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The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual framework for the institutional preconditions for media work and how organizations establish these conditions.

The work concurs with the stream of scholars who use social theory as their starting‐point to understand and make sense of public relations as a societal phenomenon. Based on earlier empirical analysis and theoretical arguments this paper supports the notion of corporate media work as being much more complex and extensive than was earlier recognized. Vital to this is mediatization, a concept describing how media are transformed from being a mediator between institutions to becoming an institution in themselves.

The paper outlines three different ideal types of strategies of corporate media work: providing, promoting, and co‐opting, resting on different aims and functions.

Organizational media work redefines, reshapes and structures the economic, political and social positions of organizations. Therefore scholars will be helped by a more developed framework to categorize and understand corporate media work in a mediatized society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the mediatisation of terror attacks affects the brand image of tourism cities.

Informed by theories of mediatisation and space, the study analyses two different types of terror attacks in Sweden during 2017 as media events. The focus of analysis is on identifying spatial and temporal patterns that underpin the narrative rhythm of the discussions of the events on Twitter and online news platforms.

The findings demonstrate that the unfolding of the events can be divided into three phases of varying intensity in rhythm and implications for city brand image. The manifestation of an imaginary terror attack in a digital environment had a greater impact on the narratives of the city than an actual one.

Rythmanalysis is introduced as a useful device to examine how urban space is mediatised through social media and online news flows.

The study contributes with novel knowledge on the mediatisation of city space on digital media platforms in a post-truth world. It shows that city administrations need to deal with both real and imaginary terror attacks, especially when there is an already established negative image of the city.

The aim of this paper is to give theoretical and empirical arguments for new forms of communication and structure of organizations within the media and information society. Organizations must legitimate their “licence to operate” through social discourses and stakeholder communication. Possibilities to institutionalize ethics within organizations and possible barriers to such a programme are analysed.

First, some theoretical arguments as to why mediatisation challenges organizations to prove ethical commitment are depicted, using a rights‐based and social contract approach. Second, empirical examples for structural and communicational barriers in Austrian companies show possible practical constraints.

Theoretical findings refer to the usefulness of applying business ethical models (especially rights‐based, and social contract models) to reorganize mediatised organizations. Empirical findings concern the lack of institutionalized ethics management in companies and the corresponding problem of “PR‐style” communication instead of stakeholder discourses.

The research reported in one section of the paper relies on the qualitative survey of 14 experts in different branches of the Austrian economy. While interviews can give a picture on how respondents understand the relevant research question and construct the respective reality, they are far from providing a representative picture of communicative ethical problems in mediatised organizations.

Practical consequences should be possible, if companies understand the mediatised and communicative nature of their relationship with society and stakeholders and therefore react to that challenge by building up reputation through ethics management.

The paper gives new insights to the important relationship between organizations and the public and shows how, e.g. enterprises can legitimate their business models and secure their long‐term existence. New empirical research concerns cases from Austrian companies.

The way in which criminologists understand, contextualise and theorise around the mediatised world has raised some critical new questions. The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research which looks at the ways in which some forms of social media are utilised by gang members. Gang research in the main is predicated on the notion that gangs are deviant products of social disorganisation; however, there is little written on the “specific” forms of expression used by those associated with gangs.

The lyrical content of three music videos has been analysed using narrative analysis.

Music videos have been used as a form of expression for decades. More recently in some cases they have been used as a tool to send threats, promote gang culture and flaunt illegal substances, which is fairly a new concept, in the UK at least. Social media and music videos are not the sole reason why there has been a rise in violence amongst young people; however, this paper aims to further explore some of these notions.

The authors suggest that this form of expression presents challenges in the understanding of gang activity in a mediatised world. The intention is not to further criminalise young people, but to seek understanding and explore the phenomenon of music videos and its position their gang research.

This paper circulates around two major questions: what is the character of prizes as a media product? And how do the specifics of media prizes relate to the understanding of organizations with respect to a given aspect of their activities? The purpose of this paper is to bring forward theoretical arguments that show the significance of media preferences and values as central in how media prizes and awards are created and operated by discussing these questions.

The paper draws on a variety of literature – mainly within management and media/communication studies – that is interested in the construction of different assessment tools such as prizes and rankings.

The paper addresses three particular characteristics of media prizes relevant for the understanding of how media evaluate organizations: the forming and spreading of stereotypical representative or behavior within a specific category or field; the simplification of status through the creation of “winners”; and the popularization of public measures for success in business life.

This is a conceptual paper and as such it needs more systematic empirical testing to validate the findings.

The paper suggests three different roles media prizes have in evaluating organizations’ performance and their social status. The findings suggest that the qualities/aspects emphasized by the prizes are framed in such a way that they follow the rational or logic of media, and that they as such bear witness should be regarded with certain critical scrutiny.

The paper discusses an expanding area of journalistic practice – i.e. production and proliferation of media prizes. These prizes have a significant effect on how the authors conceptualize and understand different aspects of the life – in the case business practices such as entrepreneurship. The authors suggest here how media prizes can come to shape the perceptions of reality through processes of simplification, stereotypification and popularization.

Up to now there are few studies focusing on media as a producer of assessments central for building normative and cognitive bases on which organizations are evaluated. The conceptual arguments in this paper highlight a number of areas that can serve as a starting point for future inquiry.

This paper examines the processes used to create and communicate the public identities of New Zealand women politicians. Interviews conducted with women politicians and their public relations practitioners are drawn upon in order to develop a public relations framework for working with individuals. The framework is developed from Foucault’s work on technologies of the self and comprises six technologies of the self: historical narration, positioning, commodification, mediatisation, aestheticisation, and moral career.

The purpose of this paper is to show how early planned PR efforts at the British Family Planning Association [FPA] resulted in an epoch-making television appearance in November 1955, tessellating with current methodological debates in the history of PR.

This paper uses a qualitative, micro-history approach and original archival document research conducted at Wellcome Collection, London and the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, to reconstruct early PR activity at the FPA. It intercedes in debates on historiography, the diversification of the history of PR and the concepts of mediatization and advocacy in historical contexts.

Attaining broadcast coverage for birth control issues was historically difficult and was made more so by Marie Stopes. The subject was commonly packaged into the less problematic issues of population and infertility. The FPA achieved explicit television coverage in 1955 after establishing a focussed PR plan to stage and exploit a silver jubilee event. This vindicated the FPA's mission, validated service users and created broadcast opportunities.

Research is limited by temporal scope (1870s–1950s), and reliance on document sources, footage of television programmes being unavailable. This paper has implications for the history of PR, contributing to the diversification of the field by suggesting an original approach to the intersection of public relations and social change.

This paper surfaces overlooked primary sources and is the first account of how birth control appeared as a topic on early British broadcast media.

Labour came to power in 1997 and immediately transferred many features of its party political news management style into government, overseeing the departure of most of the civil service communications leadership within two years, and developing the media management role of politically appointed special advisers. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the changes in custom and practice that operated behind the scenes in government communications between 1997 and 2015, asking to what extent such changes challenge public trust in government in a liberal democracy.

This study takes a longitudinal, qualitative approach through in-depth interviews with former civil servants, journalists and special advisers, together with documentary and archival evidence. The data were analysed thematically through the text-processing software, NVivo.

The paper finds that although the controversy over the 2002 dossier on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was an extraordinary episode, the creative approach to news management that characterised this case still operates within UK Government communications: the bypassing of civil servants, a partial approach to the facts, selective briefing of favoured journalists, a lack of due process in the management of information and a disregard for the letter and spirit of propriety codes. This has implications for public trust and confidence in the workings of liberal democracy.

The study adopts a mediatisation approach to the study of public relations, using the concept of the “cross field” to demonstrate how PR professionals share media management responsibilities with a number of different promotional actors. PR professionals in government must therefore navigate between the hidden, competitive and demanding worlds of politics, the media and bureaucracy, working with journalists, politicians and political operatives to craft the narratives that seek to drive public opinion.

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 aim of the research is to emphasise the role of material culture, and especially the role of objects related to physical activities, in children's socialization. It involves children's bodies but also symbolic meanings and values which introduce children to the universe of sport's consumption.

The research is grounded on the construction of a system of objects related to children's physical activities in France. The production of a corpus of objects involves a methodological circle where the choice of the objects goes together with a reflexive analysis about the operations of categorization of objects. The analysis of objects require both technological and semiotical approaches.

In the context of globalization and commodification of childhood, but also of the globalization and mediatization of sports, the research shows that objects for children's physical activities are inscribed in a double transformation: sportification of children's games and childification of sports.

The research focuses on material culture and does not investigate children's uses of the objects for physical activity and does not determine the process of their conception and design.

The paper emphasises the difference between two faces of children's physical activities: spending calories and the development of motor skills and interpretative competences linked to sports' culture and children's mass culture.

In contrast to the work done on food and digital culture, the field of children's physical activities and sports is not as well researched. This is especially the case for the objects designed for children and this research is one of the first in the field in international literature. It constitutes also the first attempt for including this topic in the worlds of children's consumption.