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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.

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.

This study attempts to identify the drivers for change in Public Relations education and what assumptions are made about professional practice. The authors suggest signature pedagogy has the potential to deepen our understanding of the teaching and learning of Public Relations and what this means as the Public Relations curriculum adapts. The paper has theoretical and practical value. It forefronts the concept of signature pedagogy as a fresh way to look at Public Relations teaching and learning that can be developed.

This paper aims to explore the historical and contemporary context of teaching Public Relations within a university setting, how it has evolved and the assumptions that underpin it both nationally and internationally. Using a mixed methods approach, the paper investigates how the curriculum has changed since 2000, how it interacts with industry and how it reflects educational historical and contemporary frameworks. It also explores the assumptions on which Public Relations education was and is based and whether signature pedagogy is evidenced.

This study concludes that, from a signature pedagogy perspective, many current Public Relations curricula emphasise surface structures of learning. Deep structures, focusing on critical engagement and conceptual approaches to problem solving, are more variable, disconnected and contested. The data indicate the existence of an Anglo-American, skills-based approach to Public Relations knowledge, alongside international nuances around multi-culturalism. From a practical viewpoint, the paper contributes to how Public Relations programmes can be designed, taught and adapted in the future.

The paper evidences fully unique, primary research.

This study aims to investigate how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) perceive the benefits and obstacles with university cooperation for themselves and regional development, setting out from the personal relations the parts have formed.

A quantitative approach was adopted, using a sample of 336 Brazilian SMEs that had undertaken some cooperation with universities in the past years.

From structural equation modelling, results show that interpersonal relations interfere in the type of cooperation formed, these being a catalyst in formalizing the cooperation. These relations also interfere in the perception of barriers and benefits of cooperation for the firm.

The results are clearer in the firm domain and less so in the region, implying that university-SME cooperation does not yet present clearly disseminated benefits so that firms can be more aware of the results. The barriers to cooperation seem to be overcome by interpersonal relations but also by the contracts established since they were more evident in the informal type of cooperation.

This study provides more empirical evidence about these relations in a context of low socio-economic development, a topic which is still under-explored in the field of university-firm cooperation.

The paper aims to explore the role of union strategic influence on the adoption of High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) in organisations and examines how the effects of job security and then in turn the industrial relations climate, mediate this relationship in a serial manner.

The research analyses an original quantitative survey of union negotiators and representatives in 382 workplaces in England. The analysis employs structural equation modelling techniques to examine the relationships between union influence, job security, industrial relations climate and HPWS.

Union strategic influence has a positive effect on the take up of HPWS in unionised workplaces. Job security and the industrial relations climate demonstrate a serial mediation effect between union strategic influence and the take up of HPWS: union strategic influence has a positive effect on job security, which in turn positively impacts the industrial relations climate, thereby increasing the likelihood of the adoption of HPWS. The findings for the industrial relations climate are particularly strong.

Findings suggest that organisations will benefit from focussing on the development of positive industrial relations, where unions have genuine strategic influence, because this maximises the likelihood that HPWS can be adopted and sustained.

The paper provides a novel focus on the take up of HPWS within unionised workplaces. It focusses on the role of union strategic influence and the mediating effects of job security and the industrial relations climate, which are contextual factors that have been underexplored in the HPWS literature to date.

MITRE and the National Security Agency cooperatively developed and maintained a D3FEND knowledge graph (KG). It provides concepts as an entity from the cybersecurity countermeasure domain, such as dynamic, emulated and file analysis. Those entities are linked by applying relationships such as analyze, may_contains and encrypt. A fundamental challenge for collaborative designers is to encode knowledge and efficiently interrelate the cyber-domain facts generated daily. However, the designers manually update the graph contents with new or missing facts to enrich the knowledge. This paper aims to propose an automated approach to predict the missing facts using the link prediction task, leveraging embedding as representation learning.

D3FEND is available in the resource description framework (RDF) format. In the preprocessing step, the facts in RDF format converted to subject–predicate–object triplet format contain 5,967 entities and 98 relationship types. Progressive distance-based, bilinear and convolutional embedding models are applied to learn the embeddings of entities and relations. This study presents a link prediction task to infer missing facts using learned embeddings.

Experimental results show that the translational model performs well on high-rank results, whereas the bilinear model is superior in capturing the latent semantics of complex relationship types. However, the convolutional model outperforms 44% of the true facts and achieves a 3% improvement in results compared to other models.

Despite the success of embedding models to enrich D3FEND using link prediction under the supervised learning setup, it has some limitations, such as not capturing diversity and hierarchies of relations. The average node degree of D3FEND KG is 16.85, with 12% of entities having a node degree less than 2, especially there are many entities or relations with few or no observed links. This results in sparsity and data imbalance, which affect the model performance even after increasing the embedding vector size. Moreover, KG embedding models consider existing entities and relations and may not incorporate external or contextual information such as textual descriptions, temporal dynamics or domain knowledge, which can enhance the link prediction performance.

Link prediction in the D3FEND KG can benefit cybersecurity countermeasure strategies in several ways, such as it can help to identify gaps or weaknesses in the existing defensive methods and suggest possible ways to improve or augment them; it can help to compare and contrast different defensive methods and understand their trade-offs and synergies; it can help to discover novel or emerging defensive methods by inferring new relations from existing data or external sources; and it can help to generate recommendations or guidance for selecting or deploying appropriate defensive methods based on the characteristics and objectives of the system or network.

The representation learning approach helps to reduce incompleteness using a link prediction that infers possible missing facts by using the existing entities and relations of D3FEND.

The aim of this article is the exploration of historical themes that formed education and training in public relations and corporate communication. Its timeline is from the early 1950s to the mid-1990s when university-level education became widespread. It also acknowledges recent initiatives to propose a Global Capability Framework for the field.

Archival material, primarily from the International Public Relations Association, was reviewed in order to understand the historic influences that have shaped public relations and corporate communication education in the, mainly, English-speaking world. This was compared with other sources such as journal, articles and other archives in the Germany, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Three findings are offered from the archival research and analysis conducted for the article: (1) There was extensive debate over the structure of education between a skills-based approach that was taught as a minor or major stream in an undergraduate degree or graduate level study (Master's) in public relations theory and practice; (2) there was continuing tension between practitioner organizations and academics over the design, content and validation of educational programmes; and (3) there was little interest in the international harmonization of public relations education and training, despite extensive discussion.

No previous historical research has taken such a broad and international view of the development of education and training in public relations and corporate communication. The article also uses archival material that has become available in the past decade.

The purpose of the article is to examine whether, if Bernays can be cast as “Dr Jekyll”, the personification of “good”, respectable public relations, and Goebbels as “Mr Hyde”, “evil”, disreputable propaganda, a comparison of their writing and work provides an insight into public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda or rather adds weight to the conclusion that both are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”.

A comparative analysis of writings and work of contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, gathered from original documents, speeches and interviews from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, as well as secondary academic and historical sources, was carried out. The analysis of their views on propaganda and “public relations” was organised using the point-by-point method.

The findings support the conclusion that both activities are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”. For Bernays and Goebbels, public relations and propaganda were always self-advantaging communication that drew attention to the positive values and behaviours of the interests they represented and masked the negative ones.

There are striking parallels between contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, including working in public opinion management for their respective governments and embracing propaganda as a means of “engineering consent”. Yet, while Bernays has been lauded as the “father of public relations” and “the PR profession's first philosopher and intellectual”, Goebbels is remembered as a “master manipulator”, “probably the most overt and arguably the most important, exponent of propaganda in history”. To the researcher's knowledge, there are no other point-by-point analyses of their work with a view to distinguishing public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of bankruptcy reform in the year 2016 on the relation between leverage and firm performance for Indian firms, separately for business group and standalone firms.

Fixed effects panel regression is used to understand the role of bankruptcy reform on firm-level data to examine the relationship between leverage and firm performance after controlling for size, growth, age, liquidity and promoter shareholding. The authors also apply the generalized method of moments (GMM) to control for the endogeneity concerns.

The authors show that the introduction of the insolvency and bankruptcy code (IBC) positively moderates the relation between leverage and firm performance such that the extent of negative relation between leverage and firm performance is less in the post-IBC period. The positive impact of IBC on the relation between leverage and firm performance holds only for firms not affiliated to business groups and for firms with higher debt in their capital structure.

The study’s findings will help the regulators appreciate the effectiveness of bankruptcy reforms resulting from IBC implementation in terms of sound bankruptcy process and leading to safeguard the interests of minority shareholders.

The authors provide the only study to examine the role of bankruptcy law in moderating the relation between leverage and firm performance across a sample of business group and standalone firms.

This review analyzes the existing theoretical and empirical research on the relation between corporate taxation and corporate social responsibility (CSR). By synthesizing the current literature regarding the directional relation between tax avoidance and CSR, the authors are able to identify areas where further research on this relation should be targeted to maximize the public interest.

The authors conduct a literature review of articles published in leading journals in the fields of accounting, finance and management. Reputable working papers are included to support emerging trends in the research and suggest meaningful paths forward.

The literature reveals a complex relation between corporate tax avoidance and CSR. The published research offers theoretical and empirical support for both a substitutive and a complementary directional relation. An actionable takeaway from this review is that corporate taxation must be considered jointly with CSR when seeking to maximize the public interest.

The authors find a rapid influx of research over the past decade that explores the complex directional relation between corporate tax avoidance and CSR. This review will be useful to researchers that are interested in moving beyond a directional characterization of this relation. By synthesizing both established and emerging literature, the authors provide a foundation and direction for future research to examine issues that may directly inform tax or firm policies to increase overall stakeholder welfare.