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The purpose of this paper is to contribute to science communication literature by further highlighting the underexplored role of organizational and corporate perspectives in science communication.

The paper takes the form of a conceptual article that uses two illustrative vignettes to highlight the power of corporate science communication.

The key argument is that corporate science communication is a compound ideology that results from merging the hegemonic corporate voice with the ultimate/god-term science (see the work of Kenneth Burke) to form a mega-ideological construct and discourse. Such communication can be so powerful that vulnerable publics and powerful advocates speaking on their behalf have little to no recourse to effectively challenge such discourse. While critiques of corporate science communication in practice are not new, what the authors offer is a possible explanation as to why such discourse is so powerful and hard to combat.

The value of this paper is in the degree to which it both sets an important applied research agenda for the field and fills a critical void in the science communication literature. This conceptual article, in the form of a critical analysis, fills the void by advocating for the inclusion of organizational perspectives in science communication research because of the great potential that organizations have, via science communication, to shape societal behavior and outcomes both positively and negatively. It also coins the terms “compound ideology” and “mega-ideology” to denote that while all ideologies are powerful, ideologies can operate in concert (compound) to change their meaning and effectiveness. By exposing the hegemonic power of corporate science communication, future researchers and practitioners can use these findings as a foundation to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns wielded by big corporate science entities and the public relations firms often hired to carry out these campaigns.

This paper develops a typology of argumentation strategies used in lobbying. Unlike in other strategic communication functions such as crisis or risk communication, such typologies have not been proposed in the sub-field of public affairs.

The article synthesises the strategic communication, political communication and policy studies literature and employs exchange theory to explain the communicative-strategic exchange in public affairs. It showcases its explanatory potential with illustrative examples from Big Tech lobbying.

The paper describes that categories of argumentation strategies that a public affairs professional will choose are based on the contingency of the issue, policy objective and lobbying objective. The descriptive typology will require empirical testing to develop further.

The paper describes how public affairs professionals influence public policy through their argumentation strategies, which sheds light on the usually opaque activities of lobbying.

The proposed typology is the first of its kind for the field of public affairs. Beyond, it contributes communication-scientific insights from a rhetorical tradition to strategic communication research and other social science fields where lobbying is studied, e.g. policy studies.

When an audience mentally counterargues a spokesperson, the message is backfiring. In such cases, audience members are practically persuading themselves to take the opposite position advocated by the spokesperson. Yet spokespeople who are professional persuaders serving corporations often seem to instill counterargument. This paper examines the role of counterargument as the conduit through which a spokesperson's different message types affect a company during a crisis. The authors explore the paradox of spokespeople's (in)effectiveness by testing divides in research drawn from normative crisis communication theory, narrative persuasion theory and the theory of reporting bias.

Two controlled, randomized experiments are reported. Participants (total N = 828) watch video clips of media interviews of a company spokesperson fielding questions about a scandal.

In the first study, non-narrative information most effectively bolsters purchase intentions and reduces negative word-of-mouth. The effect is mediated by decreased counterargument. The second study replicates the results concerning on-topic narratives compared with spinning, while on-topic narratives and non-narratives perform equally well.

This study addresses conflicts between two distinct traditions of theory as well as between normative crisis communication and its frequent practice. Reducing counterargument matters in the context of non-narrative persuasion, and non-narratives can perform at least as well as narratives in crisis communication.

The purpose of this study is to explore how big data analytics (BDA) as a potential information technology (IT) innovation can facilitate the retail logistics supply chain (SC) from the perspective of outbound logistics operations in the United Kingdom. The authors' goal was to better understand how BDA can be integrated to streamline SCs and logistical networks by using the technology, organisational and environmental model.

The authors applied existing theoretical foundations for theory building based on semi-structured interviews with 15 SC and logistics managers.

The perceived benefits of using BDA in outbound retail logistics comprised the strongest predictor amongst technological, organisational and environmental issues, followed by top management support (TMS). A framework was proposed for the adoption of BDA in retail logistics. Contextual concepts from previous literature have helped us understand how environmental changes impact BDA decision-making, as such: (i) SC maturity levels and connectivity affect BDA utilisation, (ii) connected SCs improve data accessibility and information exchange, (iii) the benefits of BDAs also affect adoption and (iv) outsourcing complex tasks to experts allows companies to focus on core businesses instead of investing in IT infrastructure.

Outside the key findings listed, this study shows that there is no one-size-fits-it-all approach for use within all organisational settings. The proposed framework reveals that the perceived benefit of BDA is non-transferrable and requires top-level management support for successful implementation.

The existing literature focusses on the approaches to applying BDA in SC and logistics but fails to present a deep dive into retail outbound logistics activity. This study addresses the “how” and proposes a social-inclusive framework for a technology-enabled topic.

The modern corporation is evaluated by many measures that go beyond profit, which was the emphasis for years previously. Today’s corporation is weighed against expectations of many stakeholders, including not just customers but employees, investors, the government and even the public at large with no discernible financial or other tie to a company. As such, corporate boards necessarily must be concerned with more than financial performance, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the increasing emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. Given that public relations scholars and practitioners have long been concerned with stakeholder relationships, social responsibility and other non-financial indicators, it would make sense that public relations has a more obvious presence on corporate boards.

This study examined the 25 companies in the Fortune Modern Board 25 to determine how many board members had a background or expertise in public relations that would contribute to the leadership necessary for the concerns of the modern corporation, and whether the boards had a committee designated to public relations or related functions.

Results show that there are few corporate boards that have public relations represented prominently in either their members or committees. The same is true for executive leadership teams. Public relations or communications executives do appear to play some role in ESG, CSR and DEI reporting, but often there are staff members with those specific titles and roles.

The study was limited to 25 corporations on a Forbes list that ranked them as best in communicating ESG, CSR and DEI. The method examined publicly available literature which was revealing to the research questions, but more could be learned by interview or survey with CCOs.

The study shows the current presence of public relations capacity in terms of members of corporate boards, corporate committees and among the C-suite is not significant. Also, rather than PR as a function owning modern concerns of DEI, ESG and CSR, there are professionals with specific expertise in those areas who are responsible for those corporate issues.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), ESG (environmental, social, governance) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) have recently been stressed as important for corporations to measure and report. The role of the public relations profession in managing and/or communicating in these areas is important to consider in terms of public expectations and satisfaction of communication on these subjects.

This paper is unique in integrating public relations theory and practice with board theory and the current management concerns with ESG, CSR and DEI. Little if any previous research has considered which professions are in charge of communicating on these concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to examine US public relations professionals' perceptions of the benefits and challenges associated with the concept of moral entrepreneurship, defined as the purposeful process of changing or creating new institutionalized ethical norms. This study argues that the concept of moral entrepreneurship provides organizations with a potentially valuable framework to actively recognize societal pressures and problems and act accordingly to better the environment in which the organization resides and operates.

This exploratory study uses purposive in-depth interviews with 25 diverse public relations professionals, who represented communication firms, in-house public relations departments, higher education, nonprofits and government.

Respondents assigned a high value to the concept of moral entrepreneurship: In addition to its being viewed as the right thing to do, they recognized its practice as a way to help organizations recruit and retain employee talent and improve stakeholder trust. However, based on the interviews, organizational leadership is the primary initiator of ethical changes; therefore, without a seat at the management table, practitioners lack the influence to initiate such new organizational directions and take on the role of moral entrepreneurs only when directed to do so by their superiors. Barriers to adopting a moral entrepreneurship approach included a limited budget and shortage of staff, employees' resistance to change, fear of failure, poor leadership and a politically polarized workplace.

Practice implications include considerations for furthering moral entrepreneurship in organizations.

This study is the first to explore the applicability of the concept of moral entrepreneurship in public relations. The paper underscores the need for further discussion around novel approaches to ethics in public relations that go beyond simple compliance with professional codes and industry standards and that help organizations lead societal change.

Decentralised administrative arrangements and the active function of local government organisations are essential to tackle crisis effectively. Using Bangladesh as a case study, this paper examines the central and local government administrative arrangements during COVID-19 pandemic.

This study applies qualitative content analysis and interviews to explore the local government’s role in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 management by interviews of 18 participants including government officials, experts, non-government organisations (NGOs) representatives, and the general public. This paper also analysed academic papers, policy documents and other publicly available documents, including newspaper reports.

The Constitution of Bangladesh intensified the active participation of local government in each administrative unit through decentralised administrative management. This paper however reveals that the administrative arrangement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh was primarily a centrally led system. The local government was not sufficiently involved, nor had it integrated into the planning and coordination process. This indicated the absence of active decentralised administration.

This study fills the research gap of the administrative pattern and local relations in COVID-19 management by exploring the local government’s role during the catastrophic situation and highlights the importance of decentralised administrative actions in managing the crisis.

The purpose of the study is to propose a new perspective to explain how China's rapid growth in patenting is partially driven by corporate strategic patenting to influence local governments. The authors highlight the role of strategic patenting and local government-business relations in creating the gap between the patent boom and underlying technological progress in China.

The authors investigate the relationship between local government-business relations and corporate strategic patenting behaviors, measured as a higher ratio of patent filings to patent awards, by collecting data from three successive NADS surveys of government-business relations in 292 Chinese municipalities, paired with detailed patenting and subsidy data of 3,756 publicly listed corporations obtained through text mining.

The authors find that, while R&D investment and patent subsidies do drive corporate patenting, firms in jurisdictions with lower-quality government-business relations are more likely to engage in strategic patenting. Moreover, the negative impact of government-business relations on strategic patenting is moderated by political connections, as the strategic patenting of firms without political connections is more sensitive to government-business relations. The authors further show that firms obtain significant benefits from patenting in the form of additional subsidies from local innovation and industrial policies in the years following.

Rolling back patent subsidies will reduce strategic patenting to a limited extent. The local governments in emerging markets need to increase the capacity to implement industrial policy and provide market-based opportunities for firms to access innovation inputs.

The authors provide an updated and fresh perspective to understand the phenomenon of China's patent boom by showing that patenting can be driven by corporate strategies to adapt to local institutions and influence government policy. The authors extend the analysis of strategic patenting to emerging markets.

The unsustainable public debt of most African economies adversely affects their economic growth and stability. This study aims to explore the influence of cross-country indicators of governance from African countries on public debt accumulation.

The study deployed a quantitative research design technique. Secondary data was used in this study. The frequency of the data is annual, and it is available from 1996 to 2022 for 48 countries in Africa. The study deployed the system generalized method of moments for the estimation.

The study finds that countries with high regulatory quality standards, control corruption and ensure effective governance accumulate less government debt while countries that abide by the rule of law instead accumulate more government debt. The study also finds that economic growth and government revenue reduce government gross debt while government expenditure and investments increase public debt.

Due to data unavailability, other factors which are likely to influence government debt accumulation were not included in the study as control variables. This is the limitation of the study.

African governments should strive to maintain high regulatory quality standards through the formulation and implementation of sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development, and ensure quality and accountability of public and civil services. Governments are also urged to control corruption and enact good laws so that the enforcement of these laws will not worsen the risk of becoming debt-distressed.

Recent studies on governance and public debt were focused on the Arabian Gulf countries, countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and a combination of high and low-income countries. This study scrutinizes exclusively the effects of the quality of governance indicators on public debt accumulation, in the context of Africa.

This paper investigates the effect of state-society relations on the industrially-related growth paths of developed countries.

It introduces a novel theoretical framework, the state-business-labor relations (SBLR) framework, where four main actors are identified: the state, big businesspersons or tycoons, owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or Entrepreneurs and labor. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the studied actors. The paper then investigates how these SBLR modes, through adopting various policies targeting the industrial sector, lead to different growth paths. Rather than focusing only on economic growth, this research regards a growth path as a matrix of the performance in long-run growth and equality of distribution.

Using regression analysis and statistical data, the results suggest that the Co-Balanced mode, having higher levels of coordination and lower favoritism, leads to the best growth path among the four introduced modes, especially with its emphasis on high levels of venture capital availability and easiness of starting business. while the Lib-Capture mode, characterized by lower coordination and higher favoritism, seems to have the worst growth path and the best implemented policy for this mode is suggested to be high profit taxes that seem to counter the negative impact of the existing high levels of favoritism.

Despite the important findings that this research has reached, this paper is mainly meant to open a further investigation into this topic and open this dimension that the research on VoC and political economy have under-researched. A deeper investigation of SBLR typologies that could only be possible by having richer datasets with more data on coordination for the whole world, rather than only the advanced economies, would further our understanding of the dynamics that shape the growth paths of different countries of the world.

To realize the best industrial growth path, fighting favoritism should be an important objective. The negative impact of favoritism on innovation could not be disregarded in the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, where innovation is increasingly pivotal to future industrial development. Actively engaging societal groups in the policymaking process is important in addressing their concerns and balancing them at the same time. This should lead to the double benefit of formulating better policies that should foster growth as well as provide better distribution of this growth. High levels of coordination should help in realizing this objective. Yet, this could only be possible if societal groups are free to associate and aggregate their power and when there are means of preventing one actor from gaining more favorite treatment and exclusive influence over policymakers. The presence of both powerful and broadly represented business associations and labor unions and the existence of a government interested in coordinating their efforts-rather than letting itself be controlled by one group at the expense of the others-should help in the realization of the best growth path. Thus, institutional reform that empowers societal groups and enables them to defend their interests as well as fights all forms of corruption should lead to the realization of a more prosperous and equitable industrial development, with the “re-industrialization” of the developed world being no exception. The technological and social challenges of intensive automation and digitalization accompanying the fourth industrial revolution make the envisaged institutional reform more urgent.

This paper is introducing a novel theoretical framework for studying the effect of state-society relations, particularly SBLR, on the industrial growth paths of developed countries. It integrates three important bodies of literature in order to build a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of state-society relations and their economic consequences. These are the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), State-Business Relations (SBR) and Industrial Relations. The SBLR framework differentiates between tycoons and entrepreneurs, an important distinction that often goes unnoticed. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced, depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the actors. It is proposed in this research that the effect on growth paths goes beyond the simple dichotomy between CMEs and LMEs usually present in the literature of VoC and that power relations provide an essential complementary dimension in explaining this causality.