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In April 2001, deadlocked labour negotiations brought all public education in Hawaii to a standstill. This paper reviews theoretical models of public relations and criticism of these models in terms of conflict theory. A case study of the University of Hawaii (UH) faculty strike, including findings from in‐depth interviews with PR professionals, chief negotiators and the press is presented. Although PR models fit well in discussing relationships between the parties and their constituents, findings suggest that PR techniques often were proscribed by the circumstances of collective bargaining, and public relations, as it has been conceptualised in both theory and layman’s terms, was used as an alternative to negotiations between opposing parties rather than a means to resolving the conflict.

In the midst of practitioners’ increasing use of social media analytics (SMA) in guiding public relations (PR) strategy, this paper aims to present the capabilities and limitations of these tools and offers suggestions on how to best use them to gain research-based insights.

This review assesses the capabilities and limitations of SMA tools based on industry reports and research articles on trends in PR and SMA.

The strengths of SMA tools lie in their capability to gather and aggregate a large quantity of real-time social media data, use algorithms to analyze the data and present the results in ways meaningful to organizations and understand networks of issues and publics. However, there are also challenges, including the increasing restricted access to social media data, the increased use of bots, skewing social conversations in the public sphere, the lack of capability to analyze certain types of data, such as visual data and the discrepancy between data collected on social media and through other methods.

This review suggests that PR professionals acknowledge the capabilities and limitations of SMA tools when using them to inform strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to extend current theories in crisis communication, by developing a more systemic approach to understanding the role of emotions in crises and the strategies organizations can use to respond. The authors' integrated crisis mapping (ICM) model is premised on a public‐based, emotion‐driven perspective where different crises are mapped on two continua, the organization's engagement in the crisis and primary public's coping strategy.

Content analysis was used to analyze 259 stories in US mainstream newspaper covering five different crisis cases.

The initial test suggests theoretical rigor. It found that publics involved in crises pertaining to reputational damage, technological breakdown, industrial matters, labor unrest, and regulation/legislation, are likely to feel anxious, angry, and sad. At the same time, they are likely to engage in conative coping.

Understanding publics' emotions in crisis is a rarely studied area. This model is arguably the first to suggest a framework of emotions. This study is the first of a series of tests to generate what Yin termed “analytic generalization” for the ICM model.

Every unexpected and sudden event (crisis) operates as a threat for an organization's reputation. British Petroleum (BP) came face to face with a crisis on 20 April 2010 when an explosion in the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig caused a huge oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico. The present case study aims to describe BP's serious communication mistakes with its stakeholders managing a serious hit to BP's reputation.

The present case study attempts to provide a detailed outline of BP's communication failures by conducting in-depth investigation of secondary data (newspapers, audiovisual material, social network sites).

BP's crisis communication was a weak link in its crisis management strategy. The lessons to learn are various, both for practitioners and researchers. Practitioners should learn from the leadership, culture and public relations (PR) mistakes made by BP and avoid them in a crisis of their organisation. They should select those strategies that foster their organization's strengths and correct its weaknesses in order to take advantage of external opportunities and counter external threats.

This study could be a valuable asset in communication literature, since BP's PR strategies during this oil spill have not been studied extensively. The communications solutions BP took during the crisis were examined and certain strategies BP should have followed in order to avoid its failed PR plan are suggested, which can help both practitioners and researchers to learn from BP's mistakes and give more attention to communication strategies, which are of critical essence to all crises.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the developing and emerging economies as a multifaceted challenge from viewpoint of the 10 keys ‘for’ and ‘against’ PPPs: feasibility; planning; optimization; modernization and development; financing; project delivery; project operation; supervision; user satisfaction and accounting issues. The conceptual model and the reasons were formulated by the authors some 10 years ago, based on the literature and case-study reviews. Relevance of those reasons was verified in practice. The knowledge and critical perspective on the above-stated reasons are relevant for the implementation of PPP projects in any national economy – developed, emerging or developing, but it is quintessential for the implementation of PPPs in the economies that are at the early stage of implementation of PPPs. Although for the identification of the above-stated reasons, wide comparative literature and case-studies review was conducted, the reasons were verified in practice in Slovenia only. Slovenia is considered as one of the most advanced transition countries of Central Europe and a developed economy. This chapter can improve public policy, teaching, learning and practice of PPP implementation in developing and emerging economies. The value of this chapter is in the approach which goes beyond the usual defending or renouncing of PPPs. This chapter also clearly identifies the importance of a sincere motive for the implementation of PPPs by the government as a prerequisite for the successful implementation of PPPs.

Despite the fact that recent anthropological interest in infrastructure has done much to illuminate the infrastructure asset as an assemblage of actors, technologies and ideas, an interdisciplinary approach is required to unpack how the infrastructure project comes together as an assemblage and to define the role that financial technologies and discourses play in shaping it. Here, an interdisciplinary approach is applied to a novel infrastructure asset, London's Thames Tideway Tunnel, in order to show how multiple actors and visions of the world are brought together to make the infrastructure asset come to fruition. The paper concludes that this interdisciplinary approach to infrastructure can allow us to keep multiple sides of the infrastructure project in sight simultaneously. This includes both the creation of a rhetorical vision and spectacle around the asset, and the underlying financial arrangements that bind it together. If we do so, we can understand how new infrastructural forms utilise particular financial technologies and ideas to change the relationship between the public and the private, and between consumers and providers, and act towards the creation of a new ‘public good’ that normalises private provision.

Introduction: Nowadays, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities carried out by companies to create a positive corporate image and a good reputation on target audiences have lost their credibility. Target audiences perceive these companies as “doing as if they are doing” CSR activities. It is effective for companies to carry out works that put them in a good light, cover the back of the showcase, make their ways appealing, cover some facts, polish their image, and carry out works that do not aim to create value or benefit.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to reveal that the intellectual company model is an alternative model to CSR studies.

Methodology: This study consists of two parts. The first part will focus on CSR understanding and will be handled with a critical perspective; the second part will discuss, through a theoretical framework, the concept of the intellectual company for sustainable economic, environmental and social development and the intellectual company will be examined.

Findings: The results of the study are as follows. (i) It was determined that the intellectual company made sustainable contributions on economic, social, and environmental issues. (ii) Sustainability is central to the intellectual company’s work on social and environmental issues. The intellectual company model is an alternative model to CSR studies. The intellectual company will make more positive contributions to social and environmental issues as it focuses on sustainability. This will affect consumer trust positively and increase brand loyalty.

Teams with a deep understanding of how their roles serve the overall vision of the organisation can transition smoothly from an exclusively in-person office into a working from home (WFH) set-up, even when this needs to happen suddenly and in a disruptive external environment. At the same time, WFH, with all the flexibility that it does offer, does not appear to sufficiently allow for the informal levels of communication and ongoing iterative feedback required by team members to sustain shared leadership and actively co-shape strategy.

Shared leadership is achieved and maintained through the type of interaction between team members and the leader. In this case study, the team nurtures shared leadership and the leader demonstrates a readiness for it by effectively coordinating and leveraging networked synergies between various stakeholders as well as guiding and translating knowledge sharing and creation into informed actionable strategy with the team. The leader, on the one hand, is an integrated member of the team nurturing it and sharing leadership with it and, on the other hand, embraces a cockpit function which navigates this ‘sharedness’ with all relevant stakeholders.

Whilst research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is reaching new territories, the extent to which such literature manifests itself in developing countries is yet to be fully understood. To that end, this study aims to investigate the understanding, evolution and practice of CSR in Vietnam.

A systematic review of the current literature in the recent past (2000–2020) has been embraced in this research. By analysing a total of 143 articles, the authors demonstrate that there has been visible growth in published articles related to CSR in Vietnam over the past 21 years.

The authors demonstrate that CSR research in Vietnam has significantly grown in the recent past. The results highlight the in-depth distribution of publications by year, journal, industry, nature and focus of CSR research in the country.

This study is not only the first to provide an enhanced overview of the current state of CSR knowledge in the country but also sets out directions within the CSR research agenda related to Vietnam and potentially other emerging and developing countries.