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This study draws parallels between the Major and Johnson eras to reclaim a discursive space beyond the media and political battlefields to examine long-term systemic failure of government PR.

As part of a wider study into government communications from 1979 to date, this paper draws on evidence from government archives from the 1990s, as well as contemporary accounts, official documents, media accounts, memoirs and biographies, to examine the PR record of two Conservative administrations divided by three decades.

News management during the Major premiership is worth serious scrutiny, not just as an interlude between two media-friendly Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Blair, but in comparison to Boris Johnson's struggle to contain the news narrative between 2019 and 2022. Both administrations experienced terminal reputational crises during their closing years but their means of managing the news were counter-productive and damaging to public trust (65).

Does this failure in public communication illustrate a systemic dysfunction in government-media relations and, if so, what is the role of government PR in these circumstances?

This article uses a comparison between fixed and moving variables associated with two very different administrations to identify the causes of ongoing systemic failure in government communication.

The Million Farmers School (MFS) program—also known as Kisan Pathshala was launched to impart training to the farmers by the government of the state of Uttar Pradesh (India) in December 2017. This study estimates the impact of training on agricultural knowledge of the farmers.

The study is based on household survey conducted in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, during March–May 2019. The authors employed matching methods, the two-stage least square (2SLS)-residual and endogenous switching regression approaches to control for selection bias and endogeneity.

The results suggest that knowledge outcomes are significantly better among participants vis-à-vis non-participants. The results are robust to different model specifications. Further, the benefits are observed across different regions and social groups.

The MFS program can go a long way in enhancing agricultural know-how and the farmers' economic well-being, bringing a transformative change in the agricultural landscape of UP.

This study is based on a field survey data and analyzes various aspects of the program's impact, design and implementation, and offers implementation advice for greater efficacy in future.

The aim of this study is to critically examine the transparency and reporting practice of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) controversies within the pharmaceutical and textile industry. Based on the four core dimensions of transparency, we explore which reporting medium is most frequently chosen for the disclosure of negative ESG contributions, the nature and information content of the disclosed incidents and how voluntary adherence to sustainability reporting standards and independent assurances affect the reporting.

We use conceptual content analysis and employ a counter-accounting approach to analyse the disclosure of 190 ESG controversies in 104 corporate reports from the pharmaceutical and textile industries, covering a three-year period from 2018–2020.

The very large majority of controversies are reported only once in the legal proceedings section of the annual report, but not again in the sustainability report, where it would be necessary to provide a balanced picture. Moreover, companies tend to disclose only those controversies that are either associated with high media attention or are expected to be related to litigation, resulting in 26 per cent of controversies not being disclosed at all. The overall quality of disclosure is unsatisfactory and in need of improvement, but comparably higher in the pharmaceutical industry than in the textile industry. Interestingly, neither the application of sustainability reporting standards nor independent assurance seems to positively impact the disclosure behaviour.

Our paper provides new insights into the shortcomings of current ESG controversy disclosures by revealing patterns of selective reporting practices and the strategic framing of issues. In addition, it contributes to the debates on corporate cherry-picking in the adoption of sustainability reporting guidelines and on the effectiveness of external assurance of sustainability reports. Based on the findings, it offers important implications for practitioners, in particular management, policy makers, rating agencies and assurance providers.

In October 2016, Timothy Sloan, the newly appointed CEO of American banking giant Wells Fargo, faced a massive public-relations crisis. A few weeks earlier, a United States government agency had announced the results of its regulatory review of the bank and exposed a shocking practice common in the retail division, in which aggressive community bankers had created more than a million fraudulent accounts and credit card applications on behalf of unaware customers for the past several years. Over the next few weeks, the bank—and Sloan's predecessor, John Stumpf, in particular—suffered from harsh criticism from politicians, journalists, and former employees alike, ultimately forcing Stumpf's resignation. As Sloan sought to minimize the public-image backlash and restore general trust in Wells Fargo, he struggled to construct the best communication strategy for the bank's next chapter.