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The modern corporation is evaluated by many measures that go beyond profit, which was the emphasis for years previously. Today’s corporation is weighed against expectations of many stakeholders, including not just customers but employees, investors, the government and even the public at large with no discernible financial or other tie to a company. As such, corporate boards necessarily must be concerned with more than financial performance, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the increasing emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. Given that public relations scholars and practitioners have long been concerned with stakeholder relationships, social responsibility and other non-financial indicators, it would make sense that public relations has a more obvious presence on corporate boards.

This study examined the 25 companies in the Fortune Modern Board 25 to determine how many board members had a background or expertise in public relations that would contribute to the leadership necessary for the concerns of the modern corporation, and whether the boards had a committee designated to public relations or related functions.

Results show that there are few corporate boards that have public relations represented prominently in either their members or committees. The same is true for executive leadership teams. Public relations or communications executives do appear to play some role in ESG, CSR and DEI reporting, but often there are staff members with those specific titles and roles.

The study was limited to 25 corporations on a Forbes list that ranked them as best in communicating ESG, CSR and DEI. The method examined publicly available literature which was revealing to the research questions, but more could be learned by interview or survey with CCOs.

The study shows the current presence of public relations capacity in terms of members of corporate boards, corporate committees and among the C-suite is not significant. Also, rather than PR as a function owning modern concerns of DEI, ESG and CSR, there are professionals with specific expertise in those areas who are responsible for those corporate issues.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), ESG (environmental, social, governance) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) have recently been stressed as important for corporations to measure and report. The role of the public relations profession in managing and/or communicating in these areas is important to consider in terms of public expectations and satisfaction of communication on these subjects.

This paper is unique in integrating public relations theory and practice with board theory and the current management concerns with ESG, CSR and DEI. Little if any previous research has considered which professions are in charge of communicating on these concerns.

This paper investigates the effect of state-society relations on the industrially-related growth paths of developed countries.

It introduces a novel theoretical framework, the state-business-labor relations (SBLR) framework, where four main actors are identified: the state, big businesspersons or tycoons, owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) or Entrepreneurs and labor. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the studied actors. The paper then investigates how these SBLR modes, through adopting various policies targeting the industrial sector, lead to different growth paths. Rather than focusing only on economic growth, this research regards a growth path as a matrix of the performance in long-run growth and equality of distribution.

Using regression analysis and statistical data, the results suggest that the Co-Balanced mode, having higher levels of coordination and lower favoritism, leads to the best growth path among the four introduced modes, especially with its emphasis on high levels of venture capital availability and easiness of starting business. while the Lib-Capture mode, characterized by lower coordination and higher favoritism, seems to have the worst growth path and the best implemented policy for this mode is suggested to be high profit taxes that seem to counter the negative impact of the existing high levels of favoritism.

Despite the important findings that this research has reached, this paper is mainly meant to open a further investigation into this topic and open this dimension that the research on VoC and political economy have under-researched. A deeper investigation of SBLR typologies that could only be possible by having richer datasets with more data on coordination for the whole world, rather than only the advanced economies, would further our understanding of the dynamics that shape the growth paths of different countries of the world.

To realize the best industrial growth path, fighting favoritism should be an important objective. The negative impact of favoritism on innovation could not be disregarded in the eve of the fourth industrial revolution, where innovation is increasingly pivotal to future industrial development. Actively engaging societal groups in the policymaking process is important in addressing their concerns and balancing them at the same time. This should lead to the double benefit of formulating better policies that should foster growth as well as provide better distribution of this growth. High levels of coordination should help in realizing this objective. Yet, this could only be possible if societal groups are free to associate and aggregate their power and when there are means of preventing one actor from gaining more favorite treatment and exclusive influence over policymakers. The presence of both powerful and broadly represented business associations and labor unions and the existence of a government interested in coordinating their efforts-rather than letting itself be controlled by one group at the expense of the others-should help in the realization of the best growth path. Thus, institutional reform that empowers societal groups and enables them to defend their interests as well as fights all forms of corruption should lead to the realization of a more prosperous and equitable industrial development, with the “re-industrialization” of the developed world being no exception. The technological and social challenges of intensive automation and digitalization accompanying the fourth industrial revolution make the envisaged institutional reform more urgent.

This paper is introducing a novel theoretical framework for studying the effect of state-society relations, particularly SBLR, on the industrial growth paths of developed countries. It integrates three important bodies of literature in order to build a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of state-society relations and their economic consequences. These are the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC), State-Business Relations (SBR) and Industrial Relations. The SBLR framework differentiates between tycoons and entrepreneurs, an important distinction that often goes unnoticed. Different SBLR categories or modes are introduced, depending on levels of coordination and power relations between the actors. It is proposed in this research that the effect on growth paths goes beyond the simple dichotomy between CMEs and LMEs usually present in the literature of VoC and that power relations provide an essential complementary dimension in explaining this causality.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.

Fake news stories have become a central element of crises that corporate public relations practitioners have confronted. Whether such stories are rumors, outright lies or deliberate attempts to discredit corporations, they have the same impact and require specific strategies for public relations practitioners to effectively respond. The purpose of this study is to uncover strategies to manage crises that arise from fake news and if and how these strategies differ for other corporate crises.

In this multi-method study of 21 in-depth interviews and a 8-person focus group with senior-level corporate public relations practitioners, authors explored decision-making strategies for responding to fake news crises. Transcripts of interviews and the focus group were thematically analyzed.

Results reveal insights regarding how public relations practitioners determine if and when to respond to fake news crises in corporations; what response strategies public relations practitioners have the autonomy to employ for fake news crises in corporations, and how public relations practitioners control media narratives during fake news crises in corporations.

The findings guide public relations practitioners to craft an autonomous decision-making process and effective online listening strategies—establishing a watchful waiting approach—and determine if the fake news issue is a passing moment or movement swirling into a crisis.

Few studies have examined the perspectives of crisis communication experts about minimizing and managing fake news crises. The study identifies opportunities for future research focused on crises originating from fake news and disinformation.

The practice of public relations (PR) is shaped by the ‘life world’ of the professionals; moreover, both the experiences of the professionals and societal changes shape the profession in a particular area (Hodges, 2006). Women have always played an important part in the development of PR as a profession and academic field in Turkey. Since PR Association of Turkey was established in 1972, five out of eight presidents have been women, and most of the members are also female. Female PR practitioners represent 70% of the total workforce of PR sector in Turkey, and most of the communication agencies are led by female entrepreneurs.

However, research on women' positions and their multiple roles in PR in Turkey are limited.

This chapter uses a qualitative study with 27 in-depth one-on-one interviews conducted in order to analyse female PR practitioners' experiences related to (1) the start of their careers, (2) their career experiences, (3) their evaluation of the profession, and lastly (4) their career goals. The interviewees included agency owners, managers, deputy general managers and group directors.

The research aimed to discover the female PR professional experience in respect of the difficulties they face in their practice and everyday life, advantages and/or disadvantages of being a female PR professional in Turkey and the ways women balanced their career and family duties.

What are the academic experiences of senior professors in the field of public relations (PR) at the Brazilian universities? This chapter proposes the advance of knowledge on the theoretical framework of contemporary liberal feminism by refining the previous theoretical and methodological publications. This theoretical lens prevails in earlier works, with empirical studies grounded in industry and corporate environments – mainly done by researchers from the United Kingdom, North America and Scandinavia, while PR feminist postmodernism appears in European literature – all scarce in Brazil and Global South (Latin America and African nations). Moreover, studies applying female or male PR scholars in university settings are rare in national and international literature. Hence, we gathered data and analysed narratives from seven senior female PR professors from Brazil, using an interpretative qualitative approach. Thus, this chapter about the female PR academic experiences and everyday practices highlights the starting point for an onto-epistemological discussion to understand the liberal feminist educational-based context in a Latin American country. Henceforth, two conceptual-practical dimensions – feminist PR competence and feminist PR performance – along with three methodological recommendations are presented for enhancing the contemporary liberal feminism theme as a robust research domain in PR and Strategic Communication agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to examine US public relations professionals' perceptions of the benefits and challenges associated with the concept of moral entrepreneurship, defined as the purposeful process of changing or creating new institutionalized ethical norms. This study argues that the concept of moral entrepreneurship provides organizations with a potentially valuable framework to actively recognize societal pressures and problems and act accordingly to better the environment in which the organization resides and operates.

This exploratory study uses purposive in-depth interviews with 25 diverse public relations professionals, who represented communication firms, in-house public relations departments, higher education, nonprofits and government.

Respondents assigned a high value to the concept of moral entrepreneurship: In addition to its being viewed as the right thing to do, they recognized its practice as a way to help organizations recruit and retain employee talent and improve stakeholder trust. However, based on the interviews, organizational leadership is the primary initiator of ethical changes; therefore, without a seat at the management table, practitioners lack the influence to initiate such new organizational directions and take on the role of moral entrepreneurs only when directed to do so by their superiors. Barriers to adopting a moral entrepreneurship approach included a limited budget and shortage of staff, employees' resistance to change, fear of failure, poor leadership and a politically polarized workplace.

Practice implications include considerations for furthering moral entrepreneurship in organizations.

This study is the first to explore the applicability of the concept of moral entrepreneurship in public relations. The paper underscores the need for further discussion around novel approaches to ethics in public relations that go beyond simple compliance with professional codes and industry standards and that help organizations lead societal change.

Despite the growing research interest in gender diversity, the presence of female executives and organizational outcomes, the relationship between female executives and employment relations outcomes remains under-researched. This study aims to examine the potential relationship between female executives and employment relations outcomes, with the gender gap as a focus.

A cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from 2,682 workers from 119 manufacturing firms in Guangdong Province, southern China.

Results show that firms with female executives are more likely to comply with labor laws and promote staff development. The association between female executives and promotion opportunities is stronger for female employees than for male employees. However, there is no significant association between female executives and employee salaries.

This research contributes to employment relations literature and extends the application of social role theory to studies of employment relations in particular societal contexts. This study also provides possible boundary conditions for the existence of queen bee behavior by using data from Chinese factories.

The problem statement is how to identify and analyze the corporate risks involved in the relationships with external agents involved in the open product innovation process (OPIP)? Seeking to extend this investigation, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the enterprise risks identified in corporate relations with external agents of the OPIP. This study proposes the systematization of the process of identification and analysis of the enterprise risks involved in the process of open product innovation.

The case explored in this study is the OPIP of Volkswagen do Brasil (VWB), one of the most important subsidiaries of the Volkswagen Group. Criteria were selected to both assessing corporate relations with external agents of the open innovation of VWB and analyzing the enterprise risks identified in these relations. Data collection included interviews with management-level professionals engaged in the OPIP activities and technical visits to a VWB’s industrial plant.

Results demonstrate that the enterprise risks mostly affecting the OPIP have a critical impact on the manufacturing process and initial sales of the new product.

The originality of the study focuses on the proposal of a systematization of how to identify and analyze the corporate risks involved in the process of open product innovation. The study focuses on the theoretical frontier on the open innovation and enterprise risk management (ERM) in the open innovation process.