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Governments around the world have shown poor capabilities in responding effectively to the COVID-19 health emergency outbreaks. After the declaration of COVID-19 as an international pandemic by the World Health Organization on January 31, 2020, three countries experienced the greatest initial impact in Europe. Sequentially Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) were hit by the highest numbers of contagion and death in the first few months in Europe. The aim of this paper is to assess how information channels and sources influenced the public’s evaluation of the three government’s communication response strategies.

An online survey was conducted between March 14 and April 14, 2020, during the first wave of lockdowns and declarations of States of Emergency in the three countries.

Findings show particularities for the different countries, but also similarities in response and reactions of the public in the three scenarios. The response strategy of the UK Government was the most untrusted and criticized by citizens. In contrast, the Italian and Spanish Governments, which both chose to respond with the severest restrictions, attracted more support from citizens, especially in Italy, which was the first to close borders and impose lockdowns for the population.

Despite the national differences in the preference of information channels and sources, overall, an empirical relationship between government communication assessment and media use were found in all the scenarios.

This empirical study has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, findings will add evidence of implications of the Channel Complementary Theory to the field of risk, crisis and emergency communication. The results also provide insights for communication practitioners in the public sector on how forms of information and trust in sources influence the public’s assessment of authorities’ communication.

Implications for theory and empirical research about communication during a health pandemic are identified and discussed.

Citizens engage at a high level and synchronize their use of multiple media and platforms in all the three national scenarios.

Stronger criticism is provided by online media, especially social media and online press in the different national contexts.

Results corroborate that factors related to media choice need to be operationalized for risk and crisis communication research.

When public health depends on people understanding the actions they need to take, the possibility of disobedience is highly dependent on trust.

Compared with Spain and the United Kingdom (UK), trust in government institutions in Italy was stronger and could be explained by the higher use of owned media for information-seeking.

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.

With the improvement of consumers' health consciousness, healthy food has attracted great attention in daily consumption. Previous research into the sense of power often distinguishes it into high and low level, ignoring the impact of different construal of power on consumption behaviors. This article divides power into dual construal (responsibility vs opportunity) and aims to examine the differential impacts of the construal of power on healthy food preference.

Two pretests and three formal experiments were conducted to examine the effect of the construal of power on the consumer's healthy food preference, the mediation of self-discipline perception and the moderation of the relative strength of prevention over promotion focus (i.e. RSPPF).

Results indicate that individuals who construe power as responsibility (vs opportunity) exhibit higher self-discipline perception, which in turn leads to greater healthy food preference. However, the main effect above can be weakened among the low-power group. Moreover, the above mediating effect of self-discipline perception is stronger for individuals with higher RSPPF.

First, based on the binary-construal perspective, this study refines the classification of high power and introduces it into the antecedent research of healthy food preference. Second, this paper reveals the self-discipline perception as the inner mechanism underlying the effect of the construal of power on healthy food preference, while RSPPF as the boundary condition for this mediating mechanism. Moreover, this research also provides practical implications for healthy food enterprises that the construal of power, self-discipline perception and regulatory focus should be taken into consideration in advertising design and healthy product promotion.

The paper aims to review rules and policy guidelines worldwide around non-personal data (NPD) and evaluate the policies on criteria that allow for the use of data for economic and social good. A review related to diverse policy approaches of various countries remains a research gap, and hence the analysis in the paper is designed with the intention of developing a research framework and providing policy gaps for further exploration.

A systematic review of academic and non-academic literature on theoretical foundations, applications of NPD for economic and social good and NPD policies and regulations was conducted to identify the evaluation criteria. A total of 32 dimensions got identified for evaluation. As second step, content analysis was used for evaluation. A total of 13 documents from 6 countries and 1 geographical region were identified for evaluation. The documents were evaluated based on the 32 dimensions spread across 5 domains that facilitate data access and sharing for economic and societal benefit.

The analysis highlights three distinct emerging perspectives on data exchange: most policy and regulatory documents acknowledge the importance of identifying different types of NPD and accordingly describing the distinct roles and responsibilities of data actors for leveraging the data; the policy and regulatory frameworks clearly focus on increasing business opportunities, data sharing cooperation and innovation; and findings also demonstrate certain gaps in the policy frameworks such as a more comprehensive discussion on data access and sharing mechanisms, particularly data sandboxes and open data, and concrete norms and rigorous standards regarding accountability, transparency, ownership and confidentiality. Furthermore, policies and regulations may include appropriate incentive structures for data providers and users to ensure unhindered and sustainable access to data for the common good.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper represents one of the first research contributions evaluating global data policies focused on NPD in the context of its increasing use as a public good. The paper first identifies evaluation criteria for the analysis on public and social good, and, thus, provides a conceptual framework for future research. Additionally, the analysis identifies the broad domains of policy analysis on social and public good for data economics.

Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.

Due to dramatic transformation of the auto industry, governments are implementing innovation policies to ensure the domain of sustainable technologies. According to the literature, developing countries that depend on multinational subsidiaries must invest in complementary innovation to be part of their research and development (R&D) headquarters' long-term plans. This study analyses the Brazilian auto industry innovation policy (Rota 2030) to evaluate if it targets complementarity with the German's one (NPE). It also compares the institutional arrangements of the former against the latter to check for governance gaps.

It applies a case-oriented comparative method (Ragin, 2014) for the analysis of qualitative evidence on secondary data. It investigates evidence of complementarity between Rota 2030 and national platform for electric mobility (NPE) objectives and checks for governance gaps in Rota 2030 using NPE as a reference.

The results confirmed a loose fitting between the innovation policies mainly for a lack of determinism of Rota 2030 objectives. Governance gaps were also found on Rota 2030 policy formulation and operationalization.

It contributes for the improvement of Rota 2030, and its analytical frame may be used for the formulation or adjustment of other developing countries' innovation policies.

It contributes with innovation system and policy field development with a theoretical extension coming from the New Institutional Economics (NIE) (Menard, 2018). By examining the performance of “institutional arrangements” during the process of formulation and operationalization of innovation policies, it shows the importance of coordination for their effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the multinational oil companies’ (MOCs) corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in Nigeria. Its special focus is to investigate the impact of the global memorandum of understanding (GMoU) on improving female status by improving nutrition in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

This paper adopts a survey research technique, aimed at gathering information from a representative sample of the population, as it is essentially cross-sectional, describing and interpreting the current situation. A total of 768 women respondents were sampled across the rural areas of the Niger Delta region.

The results from the use of a combined propensity score matching and logit model indicate that GMoU model has made significant impact in the key areas of assessment – gender-sensitive nutrition education, food security at household level, reduction on food taboos and female access to education.

This suggests that CSR interventions targeting to improve the nutrition status of girls and adolescents will help to ensure that female’s status improves throughout the life circle in the region.

This implies that MOCs’ investment in the nutrition of female is an important short-term barometer in assessing expected returns to improving household nutrition and overall human development capacity for sub-Saharan Africa.

This research contributes to the inequality debate in the women’s nutrition and inclusive growth literature from the CSR perspective. It concludes that business has an obligation to help in solving problems of public concern.