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For corporate communications, it is crucial to know how news media outlets report and frame the sociopolitical activities of multinational corporations (MNCs), including their corporate diplomacy, that affect perceptions of their legitimacy. Therefore, this study aims to identify how local news media frame corporate diplomacy in a host country and, in turn, benefit the media legitimacy of MNCs.

To identify media frames in the host country, a quantitative content analysis involving factor and cluster analyses of 385 articles published in newspapers in the United Arab Emirates from 2014 to 2019 addressing the corporate diplomacy of large European MNCs operating in the country was conducted.

This study identified three media frames, two of which establish moral and pragmatic media legitimacy. Results suggest that media legitimacy grows when news media emphasise institutional relationships between MNCs and local, established organisations and corporate diplomacy's benefits for society.

Findings provide insights into how corporate communications can contribute to legitimacy building by emphasising corporations' relationships with institutional actors in host countries and the benefits of corporate activities for local communities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was the first in corporate communications to empirically investigate news media's role in corporate diplomacy and how media frames contribute to the media legitimacy of MNCs at the moral, pragmatic, regulative and cognitive levels.

A number of scholars including Benno Signitzer and Jacquie L'Etang have proposed public diplomacy as an alternative model to describe and/or inform the practices of public relations. However, international relations and political science scholars claim major differences between public diplomacy and PR, and few studies have sought to reconcile these claims and counter‐claims. The purpose of this paper is to report a comparative analysis of key concepts and principles of public diplomacy.

This article reports a comparative analysis of key concepts and principles of public diplomacy and the “new diplomacy” as described by Shaun Riordan and public relations (PR) as defined in Excellence theory and other contemporary models of PR to identify commonalties as well as divergences, and discusses how these can inform PR theory and practice.

This analysis shows similarities between these fields of practice, as well as six unique concepts and principles of public diplomacy and “new diplomacy” that inform corporate diplomacy and organisational diplomacy as an alternative paradigm to “public relations”.

Reconceptualising PR as corporate and organisational diplomacy involves much more than a name change. It recasts PR within alternative theoretical frameworks that are significantly different to those of dominant paradigms of PR and informs new and refined approaches to practice.

Adopting the concepts and principles of public diplomacy and “new diplomacy” also would provide a more ethical and societally‐orientated approach to PR.

Most studies comparing public diplomacy and PR have focussed on commonalities with a view to expanding PR's territorial claim or gaining validation of PR. This analysis takes the opposite approach, identifying concepts and principles of public diplomacy and “new diplomacy” that contribute to an alternative paradigm of PR that is more effective, more societally‐orientated, more ethical, and ultimately more publicly accepted.

The purpose of this study is to define the communicational profile of unattached diplomats and explore the viability of state-centric concepts such as citizen diplomacy when discussing non-state actors emerging from civil society.

The paper uses a comparative, multiple case design focusing on descriptive case studies (Yin, 2018) that explore the diplomatic endeavours and social biographies of “citizens of the world” acting at a global or local level, not explicitly attached to or explicitly against an official, state agenda: Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg and Bill Gates.

The unattached diplomats have organisational mobility but are attached to the cause they promote, a configuration that fundamentally opposes that of the traditional or organisational diplomat. Looking at individuals from a diplomatic perspective, not as instruments or as targets, but rather as agents with their own agenda, issues and diplomatic capital, the unattached diplomats define their lack of attachment through organisational mobility, adversarial positioning or personal financial autonomy with regard to state diplomatic institutions or for-profit/not-for-profit organisations.

A higher number and diversity of case studies can enable the identification of patterns and standards.

This study introduces and operationalises the concept of unattached diplomats. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to discuss it in the context of another emerging concept, currently insufficiently researched: civil society diplomacy.

Arising societal issues challenge corporate social responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how corporations account for arising issues under different institutional settings: the stakeholder oriented corporate governance model of Germany is hypothesized to produce a different response than the more state dominated Swedish welfare model.

This paper takes the reported CSR response of the largest corporations in Germany and Sweden, in relation to the 2015 European refugee crisis, as its case. In total, 157 annual reports are investigated by means of text analysis for statements in relation to the European refugee crisis.

Empirically, German corporations are more prone to communicate on this emerging issue, and deploying corporate resources to an emerging societal crisis. Based on that finding, this study concludes that the German model is more in line with international CSR-discourse than the Swedish.

This study has implications for institutional theory perspectives on CSR accounting-related issues. By comparing two economies that would be characterized as “coordinated market economies” a somewhat different set of topics becomes apparent. Further considering country context could be useful when expanding the debate on CSR accounting.

This study is the first to empirically investigate corporate diplomacy with regard to the European refugee crisis. Besides others, corporations are important societal players. Therefore, corporations bear both, the obligation to deal with arising issues and the potential to participate in public opinion-forming with regard to those issues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior regarding the construction of transnational railways to help engineering managers and decision makers improve their risk management and lead to sustainable transnational railway construction projects.

This paper adopted the grounded theory methodology to analyze the news stories reported by “Belt and Road Portal” and “The New York Times” about eight transnational railways. They were China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan (Central Asia), Mecca-to-Medina (West Asia), Hungarian–Serbia (Europe), China–Nepal (South Asia), Bi-Oceanic (South America), Mombasa–Nairobi (Africa), China–Laos (Southeast Asia) and Panama railways (North America). The keywords for news search were the names of each railway. After eliminating the problem sentences with semantic repetition and ambiguity, 2,631 effective sentences were formed to screen the information and code. The process included open, axial and selective coding.

It was concluded that the core structure of the formation mechanism was “situation,” “influence factor,” “cognition” and “coping behavior.” The country-of-origin image has served as an adjustment function in the analysis for the host country people. Governance strategies were suggested focusing on risk prevention, risk mitigation and risk response according to social risk management.

The rise of transnational railway construction is encouraged by the process of globalization. But during the long construction period, the host country people's coping behavior would develop into social conflicts and mass incidents, becoming a significant obstacle to construction objectives. Thus, studying the formation mechanism of public coping behaviors can better take measures to prevent social risks.

The contributions of this research are three aspects: first, a formation mechanism of the host country people's coping behavior based on grounded theory is presented. Second, the country-of-origin image is found to be a factor that cannot be ignored in a transnational context. The formation mechanism of public coping behaviors is improved compared to risk management in the domestic situation. Finally, the host country people pay more attention to the motivations of country-of-origin's controlling interests and their own emotions compared with internal stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to describe what business leaders can do to promote peace. The paper begins by reviewing the salient literature on business and peace and adding to this discussion, leadership concepts that enrich an understanding of the role of business in promoting peace. Using a case example of a business leader committed to advancing peace, the paper introduces the concept of a theory of change to describe the process of transformation business leaders can take to promote peace.

This conceptual paper draws on literature from business and peace and adds literature from the field of leadership studies to enrich the discussion of business and peace.

This paper suggests business leaders promoting peace can take action using a theory of change that includes the application of participative and ethical leadership, strategy that embeds peace goals and the use of entrepreneurships in buffer conditions to mitigate identity-based conflict between opposing groups. By understanding a leader’s theory of change, insight is gained on transformational change in promoting peace.

This paper adds to the theoretical and practical discussion on business and peace by including leadership concepts and the concept of a theory of change as a way to describe business leadership for peace.

This paper aims to study whether international niche market leaders (INMLs) gained their leading position as early mover or diligent follower, and assess whether they leveraged hard or soft forms of technological, supply pre-emption and customer lock-in advantage mechanisms.

Empirical material stems from qualitative and quantitative data on a sample of 20 niche companies from the Basque Country (Spain) that operate in business to business markets.

The sample predominantly followed an early entrant strategy and applied soft measures to reach niche market leadership.

Findings imply that early entering fosters conquering leadership in niche markets, that pioneer advantage is easier to sustain in niches than in mainstream markets, and that soft measures are more effective in niche markets than in larger markets. A limitation to our findings is that they follow from explorative research on a sample of firms from a reduced geographic setting.

Hidden champions and INMLs can be important sources of technological progress and economic value for the localities that host them. Therefore, despite their traditional low profile and the fact that they are not always the largest firms around, policymakers may want to pay more attention to this type of companies.

Tot he best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to research entry timing and its outcome for market leadership with regard to niche players or hidden champions-type of firms. It introduces an original taxonomy to operationalize and distinguish between hard and soft measures to leverage advantage mechanisms related to market entry timing.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how “manias” in global health governance lead to health inequalities even before, during and in the aftermath of acute health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. “Manias” as used here refer to obsessive ir/rational behaviors, misguided policy/strategic choices and the exercise of power that benefit the major global health actors at the expense of stakeholders.

From post-colonial and historical perspectives, this study delineates how the major global health actors influence outcomes in global health governance and international business when they interact at the national–global level using an illustration from an emerging economy.

Power asymmetry in global health governance is constructed around the centralization of economic influence, medico-techno-scientific innovation and the geopolitical hegemony of a conglomerate of super-rich/powerful actors. They cluster these powers and resources in the core region (industrialized economies) and use them to influence the periphery (developing economies) through international NGOs, hybrid organizations, MNCs and multilateral/bilateral agreements. The power of actors to maintain manias lies in not only how they influence the periphery but also the consequences of the periphery’s “passivity” and “voluntary” renunciation of sovereignty in medical innovations and global health policies/politics.

As a quintessential feature of manias, power asymmetry makes it harder for weaker actors to actually change the institutional conditions that produce structural inequalities in global health.

This timely and multidisciplinary study calls for a novel architecture of global health governance. Thus, democratizing global health governance with sufficiently foresighted investments that prioritize equitable access by and the inclusiveness of vulnerable stakeholders will help dismantle institutionalized manias while decreasing health inequalities.

Stakeholder relations has been largely based upon a two-way public relations model. Along with this change, business diplomacy emerged as a proposal to renew stakeholder management. It is still uncertain if this proposal adds value to stakeholder management, which this study seeks to clarify.

Corporate representatives in charge of stakeholder management were invited to participate in an online survey measuring both public relations and business diplomacy activities. With a sample of 104 companies, factorial analyses were conducted on public relations and business diplomacy activities comparing model quality.

This study finds that public relations and business diplomacy activities share identity but not to the point of being fused and are thus different in nature. The best model showed three overarching functions (communication, influence and intelligence) implying that stakeholder management needs both public relations and business diplomacy.

Findings suggest both public relations and business diplomacy research should be included in advanced stakeholder management studies.

By acknowledging the role that business diplomacy plays in stakeholder management, companies may place influence at the core of the renewed stakeholder management strategy to better deal with the increasingly complex business environment.

This study adds clarity to the role of public relations and business diplomacy in stakeholder management based on actual activities developed in organizations and reveals the underlying dimensions of communication, influence and intelligence.