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Symmetric communication and relationship building are core principles of public relations, which have been highlighted for CSR communication. The purpose of this paper is to develop three different communication strategies for CSR communication in Twitter, of which each contributes differently to the ideals of symmetric communication and relationship building. The framework is then applied to analyze how companies use the micro-blogging service Twitter for CSR communication.

Social network analysis is used to identify the 30 most central corporate accounts in a CSR Twitter network.

From the social network analysis 40,000 tweets are extracted and manually coded. Anova is applied to investigate differences in the weighting of CSR topics between the different strategies.

So far not much is known about how social media, such as Twitter, contribute to the core principles of public relations, if companies use social media to foster symmetric communication and relationship management, or which CSR topics they address.

The purpose of this paper is to participate in the discussion of a relatively new field of corporate governance (CG) and its development. The aim of the research is to discover how well‐known Estonian business leaders perceive the purpose of business activities, corporate relations with the society and environment and who they consider the most significant stakeholders. These issues are studied and analyzed during a ten‐year period in the real‐life Estonian business environment.

The empirical part of the paper is based on the results of in‐depth interviews with 26 top Estonian managers and owners, often known as generalists. The paper discusses the results of qualitative research conducted among these business leaders, owners and top‐managers in Estonian organizations, exploring how business purposes and interests, relations with the society and environment as well as different stakeholders are perceived and how these perceptions have changed in Estonia during the period of ten years (1995‐2004).

This paper shows how business purposes, interests, corporate relations with the society and environment as well as with different stakeholders are perceived in a rapidly developing former post‐socialist and now EU member state, Estonia. It was revealed that stakeholder interests and corporate relations with the society and environment in business have not yet been considered important issues in business organizations. According to the results, the stakeholder thinking and stakeholder concepts have just recently became recognized and understood among the Estonian business leaders. There is a clear difference seen in two periods studied in this research.

The main limitation of the study is related to survey methodology. In‐depth interviews are conducted with 26 representatives; this sets limits to the possibility to generalize the results. In further research, the aim is to get more data through structured questionnaires thus enabling to conduct quantitative analysis and draw conclusions based on larger amount of respondents.

In order to stay sustainable and be able to develop further there is a need for Estonian business leaders and organizations to start paying more attention to the different stakeholders, and see the organizations as a part of the environment and society.

The main contribution of the paper can be found in the in‐depth discussion of the concept of CG particularly from the perspective of stakeholder theory.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between community of place and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lombard industrial districts in Italy.

A brief literature review of international authors from the stakeholder approach and Corporate Community Relations (CCRs) field is presented. This paper refers to a survey of Lombard industrial districts conducted by ALTIS. The data were collected via a telephone survey from 834 firms.

The main finding is that managing CCRs is of major importance for company success. The results of the survey show that there are some tools and actions that Italian industrial district SMEs use to interact with their particular communities of place to develop effective and coherent relationships with their stakeholder groups. Moreover, although the survey shows that though SMEs do implement different CCR activities, they are not able to communicate these effectively through systematic communication strategies. However, the narrow sample includes only a sample of some Lombard districts. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that effective CCR seems to confer competitive advantage based on stakeholder responses and rewards sought.

The framework could assist in supporting CCR developments between industrial districts as various players would know how to improve CCR activities. One further suggestion is that University and Research Centers could have a role to play in creating and communicating codified knowledge concerning community relations in industrial districts, while other public players still have to develop specific tasks in improving infrastructures.

This study is in line with the main focus of CCR, which is in striving to meet stakeholder and societal needs. However, industrial district SMEs have to learn how to communicate their CCR activities from the examples set by large Italian companies. The paper links the notion of CCR with tools and actions to develop meaningful relationships with both community of place and interest. Moreover, considering the survey results, a new framework for local player roles is proposed.

Dialogue has been an elusive concept for academics when it comes to its definition within organisational contexts. In spite of the vast amount of academic research, it is not easy to find concrete proposals – both from theoretical and empirical standpoints – that analyse how companies manage dialogue processes with their stakeholders. The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap by highlighting the role of dialogue in strategic decision-making processes. In order to achieve this purpose, this work is structured into two parts. Firstly, multidisciplinary literature regarding how Public Relations and Management studies research on dialogue is reviewed. Secondly, the chapter presents a managerial proposal of dialogue for decision-making processes called the IDEA model. This chapter aims to scale back the theoretical fragmentation of the concept of dialogue while looking into its practicality based on an original proposal for scholars and practitioners.

The purpose is to examine the bases of positive relations between suppliers and purchasers of healthcare services. In doing so, the paper examines the nature of cooperation between the providers of healthcare services (hospitals) and those who commission and purchase healthcare on behalf of patients (regional health authorities).

The paper employs a qualitative interview approach for gathering and analysing major stakeholder (provider and purchaser) perceptions of their interorganisational relations and how these interactions impact on the quest of the healthcare provider to meet the needs of the community they serve.

The paper identifies group relevant variables into four major themes or “core categories” that characterise purchaser‐provider stakeholder cooperation. These themes represent provider and purchaser views on those factors characterising stakeholder relationships within the purchaser‐provider dyad.

The paper suggests that extending practitioners' understanding of the nature of these interrelated factors may lead to better insights of how interorganisational relations and partnerships might be managed more proactively throughout the healthcare value chain.

In the extant literature, there is a paucity of research that has illustrated multi‐stakeholder perspectives in the public sector. This paper explores the perceptions of two main stakeholders in public healthcare to map and assess management issues influencing purchaser‐provider cooperation.

Stakeholder thinking has contributed considerably to the organizational literature by demonstrating the significance of the environment in managing organizations. Stakeholders affect and are affected by organizations’ daily operations and decisions. They have varied and often conflicting interests, making it necessary for managers and organizations to know who they are as well as their attributes. Consequently, Mitchell et al. (1997) developed the stakeholder salience theory to help managers and organizations identify the power of certain stakeholders and their salience to the organization. With a few exceptions, the mainstream stakeholder salience theory is in many ways still largely static, short-term oriented, and firm-centered. The aim of this paper is to revisit certain conformist assumptions concerning the role of marginalized stakeholders, or “dormant” stakeholders, in stakeholder thinking. Overall, this chapter is a call to a new conceptualization of stakeholders that reintroduces stakeholder dynamics at the core of stakeholder thinking to overcome its restrictive shortcomings. We argue that managing stakeholder relationships is not simply meeting stakeholder demands but also involves taking into account the long-term dynamics of stakeholder interactions.

This paper seeks to explore the meaning of the stakeholder concept in politics, using theories drawn from the fields of management, political science and public relations. In particular, the theory of stakeholder identification and salience is to be used as a framework.

This qualitative study involved in‐depth interviews with 23 politicians and political advisers in Western Australia and was conducted in the style of a grounded theory investigation.

The results indicate that in politics, as in business, controversy and confusion continue to surround the stakeholder concept. Participants thought “stakeholder” should imply possession of a legitimate interest in an issue, but did not believe this was always the case. There is a gulf between how politicians think stakeholder status should be accorded in principle and what happens in reality. In practice, power seems to play a far greater role than legitimacy in determining stakeholder salience among political decision‐makers.

Although the study focuses on a single jurisdiction (Western Australia), there are implications for policy development in other contemporary democracies. Excluding or marginalising stakeholders with a legitimate right to be heard contributes to the phenomenon known as “democratic deficit”, whereby citizens feel alienated from the political process.

This is one of the few empirical studies to investigate the application of stakeholder theory – as developed in the management literature – to politics. It integrates theories from different disciplines of direct relevance to what should be the primary focus of public relations – the management of stakeholder relationships.

In this paper we propose a typology of firm-stakeholder relationships based on four different states of consumption, leading to a new model of business commitment to responsible consumption. In developing this typology, we apply a physiological theory of consumption to define business as a nexus of activities capable of producing four different types of value: subsistence, growth, indifference and excess. The model represents a more coherent conceptualization of business management, drawing upon long-term multi-dimensional value management in firm-stakeholder relations. Thus, in our model, we establish normative connections between value creation and responsible consumption, and indicate more specific measures of value creation for stakeholders, by promoting subsistence and growth, and discouraging indifference and excess. We are thus taking value creation stakeholder theory one step further, by exploring how different levels of value or utility could inform integrative, convergent value creation processes within the firm as a network of stakeholders.

The UK’s Institute for Public Relations (IPR) is applying for Royal Chartered status, giving legitimacy to the professional standing and practice of public relations. One of the key motivators in seeking registration was to demonstrate that its members are “not just working for (our) own interests, but the interests of the public good”. Improving professional education in PR and the image of public relations practice were also two recommendations made in a joint UK IPR/Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) report in 2003. Given the cynicism of the public, however, the overall objective of achieving trust may be more challenging, as UK practitioners wonder if professional guidelines on ethics and trust are a step too far in their field: indeed, comparable professional institutes do not have this focus in their terms of reference. This paper makes a series of practical recommendations in support of trust and transparency in the UK and examines the wider issues affecting the PR practitioner’s operating environment. For instance, the role of business regulation, CEO education, industry models and the perception of PR as publicity.