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Queries as a pioneering measure of public attention on various social issues have elicited considerable scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is to address two fundamental questions, as follows: first, how do we identify niche queries that internet users search for on specific social issues?; and second, what are the measurement properties of queries data in gauging public attention on social issues?

The present study uses public attention on environmental issues in the USA as the empirical setting of research. An iterative framework is developed to identify niche queries to measure public attention on environmental issues. The measurement properties of queries data are assessed by comparing the dynamics of public attention on environmental issues captured by queries data with that measured by the “most important problem” (MIP) question in Gallup opinion polls.

A list of 39 niche queries that internet users search for on environmental issues is identified. The dynamics of public attention on environmental issues determined by the search trends of these 39 queries is found to positively correlate with that measured by Gallup MIP polls, whereas both dynamics can forecast each other well in a 12-month time frame.

The findings of the study possess methodological and practical implications. The study shows that queries data are complementary to, rather than substitutes of, public opinion polls in measuring public attention on environmental issues. The iterative framework developed in the study can be applied in future studies to help researchers identify valid queries to measure public attention on other social issues, as it can minimize researchers’ subjective biases in selecting search queries. Policymakers and environmentalists can utilize our approach to monitor the status of public attention on environmental issues and implement campaigns to mobilize favorable public opinion when the decline of public attention is predicted by the trends of web search queries.

This study applied eye-tracking techniques and questionnaires within the framework of the Stimulus-Organism-Response Model (SOR) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), to investigate the influencing factors of the public acceptance of 5G base stations.

This study used a combination of eye-tracking experiments and questionnaires. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

(1) The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) could be used to explain the effects on public acceptance of 5G base stations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public's perceived usefulness and ease of use of 5G base stations positively affects public acceptance of 5G base stations. (2) The public's perceived risk of 5G base stations has a negative influence on the public acceptance of 5G base stations. (3) The public's visual attention to the different valence information about 5G base stations positively impacts the perceived ease of use while having negative impacts on perceived risk. (4) Visual attention to various valence information of 5G base stations can indirectly influence public acceptance through the perceived risk.

Applying the SOR and TAM to data obtained from eye-tracking experiments and questionnaires, this study analyzed the factors and mechanisms influencing public acceptance of 5G base stations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As demands on global water resources intensify, battles are emerging over water ownership and governance. Evidence to support opposing views is scarce, however, especially with respect to the impact of ownership on water quality. Using a data set of 168,823 municipal water systems in the United States from 2010 to 2014, we find evidence that stakeholder attention moderates the effect of ownership on compliance with drinking water quality standards. Private systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with system size, consistent with greater social movement pressure, while public systems’ compliance improves more rapidly with local educational attainment, consistent with greater responsiveness to stakeholder attention and concern.

This study examines the social and environmental disclosures of BHP Ltd (one of the largest Australian companies) from 1983 to 1997 to ascertain the extent and type of annual report social and environmental disclosures over the period, and whether such disclosures can be explained by the concepts of a social contract and legitimacy theory. This research is also motivated by the opportunity to compare and contrast results with those of Guthrie and Parker, in whose study the social and environmental disclosures made by BHP Ltd were also the focus of analysis. In testing the relationship between community concern for particular social and environmental issues (as measured by the extent of media attention), and BHP’s annual report disclosures on the same issues, significant positive correlations were obtained for the general themes of environment and human resources as well as for various sub‐issues within these, and other, themes. Additional testing also supported the view that management release positive social and environmental information in response to unfavourable media attention. Such results lend support to legitimation motives for a company’s social and environmental disclosures. A trend in providing greater social and environmental information in the annual report of BHP in recent years, and its variable pattern, was also evidenced.

In this article, managerial competencies are derived from observations of public managers in action. Based on institutional theory, it is assumed that public managers are competent when they know how to play the game of public management and how to apply the rules of the game. This assumption is legitimated by the use of the concept of ambiguity, which underscores the fuzzy, contested and equivocal nature of real life policy issues. When issues are fuzzy and equivocal, multiple ways of behaving are thinkable, so public managers will not do what is “best”, but what is considered to be “appropriate”. In a study of 12 public managers in action, it was observed how they allocated their attention amid different kinds of ambiguity which included unstable issue linkages, unclear impacts, continuous contestation and unpredictable exposure. Individual public managers handled these conditions by being able to do three things: they interpreted signals and events; institutionalized issues by creating issue labels, meetings, meeting items and texts and by establishing political back up; and they produced appropriate texts, in time, in order to take away unnecessary “heat”.

Multiple topics often exist on social media platforms that compete for users' attention. To explore how users’ attention transfers in the context of multitopic competition can help us understand the development pattern of the public attention.

This study proposes the prediction model for the attention transfer behavior of social media users in the context of multitopic competition and reveals the important influencing factors of users' attention transfer. Microblogging features are selected from the dimensions of users, time, topics and competitiveness. The microblogging posts on eight topic categories from Sina Weibo, the most popular microblogging platform in China, are used for empirical analysis. A novel indicator named transfer tendency of a feature value is proposed to identify the important factors for attention transfer.

The accuracy of the prediction model based on Light GBM reaches 91%. It is found that user features are the most important for the attention transfer of microblogging users among all the features. The conditions of attention transfer in all aspects are also revealed.

The findings can help governments and enterprises understand the competition mechanism among multiple topics and improve their ability to cope with public opinions in the complex environment.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand agenda setting by international human rights organizations in the online environment and at the same time contribute to agenda‐setting theory. The role of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in the area of human rights is clarified, and agenda setting and related concepts are discussed.

The study focuses on how attention is drawn to human rights issues in online communication by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International. A content analysis of online forums of HRW and Amnesty International was conducted by monitoring their web sites and Facebook and Twitter pages over a period of three months. In addition, two expert interviews with representatives of Amnesty Finland were conducted to better understand how the organization's online communication activities relate to its policies in drawing attention to human rights.

Based on this study, drawing attention to human rights issues is a goal that leads to active online communication. NGOs aim at attracting attention to their issues online by initiating a dialogue via online forums and motivating the public to participate in activities that may influence the media and the political agenda. The existing agenda‐setting research tends to emphasize the role of journalists in setting the public agenda, and mentions NGOs primarily as a source for journalists and as a political player. The online environment shows, however, that these NGOs mostly aim at setting the public agenda to create social change, while the media and political agenda are also not forgotten.

This study suggests that the interdependence of the media, public and political agendas is more complex than has thus far been considered in agenda‐setting theory, especially in the current online environment. It investigates online agenda setting by two international NGOs, but does not discuss the role of the media or the public at large in their relationship with these NGOs. As this study has a limited time frame, a content analysis over a longer period and interviews with representatives of a wider variety of NGOs could be a next step. Future research could also compare the online communication of NGOs with that of profit organisations.

The findings show how agenda setting is supported by intricate multi‐platform activities in the present‐day online environment by the organizations studied in order to initiate a dialogue on societal issues. This suggests that in the online environment, the media, public and political agendas are becoming increasingly interrelated and within this triangle the public agenda seems to be gaining further in importance.

The impact that NGOs have on today's society is growing, and hence studying their online agenda setting is valuable from the perspective of corporate communication. International NGOs early on recognised the value of online communication.

The paper explores how the implementation of performance budgeting unfolds public managers' attention and responses to competing accountability demands over time.

This is a longitudinal study of one Russian municipality's implementation of PB under central government pressures during 2013–2017. Using triangulation of 25 interviews, documentary analysis and field observations, we employed institutional logics to guide the study.

The paper demonstrates the dynamic properties of PB construction under competing accountability demands via the “creative distraction” metaphor. PB was a “distraction” mechanism, which, on one hand, strengthened external accountability, while, on the other, distracting the municipality from internal municipal demands. Nevertheless, this “distraction” was also “creative,” as it produced proactive responses to competing accountability demands and creative effects over time. Specifically, PB also led to elements of creative PB negotiations between departments when managers started cooperating with redirecting the irrelevant constraints of performance information in budgeting into necessary manipulations for municipal survival. The demonstrated “creative distraction” is explained by the changing institutional logics of public managers supplemented by a set of individual factors.

The paper responds to the recent calls to study PB practice under several accountability demands over time. In this regard, we show the value of public managers' existing institutional logics as they shape PB's capacity to balance competing accountability demands. As we revealed, this capacity can be limited, due to possible misalignment between managers' attention toward “what to give an account for” during budget formation (input orientation driven by OPA logic) and “what is demanded” with the introduction of PB (output orientation driven by NPM logic). Yet, the elements of proactive managerial responses are still evident over time, explained by a set of individual factors within the presented case, namely: learning NPM logic, strengthened informal relationships and a common saturation point reflected by managers.

The Orphan Drug Act has provided the pharmaceutical industry with incentives to research and develop drugs for orphan diseases: rare diseases with little profit potential. It is considered very successful legislation by legal scholars, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and orphan drug activists. The policy process of the Act provides an important model of the policy process for future incentive-based pharmaceutical legislation. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the important incentives of the Act and the historical events leading up to the Act. The paper applies three different theoretical models of the public policy process to understand the emergence of the Orphan Drug Act: Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Model, the Advocacy Coalition Framework, and Social Constructionism Theory. The paper then synthesizes the public policy process lessons from each perspective and provides four recommendations for other social activists seeking to propel incentive-based pharmaceutical legislation for under-researched diseases.

The author analyzes the history of the Orphan Drug Act based on publicly available scholarly research, government documents, and interest group publications. The author then applies three public policy theories to the history of the Orphan Drug Act to explain the emergence of the Act and to extract policy process lessons for future disease activists.

Regardless of which theoretical perspective the Orphan Drug Act is analyzed from, some common themes of the policy process emerge. First, focussing events are instrumental in capturing the public’s sympathy and Congress’s attention. Second, in its activities and proposed legislation, a coalition should provide a role for all relevant and important actors. Third, the target groups of the legislation were construed positively, increasing the pressure for Congressmen to pass some kind of bill. Finally, the proper construction of “the problem” is instrumental to passing effective legislation as a “solution.”

The Orphan Drug Act is widely considered successful incentive-based pharmaceutical legislation. However, because it was originally passed in 1983 and has not had public attention since the early 1990s (when it was amended), it has rarely been written about in recent years. However, its lessons are still highly relevant to policy activists, especially disease activists. Furthermore, existing articles focus on the impact of the legislation and ways to amend it, rather than on the passage of the Act.

Visibility in the media is considered important for organizations, as it is alleged to affect their reputation, public legitimacy, and stakeholder relations. Strategies for media relations often discern corporations, public organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The media attention for those organizations is, however, often studied in isolation. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of media positioning to compare media coverage for corporations, public organizations, and NGOs.

A quantitative content analysis of the media coverage of 61 Dutch organizations was conducted. The comparison focused on three aspects of media positioning: prominence, context, and evaluation.

Public organizations and corporations were most similar, whereas corporations and NGOs differed most strongly in their media positioning. Corporations appeared most prominently in the media. While corporations and public organizations were more often related to organizational issues, NGOs were more often linked to substantial issues and received more positive coverage.

Insight into the content, amount, and tone of organizational media coverage is crucial for the formulation of public relations strategies by corporate communication professionals. The analysis shows whether and how the prominence, context, and evaluation differs among corporations, public organizations, and NGOs. The findings shed light on institutional factors that affect the visibility of different types of organizations, thus enabling future scholars in the field of visibility analyses in corporate communication to refine theories on drivers and characteristics of media coverage regarding different types of organizations.