Search results

However, the scale of corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation in Polish media organisations is diversified. The survey, which was conducted among the CEOs of some regional radio broadcast partnerships in Poland, indicates that only one of them has in fact accepted the CSR solutions. The majority of this group think there is no need to implement CSR because they consider it to be a duplication of the public media mission. Considering commercial media, all the biggest TV and radio stations apply CSR. The pressure is manifested by the fact that numerous media organisations – commercial and public ones – have accepted solutions of CSR. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To verify the hypotheses, a survey was conducted from January to June 2015, in 12 (out of 17) Polish regional radio stations (independent partnerships). The research was of quality character – each media organisation selected for the survey was a separate case study. To collect the required data, two research methods were applied: in-depth interviews with the radio station CEOs (N1-N12); analysis of organisation documents concerning the mission of public organisations. We assumed that an in-depth analysis of a fragment of the empirical material in the form of a case study comes as an element of universal experience, and it reflects the universe (Denzin and Lincoln, 2009).

The survey suggests that only one organisation implements CSR standards. Its CEO, however is mainly driven by business reasoning. He considers that “it is an excellent tool to improve the image of the organisation in the advertisement market” and “a good way to present a radio company as a reliable business partner”.

A critical attitude to CSR in media organisations has a double source: generally, CSR is not adequate to all organisations; CSR multiplies social functions of a media organisation, and a role which it plays in the society. It comes as an immanent feature of the way how a media organisation functions in its basic dimension. As presented above, the attempt to define specific elements, which allow us to analyse the level of “advance” characteristic for a media organisation, drives us to a following conclusion: communication and implementation of the CSR standards seems natural in the context of such activities of media companies as placing orders (relations with business partners, internal policy of employment, etc.), however, it only comes as a confirmation of such expectations from media organisations which are connected with maintenance of journalist standards.

As the survey of the CEOs of Polish public radio companies suggests, the problem of multiplying social responsibility of media refers, first of all, to public media. Majority of the executives considers CSR as duplication of fulfilling the public mission, and as some superfluous practice in public media.

Considering this situation, it is possible to state that the concept of CSR, first of all, results from the presence of media entities in the market, where they compete mainly for the attention of listeners and advertisers. The consumer-investor dimension of media operations also contributes to the perception of CSR as the operation which is apparently pro-social, however which truly aims at increasing the company value by the improvement of its image as goods and service provider.

The source of acceptance for public media is a strong belief in social value of honest and competent information reporting and its contextualisation. At the same time, however, a basic deteriorating factor of media legitimisation is their transformation into market-oriented economy. Commodification of media means constant pressure to increase the role of “business” rhetoric and “business” solutions. The pressure is manifested by the fact that numerous media organisations – commercial and public ones – have accepted solutions of CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to identify selected tools of external public relations (PR) employed by the public media in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to exemplify them with the activities of Radio Gdańsk in the years 2012-2015.

The opening section of the work is based on studies of the desk research type, i.e. analysis of the literature and industry data, plus exploration of the Radio Gdańsk website. The core part of the work was compiled based on primary research conducted under the quality method – a direct unstructured telephone interview held with a member of the Radio Gdańsk Supervisory Board. The interview concerned the activities of Radio Gdańsk in the years 2012-2015. The information acquired via telephone surveys has been supplemented with more written sources. The sources contained some detailed data without which the analysis of the subject matter would not have been possible. The authors of this study maintain that not only have the data acquired made the analysis possible but also that the paper ought to be treated only as a preliminary study with some interesting findings and a starting point for further analyses.

Reaching for actions of the CSR area carries tangible benefits also to the public media which consolidate their competitive edge thanks to the positive image of a socially engaged enterprise. Thus, using CSR tools, the public media are setting a model of a kind for others. Analysis of the Radio Gdańsk activity areas reveals that the broadcasters successfully employ the selected tools of external communication (external PR) which enable them to put in flesh the postulates of CSR and effectively create their image of a sensitive and socially engaged institution.

This study is based on an analysis of one of a dozen public radio stations and it has some interesting findings, which may be a starting point for further research into the subject. However, it gives the authors no answer as to whether other public media outlets in Poland implement CSR strategies, and what tools they apply in this respect. The authors think that the phenomenon deserves comprehensive and thorough research, which would help us broaden our knowledge of the problem. Yet another interesting aspect of the study, which is mentioned in the introduction, is the question whether (and if so – to what extent) the public media outlets implement CSR policies as part of their market strategy. The policies may after all be merely some intuitive attempts resulting from the general mission of such entities and unstable market situation, and in such cases the noble goals of CSR may be achieved solely by accident.

Using CSR tools, the public media are setting a model of a kind for others (i.e. commercial firms).

The assumptions of a CSR strategy can be found reflected in public media operations and become an action model of a kind for the management of commercial firms.

A negative framing of immigrants to stir populist sentiment is a widespread tactic repeatedly deployed by the British press. Following the accession of ten new and predominantly Eastern European member‐states to the European Union in 2004, this gambit was again utilised to provocatively portray migrant workers newly arriving in the United Kingdom as an external economic threat. The aim of this paper was to uncover the recurrent ways in which Polish migrants were emotively framed by the top daily British newspapers during this period of EU enlargement.

A bespoke collection of newspaper articles was assembled and examined using a corpus‐based discourse analysis. The analysis was subsequently triangulated with relevant responses to a series of public opinion surveys.

Results show that the British press conformed to classic media representations of migrants when referring to Poles in particular, by depicting them as an external economic threat “flooding” the country; in addition a novel stereotype of the “Polish plumber” was used to present them arriving to take the jobs of native manual labourers.

The study adds to the understanding of media attitudes towards new migrants in the UK, and demonstrates the utility of triangulated corpus‐based discourse analysis for those who seek to highlight systematic characterisations of migrants in the popular press.

The purpose of this paper is to find out how organizations communicate with their opponents during crises and later.

Qualitative research that is interviews with crisis communication professionals in Poland was conducted to explore their opinions, attitudes and practices toward opponents in crises, communication tools employed, methods of settling conflicts and ways of getting along with the former opponents later.

Communication and crisis managers provided in-depth insights on how they approach opponents during crises and later. Even though public relations professionals are aware that communicating with activist or hostile publics in times of turmoil is important, they pay more attention to internal publics and media. Senior executives often perceive media and journalists as crucial channels to reach out to different stakeholder groups during crises. Ongoing communication with opponents (or former opponents) – also after crises – mostly remains a high call for public relations professionals.

This paper contributes to corporate and crisis communication research by presenting how opponent publics are handled by communication professionals in crises. It shows that most organizations need to rethink their crisis strategies to include opponents in their relationship building, and to maintain these relationships with former opponents beyond the time of crisis.

Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezależna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

The purpose of this paper is to address the intensive spread of the English language in Central and Eastern Europe as an aspect of postsocialist transition.

The paper analyses the discourses and ideologies related to the spread of English in postsocialist Poland, drawing on insights from critical discourse analysis and language ideology. The empirical material discussed comprises newspaper articles dealing with the topic of language policy in Poland, with a focus on the media campaign, “battle for English”.

The paper finds that the spread of English is facilitated by powerful discourses propagating the knowledge of English together with the ideology of neo‐liberal economic and social transformation. The exploration of the discourses inherent in the story of the “battle for English” enables the links between the linguistic practices applied by individual actors and the ideologies conveyed by the discourses found in mainstream media to be made explicit.

An awareness of the mechanisms of discourse and ideology allows us to question both the drive behind and the social impact of the spread of English in Central and Eastern Europe.

The paper offers a novel theoretical and empirical contribution to the understanding on postsocialist transition.

The paper surveys selected standpoints in the Polish humanities that are visibly critical toward neoliberal assumptions and claims of economics. The resources used in the text are: Andrzej Szahaj’s philosophical postulates and assertions; Tadeusz Kowalik’s view; criticism and postulates of social economics articulated by the quarterly magazine Nowy Obywatel (The New Citizen). The purpose of this paper is to construct a possibly cohesive picture of this type of criticism by indicating important similarities between the approaches mentioned above, its strongest arguments, philosophical premises and political inclinations.

A conceptual synthesis and interpretation of theoretical standpoints and its philosophical premises, a comparative analysis of the text/content of the magazine (The New Citizen).

Each of the three standpoints discussed in the paper proves to be an interesting example of social economics. It is also symptomatic that they share a similar, critical attitude toward the way in which the transformation of the Polish economy from a socialist to a capitalist system had been carried out. The transformation is thereby interpreted as a process that is not accomplished at all from the point of view of the ideals of social justice and integrity.

The popularization of Polish normative views of economics taking into account the problem of social justice, and the possible transformation of the way in which economic problems are publicly understood in Poland.

The discussion of non-standard interpretations of Polish transformation and its effects that undermine and challenge neoliberal ideology in economics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of social media (including social networking technologies) on migration strategies and integration, focusing on the use of new technologies for information seeking and dissemination, as well as personal communication.

A total of 26 Polish nationals resident in Ireland were interviewed in 2008, using semi‐structured interviews.

Results indicated a significant use of new social media, especially social networking technologies based in Poland and largely used by Polish language speakers. The use of social networking technologies enabled “media rich” and resilient social groups to develop, founded on the latent monitoring of activities characteristic of face‐to‐face, geographically delimited communities. The resulting social groups incorporated friends and relations based in Poland, Ireland and throughout the world. These networks tended to minimize integration into Irish society, as most Polish nationals interacted only with other Polish people, whether resident in Ireland or elsewhere.

This research demonstrates that new technologies are having a significant impact on patterns of migration. New social media are changing the character of international migration, with an emphasis on mobility rather than assimilation. Where foreign nationals previously tended to integrate into the societies where they resided, migrants are now more likely to be peripatetic mobile workers. Furthermore, while these migrants often no longer live in physical ghettos, they now live in “virtual” ghettos or enclaves, as they use new technologies to create separate lives within the wider society in which they work and live.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a range of innovative (for public library performance measurement and impact assessment) methods and tools developed by country teams as part of the Global Libraries (GL) initiative. Short reports are provided on: a return on investment study, a simplified data processing system for library managers and an online reporting system for public libraries in Ukraine; a study of the public image of Polish libraries in print mass media, two approaches to sustainability of performance measurement and impact assessment in Romania, through tools to conduct pop-up surveys and use of agricultural subsidies support data, assessments of changes in public library managers’ planning efforts in Poland and of their perceptions of libraries and their own role, using Modified Delphi forecasting, in Lithuania, two ways of focussing on the world of public library users by engaging non-profit organizations in library research in Poland and conducting impact studies in virtual environments in Chile.

A range of methods and tools and their uses are described.

No specific research findings are reported.

All of these tools and methods have been (or are being) trialed in national public library contexts; some have been developed over several years.

Useful for people in other (non-GL) countries who may be contemplating public library evaluation at regional, national or local level or who are interested in performance measurement and impact evaluation.

This paper is part of a GL effort to share what participants have learnt about impact planning and assessment in public libraries with the wider international libraries community.

The impact planning and assessment program of GL has been the largest sustained international public library evaluation program so far attempted. This paper reports on the more innovative evaluation activities undertaken at country level through this program.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), in the form of corporate philanthropy or charity, has been practiced in the United States since the late 1800's (Sethi, 1977). Today's concept of CRS originated in 1953 with the publication of Bowen's book entitled “Social responsibilities of Businessmen”. In his book Bowen asked the question: “What responsibilities to society can business people be reasonably expected to assume?” At this time, the emphasis was placed on business people's social conscience, rather than on the company itself. Further on the academics became much more precise in defining the firms’ responsibilities. Carroll (1999) divided companies’ responsibilities into economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic. Lantos (2002) narrowed down CSR to ethical, altruistic, and strategic responsibility. According to Davis (1973, p. 312) CSR refers to a company's concern for “issues beyond the narrow economic, technical and legal requirements of the firm.”