferences are increasingly important for knowledge generation and creating potential for action, yet are underexplored in service research. This paper contributes to the literature by using service logic and dialogical conferences to extend our knowledge of value co-creation interactive platforms and outcomes. Second, we demonstrate the value of dialogical conferences for facilitating meaningful service research and knowledge development. Finally, the authors identify research priorities to encourage further work on extending the understanding and application of dialogical interactive platforms and value co-creation to enable the service community to be responsive in solving complex problems through service offerings.