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In recent decades, scholars and politicians have concerned themselves with how to more robustly engage people in public life. “Internet Utopians” have looked to various web technologies, including social media, to be helpful; even transformative. This article looks at extant research on which technologies governments in the US use, whether their use of technologies facilitates offline and online civic engagement, and the extent to which the government-citizen relationship has changed or may be changing. For Internet Utopians the picture is dismal, though not without some bright spots. This article ends with areas for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework for understanding how millennial social media use preferences can help public administrators change their delivery ethos to foster meaningful micro-encounters in digital spaces to then create public value. Ideally, these micro-encounters encourage public values creation from both the user (government) and audience side. Traditional government social media use often is one-way push without much care for dialogue and discussion. This revised framework shifts that thinking from the social media creation phase, allowing public administrators to use the tools in a more creative way.

The approach to the paper is theoretical, meaning the theoretical framework brings together lines of scholarship that have previously run parallel: millennial social media use preferences, government social media, and public values creation.

The theoretical framework offers propositions for future inquiry. The framework shows how traditional public sector social media use fails when it comes to creating meaningful spaces for interaction, which ideally is the purpose of social media.

The framework offered herein can help practitioners change the way they set up and even currently use social media tools to engage with the public. Though the framework is based on millennial social media preferences, any generation can benefit from a more open, inclusive platform that strives to foster public values such as collaboration, dialogue and transparency.

The theoretical framework generated for this paper brings together usually separate literatures to create a more holistic picture of social media use for public administrators.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a theory-driven intervention called VOICES that was developed to improve police-community relations. The intervention was designed based on principles derived from social psychological theories of intergroup contact and communication.

The authors discuss the theoretical basis for the intervention, as well as its development and implementation in the Santa Barbara Police Department. Based on this pilot testing, the authors provide preliminary evidence about its effectiveness using survey responses and qualitative feedback provided by participants.

Although the case study method used here does not allow for causal inferences about the effectiveness of the intervention, the limited evidence the authors present does suggest that participants found VOICES useful and it may have improved their perceptions of police. The next step will be to test this intervention using experimental or quasi-experimental methods that allow for causal inferences about effectiveness.

The paper shows how police can develop theory-driven interventions in an effort to improve trust between police and the public, including communities in which relationships with police have been historically strained. It also underscores how insights from the study of intergroup contact and communication can benefit policing.

This study examines shareholder and board motivations regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) to understand boards' stewardship approaches to environmental issues.

Using content analysis, the authors classify CSR motivations in all environmental shareholder proposals and board responses of Fortune 250 companies from 2013 to 2017 from do little (a shareholder primacy perspective) to do much (a stakeholder pluralism perspective). The authors calculate the motivational dissonance for each proposal-response pair (the Talk Gap) and use cluster analysis to observe evidence of board stewardship and subsequent environmental disclosure and performance (ED&P) changes.

Board interpretations of stewardship are not uniform, and they regularly extend to stakeholders beyond shareholders, most frequently including profit-oriented stakeholders (e.g. employees and customers). ED&P changes are highest when shareholders narrowly lead boards in CSR motivation and either request both action and information or information only. The authors observe weaker ED&P changes when shareholders request action and the dissonance between shareholders and boards is larger. When shareholders are motivated to do little for CSR, ED&P changes are weak, even when boards express more pluralistic motivations.

The results show the important role that boards play in CSR and may aid activist shareholders in determining how best to generate change in corporate CSR actions.

This study provides the first evidence of board stewardship at the proposal-response level. It measures shareholder and board CSR motivations, introduces the Talk Gap, and examines relationships among proposal characteristics, the Talk Gap, and subsequent ED&P change to better understand board stewardship of environmental issues.