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To fill the gap, this article examines the inter-governmental collaboration mechanisms behind the platform curtain.

Behind the curtain is to look at what makes things happen backstage. For collaborative e-governance platforms, scholars have assumed that technological factors and user characteristics are the determinants for platform success. Little attention has been paid to the issue of how multiple governments, acting as platform co-builders and co-operators, interact and collaborate backstage to provide integrated e-services.

Based on data from survey questionnaires sent to government employees, the results show that governments’ information processing capacities cannot directly affect collaboration; however, these capacities can impact collaboration via the mediating variable of horizontal relations. In addition, we found that higher-ranking authorities are better suited to intervene once horizontal relations have been established and that more adaptable organizations are better at forming horizontal relations with peers. For governments participating in collaborative e-governance platforms, our findings are practically applicable.

The research question reads as: How do various government departments acting as platform co-builders and co-operators judge their collaboration performance, and what collaboration mechanisms contribute to it? We study this research question by constructing a conceptual model based on the Organizational Information Processing Theory (OIPT) and the Collaborative Governance Theory (CGT), both suggesting information processing capacities, organizational flexibility, horizontal relations and vertical intervention as indispensable factors influencing collaboration performance in ICT-supported groupwork. We propose and test four hypotheses on the relationships among these four factors to reveal the inter-governmental collaboration mechanisms for cross-government platformisation projects.

This study aims to examine the effects of religiosity, ethical leadership and local wisdom on the relationship between fraud risk management and asset misappropriation in Indonesia.

Data were collected using a set of questionnaire surveys administered to the head office, local government internal auditors (inspectorate) and local government employees in Indonesia. Sample selection used purposive techniques and obtained 151 respondents who became research data. The dependent variable was asset misappropriation. The independent variable was fraud risk management. The moderating variables for this study were religiosity, leader ethics and local wisdom. The analysis technique applied the structural equation model-partial least square (SEM-PLS).

Fraud risk management has a significant negative effect on asset misappropriation. In addition, this study finds evidence that religiosity, ethical leadership and local wisdom increase fraud risk management against asset misappropriation.

This study proposes an integrative model that enables local governments to understand fraud risk management. By integrating religiosity, ethical leadership and local wisdom, managers can design strategies to prevent asset misappropriation.

This research has the advantage of proposing an integrative model for mitigating asset misappropriation. Research on asset misappropriation is limited. Therefore, this study provides insights into fraud risk management, particularly in Indonesia’s local governments. In addition, this study adds ethical aspects such as religiosity, leadership and local wisdom to complement the weaknesses of fraud risk management and reduce the potential for asset misappropriation.

Thanks to a background of federal structures with varied jurisdictions, responsibilities and competencies, and a wide range of stakeholders active in tourism policy and the tourism industry, a high degree of complexity characterises tourism structures in Germany. These structures often present a great challenge in the sense of Head’s (2022) wicked problems, as policy success depends on identifying the relevant political level, the relevant tourism policy decision-makers and the relevant political institutions with whom to communicate and interact. One option for realising interests is tourism lobbying. In this context, the tourism lobbying model according to Pillmayer and Scherle (2014) serves as a starting point to visualise and ultimately implement the procedure.

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.

This paper is intended as an original contribution to researching ESG from a PR perspective, as well as offering a case study of the use of letters as a mode of corporate communication.

The methodology is interdisciplinary but is centred on a critical discourse analysis of the organizational rhetoric on ESG in the annual letters of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink from 2018 to 2023. The article also considers the content of the BlackRock letters alongside the campaign rhetoric deployed by opponents to ESG over the same period.

The analysis of the letters showed up a difference in tempo and tone between the courteous, collaborative and somewhat “corporate” style of text in the Fink letters and the more urgent and confrontational tone of opponents that adopted a populist line of argumentation against ESG in general and Larry Fink and BlackRock in particular.

While advantages can accrue to CEOs and corporations for speaking out on issues, there are also perils awaiting in the contemporary environment for opinion. The findings suggest it is also important to gauge the intensity of cultural and political division in society when speaking out on contentious issues and make a judgement on whether to proceed based on that analysis. Moreover, in countries where the middle ground of public opinion has eroded, ideology and cultural affiliations can prevail instead of openness to argument and counter-argument on topics such as climate change.

The paper presents a fresh case study of a CEO who has been prominent in shaping the discourse on ESG, which has itself become is a matter of contemporary relevance to public relations. The findings offer original insights that are additive to existing guidance and criteria for CEOs deciding to speak out on issues on behalf of their organizations.

To increase university–industry collaboration and research commercialisation, the Australian government recently introduced the Intellectual Property (IP) Framework, a set of online standard contracts. This follows a predecessor standard contract initiative, the IP Toolkit, which has not previously been evaluated. This paper aims to examine standard contracting in the innovation sector, tracing the policymaking behind the IP Toolkit using the lens of Macneil’s relational contract theory, to assess prospects of success for the new IP Framework, and similar initiatives in other jurisdictions.

This is a disciplined-configurative case study, drawing on qualitative secondary data analysis and applying Macneil’s relational contracting theory to guide case construction and generate hypotheses around likely success of standard contracting initiatives (stakeholder sentiment, stakeholder adoption). Within-case analysis process-traces development of the IP Toolkit, to discover what the policymakers wanted, knew and computed – and to detail observable implications Macneil’s theory predicts. Its themes are triangulated with multiple sources.

The case study, via Macneil’s theory, confirms the first hypothesis (resistant stakeholder sentiment) and partly validates the second hypothesis (low levels of adoption), demonstrating limited suitability of standard contracting in the dynamic and highly uncertain space of university–industry collaboration.

The study provides insights into the limited role that standard contracts can play in improving national collaborative research and development performance.

This is a novel theory-driven case study triangulated with previously unpublished data on the IP Toolkit’s website usage, and data from recent consultations on the new IP Framework. It has broader implications for other jurisdictions considering adoption of the standard contract model.

This study, a perspective piece, aims to argue that one particular slice of political institutional operations – the conduct of international relations – offers a clue to the possible risks that businesses face from geopolitics.

The authors examine the various facets of international relations and diplomacy, including the processes and arenas, to show the relevance of statecraft for firms looking to minimize political risk.

By understanding the role of diplomacy and statecraft as a process, firms can better prepare themselves for events that have far-reaching ramifications. This is very different than minimizing risk from inherent geopolitical tensions and allows for a more flexible approach to understanding risk levels in the global arena.

International business scholarship has focused on institutions and their effects on firms and has recently begun to re-examine the role of geopolitics and political risk on firm performance and decisions. However, the current literature continues to have a superficial understanding of institutional processes and their impact on business, especially when it comes to the daily workings of political institutions.

The objective of this research is to methodically categorize the various types of Open Government Data (OGD) stakeholders, and to elucidate the intricate network relationships among OGD stakeholders, along with the underlying mechanisms that shape their formation.

To comprehend the collaboration mechanism of stakeholders in the OGD ecosystem, the authors constructed an OGD multi-stakeholder relationship network by using data from the Shandong Province Data Application Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition. Based on the structural social capital theory and exponential random graph model (ERGM), an analytical framework was established to explore the formation mechanism of the collaborative network of OGD multi-stakeholder.

The results indicate that multi-stakeholder collaboration among government, enterprises and the public is crucial for achieving OGD goals. Organizing OGD competitions serves as an effective mechanism for solidifying and maintaining relationships among OGD stakeholder groups. Degree centrality and structural parameters reveal a Matthew effect within the connection process of the OGD ecosystem's collaborative network. Additionally, there is evidence of agglomeration and transferability within the network's structure.

This study contributes to the understanding regarding the formation mechanism of OGD stakeholders. The findings have implications for developing multi-stakeholder relationship networks of OGD and driving OGD initiatives.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2023-0284

This paper aims to use the obsolescing bargaining power (OBP) Model (Vernon, 1977, 1998) to analyze the case of United Company Rusal, a Russian politically connected multinational companies (MNCs) that was one of the world’s largest aluminum companies between 2005 and 2014, having acquired and, ultimately, sold the Montenegrin aluminum smelter company Kombinat aluminijuma Podgorica.The authors did so with the aim of answering the following question: How do geopolitics affect the bargaining balance of power between a Russian MNC and a host country?

The authors used the discourse analysis methodology to identify the key players in the bargaining process and illustrate the evolving bargaining process.

The authors demonstrated that, over time, the shift in power from the Russian MNC to the host government had not merely been the result of the increase in committed MNC assets in the host country but, rather, of a geopolitical chess game involving the Russian Government, North Atlantic treaty organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). By extending the OBP model with geopolitics, the authors found that a political agenda can influence the outcome of a bargaining process.

The authors extended the OBP model to illustrate the complex interaction between an emerging market MNC and an emerging host country government, indirectly influenced by two supranational organizations – the EU and NATO.