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Web 2.0 and the social networks have changed how organizations interact with their publics. They enable organizations to engage in symmetric dialogic communications with individuals. Various organizations are increasingly ­using different social media to enhance their visibility and relationships with their publics. They allow them to disseminate information, to participate, listen and actively engage in online conversations with different stakeholders. Some social networks have become a key instrument for corporate communication. Therefore, this chapter presents a critical review on the organizations’ dialogic communications with the publics via social networks. It puts forward a conceptual framework that comprises five key dimensions including ­“active presence,” “interactive attitude,” “interactive resources,” “responsiveness” and “conversation.” This contribution examines each dimension and explains their effect on the organizations’ dialogic communication with the publics. Hence, this contribution has resulted in important implications for corporate communication practitioners as well as for academia. Moreover, it opens future research avenues to academia.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Kent and Taylor's dialogic features are used by agricultural associations in the USA and Germany to engage media.

A content analysis of 51 American Farm Bureau Federation and 18 Deutscher Bauernverband web sites was conducted to evaluate the incorporation of the principles of ease of interface, usefulness, dialogic loop, conservation of visitors, and generation of return visits.

The study found mixed results for the incorporation of Kent and Taylor's five dialogic principles. At the time of the content analysis, these sites failed to provide a solid dialogic loop between the organisation and the visitor, and they did not encourage return visits. This weakens the sites' potential to move past information provision and build lasting relationships with reporters.

The findings of this research project provide benchmark numbers for the presence of the five dialogic principles in the agriculture industry. Further, the findings strengthen the growing evidence of the impact of the principles in various sectors. Previous research has examined how nonprofit social service and activist organisations have incorporated the principles as well as for‐profit organizations. The current results shine light on how other organisations are using their web site to develop relationships with visitors.

Research on agricultural communication indicates that the media increasingly are downplaying the significance of the industry in mainstream news. Scholars have suggested that the agricultural industry is not well versed in media training and media relations. However, the findings of this study indicate that the leading agricultural associations in the USA and Germany are still primarily using their web sites as one‐way information subsidies rather than capitalizing on the interactive nature of the web. By incorporating the five dialogic principles into their web sites, the agricultural communicators will be in a better position to interact with media in a lasting manner rather than simply serving as a source of one‐way information.

Though the dialogic principles have been studied in other settings, this paper examines their use by organisations in multiple countries. Given the increasing globalisation of the agriculture industry, it is vital to understand how this industry communicates with the media given that it has repeatedly complained about media coverage of agricultural issues and the push by the American Farm Bureau to assist other national agricultural associations around the world.

The era of globalization has increased the challenges for multinational corporations (MNCs) to retain legitimacy. In striving for legitimacy, MNCs increasingly engage in dialogue processes with their stakeholders. However, the era of globalization and the parallel rise of the Internet and the new “Web 2.0” have dramatically widened the range of options for such dialogue processes. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in particular make use of “social media” (e.g., Facebook, Weblogs, Twitter) which enable them to quickly generate attention regarding socially and environmentally harmful business practices by MNCs. In response, MNCs have started applying social media technologies for corporate communication purposes. However, given the novelty of these activities, we lack knowledge on how these organizations make use of social media. Therefore, in this chapter, we examine how MNCs and NGOs utilize one particular social media application, that is, Twitter, for dialogic stakeholder communication.

In our empirical study, we examine current practices of Twitter usage by MNCs and NGOs. We investigate a dataset of more than 3,000 Twitter articles from 30 MNCs and 30 NGOs in the German-speaking world. Our analysis is based on the “conceptual orality or literality” scale by Koch and Oesterreicher (1994).

The comparative analysis shows that on average MNCs and NGOs exhibit a surprisingly similar profile on Twitter. Both tend toward conceptual literality. However, the analysis of Tweets per organization reveals a much larger variance. At the extreme poles, while some NGOs (like Greenpeace Youth) make extensive use of the medium’s potential for conceptual orality, some MNCs (like Deutsche Börse) almost entirely adhere to conceptual literality. In other words, these MNCs promote a classical one-way model of communication and fail to make use of the dialogue-like qualities of the medium.

We analyzed a small number of organizations and we restricted our study to MNCs and NGOs in the German-speaking world. Furthermore, Twitter only allows for short messages with a maximum of 140 letters or signs. This, in turn, renders questionable whether the medium is suited to establish deliberative dialogues between MNCs and NGOs that are based on more elaborate arguments which can be expressed in the short format.

Our study addresses the lack of research regarding new possibilities for stakeholder communication in the age of social media. Moreover, the study methodologically contributes to the study of social media in the context of corporate communication by applying the scale of “conceptual orality or literality” to MNCs’ and NGOs’ Twitter usage.

Both the theory and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are foundational to the field of Business & Society (B&S). However, efforts to define and operationalize this construct have been undermined by definitional discord arising from the disparate sense-making assumptions and methods of competing North American and European research traditions. Scholars wedded to the North American research tradition have striven mightily to uncover “objective” evidence in support of the instrumental proposition that IF corporate executives were to invest more resources to enhance social and environmental performance, THEN the firm’s burnished brand image, reputation, and perceived legitimacy would elevate the firm’s long-term financial performance as well. However, the inconclusive statistical record has failed to move many corporate decision makers beyond the minimal social and environmental investments needed to create the impression of compliance with societal expectations. The proliferation of corporate scandals and the pattern of settling legal disputes without admitting guilt are also troubling. The muted impact of B&S research based on proving the instrumental proposition has prompted a new generation of European B&S scholars to explore the sense-making potential of the European research tradition, which seeks meaning and normative validity within a pluralist crucible of community discourse. This contested communicative space is filled with paradoxical tensions and contending stakeholder voices and narratives. With respect to CSR, this discursive sense-making process is animated by an aspiration toward constructing shared meanings that can guide a search for more collaborative approaches to addressing systemic challenges via stakeholder engagement and experiments in multisector collaborative problem-solving. Rather than try to scientifically “prove” a fact-based pre-existing condition, this approach embraces “an emergent and mediated form of strategic ambiguity” to keep open the possibility of “fulfilling often conflicting instrumental and social/ethical imperatives at the same time” (Guthey & Morsing, 2014, p. 556). This discourse-based search for shared meanings in support of a convergence of economic, social, and environmental values frames CSR as an aspirational cocreative process rather than as a pyramid of normative assertions loosely grounded on a search for validation in efforts to find correlations (or causation) within an assortment of “objective” facts. The discursive approach to constructing CSR also highlights the relevance of the emergence of institutional innovations that enable network interactions to address shared systemic problems. Ultimately, CSR may be expressed as a form of network governance seeking to assure the sustainable outcome of system health and vitality across micro-, meso-, and meta-levels of thought and action.

For many years the excellence theory (Grunig, 1992), with its ideal of two-way symmetrical communication, has been the dominant normative framework in public relations (PR). From an affordance perspective, social media seem to side perfectly with this promise of a more balanced power relation between participants in the communication loop. The purpose of this paper is to see if this promise was realized in the context of an internal communication practitioner’s social software use.

The authors used a critical case approach for the organizational ethnography. Therefore, the authors selected an IT company where the formal position of internal communication was being created. In this environment, the authors considered it “least likely” to find the unidirectional model of “push communication.” The authors used the network gatekeeping theory (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) to study technology usage patterns in the organization.

The analysis indicates that the internal communicator uses social software to interact with other employees. The authors additionally found these tools to affect the gatekeeping role of internal communication, altering the position’s ideological focus through its ability to shape the technological environment.

On a theoretical level, the network gatekeeping theory proved to be useful to study power relations inside organizations. On a practical level, the authors found themselves combining different data sources to grasp the complexity of organizational communication practices.

This research questions the widespread assumption that adoption of social software leads to excellence in PR. Additionally, the use of ethnographic methods in PR has been rare.

This paper aims to present results of a study which examined students’ collaborative information behavior (CIB) in comparison with behavioral patterns illustrated in Wilson’s (1996) model of information behavior.

A total of six groups of undergraduate students; four from Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) and two from Ardhi University (ARU) were purposively selected. Data were collected using semi participant observation, critical incident interviews and focus group discussion methods.

Results indicate that students’ CIB is mainly shaped by collaborative learning environment, learning tasks objectives and requirements. Despite its wider applicability in different domains and contexts, Wilson’s (1996) model is partially appropriate in modeling students’ group-based learning information behavioral activities. Person(s) in context and active and passive information seeking are aspects of the model which are observed to be relevant in students’ CIB.

The study has implications on teaching and learning practices in higher learning institutions.

The study provides new insights on how students exhibit different information behavioral patterns during collaborative learning. The study fills a gap on how solitary models of information behavior can be used to model students’ information behavior in team-based learning.

This study aims to analyze whether companies from six Latin American countries are encouraging dialogic communication on Facebook.

To do so, the paper studied the level of predisposition for interaction and the type of interaction achieved by companies on Facebook to produce an effective dialogic communication exchange and to generate conversation through different types of communication exchange between organizations and users. This research includes a specific analysis of the active presence, interactive attitude, interactive resources, responsiveness and conversation of 29,078 posts on 135 corporate fanpages of companies from six Latin American countries.

The results show that companies have a low interest in managing communication from a dialogic perspective on the social network, not only because a greater predisposition to interaction is needed, but also because the interaction generated is very low. Therefore, the paper identifies the need to review the communication strategy on social networks and to define a strategy aligned to the dialogic nature of the social network.

This research contributes to broadening the conceptual reflection on the evaluation of the dialogue in the digital context and aims to generate new methodological contributions to the evaluation of dialogic communication in an integrated way.

The purpose of this paper is to delineate lessons for business schools seeking re-accreditation and that face previous peer-review improvement expectations, strategic and operational imperatives similar to those faced at College of Business Administration (CBA) in University of the State Capital, all pseudonyms to mask their true identity.

Based on qualitative case study method, CBA’s Assessment Director, Gabriel Mouton, again a pseudonym, serves as the central protagonist whose interactive dialogical and technology-enabled change processes provide instructive practical lessons around the management of assurance of learning (AoL) for re-accreditation.

This paper offers a tripartite change focus in AoL for re-accreditation: balancing program goal integration with discipline differentiation, adopting an interactive dialogical shared governance process over a top-down or bottom-up process and technology-enabled straddling program depth and breadth.

This paper is unique to CBA’s path-historical institutional change experiences in the USA with rich-shared faculty governance that may need to be first developed before emulation in institutions where such a tradition is absent.

The experiences narrated in this paper offer universal lessons for business schools aspiring to continuously improve their AoL and, in the process, uphold program meaning and quality standards for stakeholder relevance and re-accreditation.

The experiences narrated in this paper offers lessons for tying program quality to external stakeholders’ expectations in the community, including for international business schools.

This paper advances an original tripartite change focus specifically relevant for business schools seeking re-accreditation and that are concurrently grappling with multiple strategic and operational imperatives.