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Organizations are increasingly confronted with legitimacy threats related to the perceived social costs of their business activities. Despite a significant amount of research on the responses of individual organizations, surprisingly limited attention has been paid to the collective activities firms may engage to address such issues. In this paper, we use institutional theory as a lens for an exploratory case study of Issue-Based Industry Collective (IBIC) action in the alcohol industry. Our findings identify a new organizational form, the IBIC and inspire new research avenues at the intersection of business collective action, social issues, and institutional theory.

This paper examines the relevance of the wicked problem continuum, particularly the emergence of super wicked challenges for public leadership researchers. Contemporary theorizing on public leadership adequately deals with tame challenges, struggles with wicked problems and remains in the dark with regards to the implications of super wicked problems

The wicked problem continuum provides a typology or set of dilemmas running from tame to wicked through to super wicked problems. These different problem types are treated as if they were on a three-zone continuum in which the difficulty of solving or substantially reducing the problem varies from relatively low to very high.

We delineate the three-problem contexts in the wicked problem continuum and discuss the ideal type of organization thriving in each zone. We then posit two opposing wicked problem interpretations-taming and wilding- for those interested in public leadership. Taming calls for prudent, results-oriented leaders employing tried and tested practices. Wilding demands leaders who test the status quo by seeking alternatives.

On the global leadership agenda, wilding problems—those calling attention to the super wicked zone—are escalating. Despite this, public leaders' training lacks a framework for making sense of these urgent and publicly contentious super wicked problems.

Public policy researchers are beginning to direct attention to super wicked problems such as climate change, and pandemics. This work introduces the wicked problem continuum and demonstrates its pertinence for researchers of public leadership.

This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.

This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls.

The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions.

The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability.

The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

Public administration as an aspect of governmental activity has existed as long as political systems have been functioning and trying to achieve program objectives set by the political decision-makers. Public administration as a field of systematic study is much more recent. Advisers to rulers and commentators on the workings of government have recorded their observations from time to time in sources as varied as Kautilya's Arthasastra in ancient India, the Bible, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's The Prince, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cameralism, concerned with the systematic management of governmental affairs, became a specialty of German scholars in Western Europe. In the United States, such a development did not take place until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the publication in 1887 of Woodrow Wilson's famous essay, “The Study of Administration,” generally considered the starting point. Since that time, public administration has become a well-recognized area of specialized interest, either as a subfield of political science or as an academic discipline in its own right.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the environmental disclosure initiatives of Niko Resources Ltd – a Canada‐based multinational oil and gas company – following the two major environmental blowouts at a gas field in Bangladesh in 2005. As part of the examination, the authors particularly focus on whether Niko's disclosure strategy was associated with public concern pertaining to the blowouts.

The authors reviewed news articles about Niko's environmental incidents in Bangladesh and Niko's communication media, including annual reports, press releases and stand‐alone social responsibility report over the period 2004‐2007, to understand whether news media attention as proxy for public concern has an impact on Niko's disclosure practices in relation to the affected local community in Bangladesh.

The findings show that Niko did not provide any non‐financial environmental information within its annual reports and press releases as a part of its responsibility to the local community which was affected by the blowouts, but it did produce a stand‐alone report to address the issue. However, financial environmental disclosures, such as the environmental contingent liability disclosure, were adequately provided through annual reports to meet the regulatory requirements concerning environmental persecutions. The findings also suggest that Niko's non‐financial disclosure within a stand‐alone report was associated with the public pressures as measured by negative media coverage towards the Niko blowouts.

This paper concludes that the motive for Niko's non‐financial environmental disclosure, via a stand‐alone report, reflected survival considerations: the company's reaction did not suggest any real attempt to hold broader accountability for its activities in a developing country.

This is the first known paper that investigates a multinational company's disclosure behavior in relation to environmental incidents which occurred in a local community.

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has become a major public health emergency of global concern. Studying the Internet public opinion dissemination mechanism of public health emergencies is of great significance for creating a legalized network environment, and it is also helpful for managers to make scientific decisions when encountering Internet public opinion crisis.

Based on the analysis of the process of spreading the Internet public opinion in major epidemics, a dynamic model of the Internet public opinion spread system was constructed to study the interactive relationship among the public opinion events, network media, netizens and government and the spread of epidemic public opinion. The Shuanghuanglian event in COVID-19 in China was taken as a typical example to make simulation analysis.

Research results show three points: (1) the government credibility plays a decisive role in the spread of Internet public opinion; (2) it is the best time to intervene when Internet public opinion occurred at first time; (3) the management and control of social media are the key to public opinion governance. Besides, specific countermeasures are proposed to assist control of Internet public opinion dissemination.

The epidemic Internet public opinion risk evolution system is a complex nonlinear social system. The system dynamics model is used to carry out research to facilitate the analysis of the Internet public opinion propagation mechanism and explore the interrelationship of various factors.

Research into the emergence of a hype requires a mixed methods approach that takes into account both the evolution over time and mutual influences across different types of media. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodological approach to detect an emerging hype in online communications.

The paper combines Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time series modelling and semantic co-word networks, and this combination of methods provides a view on the emergence and development of a hype at the level of mutual influences across a heterogeneous set of newspaper and blog data. The subject scope of the paper is the climategate hype. The climategate hype was triggered by the online publication of a set of hacked e-mails belonging to climate researchers at the East Anglia University in November 2009.

The main findings show that the climategate hype was initiated in the blogs, and the newspapers were reacting to the blogs. At the level of semantics, the blogs and the newspapers framed the issue from opposite perspectives.

The combination of methods contributes theoretical insights to how blogs interact with more traditional media on hype generation and methodological insights to internet researchers investigating emergent online hypes. The method calls for further validation.

Investigating the emergence and evolution of a hype, and the interaction of the two media is relevant for journalists in becoming more reflexive in their practices and the cues from the outside world.

The paper is novel in its combination of the two specific methods, ARIMA time series modelling and co-word networks and its attempt to identify the media origins of a hype, and especially the interaction between blogs and newspapers.

A recent OECD report on labour disputes noted that there has been a considerable increase in strike activity in the public sector of a number of member countries in recent times. Moreover, it was noted that strikes have started to occur in the traditionally “quiet” parts of the public sector in various countries. There is little need to stress this point in the last few years as the strikes that are attracting attention throughout the world are virtually all in the public sector; witness, for example, the air traffic controllers' dispute in the United States, the campaign of selective industrial action by civil servants in Britain and the postal and telecommunications disputes in Australia in mid‐1981.

The recent Childhood Immunization Initiative of the Clinton Administration was a dramatic and ambitious policy response to what we will show is a case of significant management and implementation failure. Interpreted by the Administration as a policy failure, low rates of early childhood immunization met with an aggressive and targeted policy response which ultimately diverted attention away from significant evidence of fundamental problems of service delivery, infrastructure, and parental knowledge and behavior. Analyzes and seeks to evaluate the reasons for the poor fit between the diagnosis of the problem of existing childhood immunization policy and the ultimate policy prescription of the Clinton Administration which relies almost exclusively on reducing the price of vaccines.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.