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This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

Using and understanding social media in the context of networked publics enhances crisis communication. This chapter describes models and ideas for integrating social media into the communication strategies of rescue organisations. The authors develop their recommendations for the use of social media by these organisations from both a summary and comparison of communication processes during the 2013 Central European floods in Austria, and from the perspective of an organisation actively using social media in the chosen model region of Alkoven. The chapter presents basic recommendations, recommendations inspired by content strategy and recommendations based on web and social media literacy in order to support the further development of crisis communication in the digital age.

The United States (US) sugar program protects domestic sugar farmers from unrestricted imports of heavily-subsidized global sugar. Sugar-using firms (SUFs) criticize that program for causing US sugar prices to be higher than world sugar prices. This study examines the financial performance of publicly traded SUFs to determine if they are performing at an economic disadvantage in terms of accounting profitability, risk and economic profitability compared to other industries.

Firm-level financial accounting and market data from 2010 to 2019 were utilized to construct financial metrics for publicly traded SUFs, agribusinesses and general US firms. These financial metrics were analyzed to determine how SUFs compare to their agribusiness peer group and general US companies. The comprehensive financial analysis in this study covers: (1) accounting profit rates, (2) drivers of profitability, (3) economic profit rates, (4) trend analysis and (5) peer comparisons. Quantile regression analysis and Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney statistics are employed for statistical comparisons.

Regarding various profitability and risk measures, SUFs outperform their agribusiness peers and the general benchmark of all US firms in terms of accounting profit rates, risk levels and economic profit rates. Furthermore, compared to other US industries using the 17 French and Fama classifications, SUFs have the highest return on investment and economic profit rate―measured by the Economic Value Added® margin―and the second-lowest opportunity cost of capital, measured by the weighted average cost of capital.

This study finds nothing to suggest that the US sugar program hinders the financial success of SUFs, contrary to recent claims by sugar-using firms. Notably in this analysis is the evaluation of economic profit rates and a series of robustness techniques.

We examine the various components of entrepreneurial self-efficacy within the entrepreneurship literature from a measurement perspective. Two published entrepreneurial self-efficacy instruments are tested and compared. Additionally, we study how self-efficacy relates with many of the tasks and roles identified within the entrepreneurial new venture life-cycle. Our study suggests relationships between self-efficacy, perceived skills, and abilities to manage a new venture, and entrepreneurial intentions to start a new venture. We discuss relationships between entrepreneurship research and university teaching and make specific suggestions on how further work on improving measurement in entrepreneurship will benefit both research and teaching effectiveness.

Rape culture, described as when “violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993, p. vii), exists online and offline (Henry & Powell, 2014). Much of the research on rape culture focuses on the experiences of heterosexual women, and few studies have explored rape culture in the context of dating apps. This chapter explores how men who have sex with men (MSM) understand and experience rape culture through their use of Grindr and similar dating apps. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 MSM dating app users revealed problematic user behavior as well as unwanted sexual messages and images as common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Participants explained that rape culture extends beyond in-app interactions to in-person encounters, as evident by incidents of sexual violence that several participants had experienced and one participant had committed. Participants were unsure about the extent to which MSM dating apps facilitate rape culture but asserted that some apps enable rape culture more than others. This chapter demonstrates the importance of investigating sexual violence against people of diverse gender and sexual identities to ensure their experiences are not minimized, ignored, or rendered invisible.