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This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

Charitable giving in China has moved from being subjected to government attention and public skepticism to receiving government encouragement and public support. The role played by political connections in philanthropy is indisputable, although very few studies have explored their association from the perspective of the country’s first Charity Law of 2016. This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the 2016 Charity Law and offers an understanding of the future trends in corporate charitable giving.

Using empirical analysis of data collected from listed companies in China, this study analyzes the impact of political connections on corporate charitable giving before and after the 2016 Charity Law. The study adopts three leading theories from previous research into corporate charitable giving and political connections: corporate social responsibility, resource dependence theory and stakeholder theory. A conceptual framework is outlined, and hypotheses are formulated accordingly.

The results show that political connections have a substantial positive impact on corporate charitable giving, both before and after the implementation of the 2016 Charity Law, which has significantly promoted and increased the amount and proportion of charitable giving. Although the 2016 Charity Law attempted to weaken the political connections of enterprises, the influence of political connections on corporate charitable giving has proved difficult to diminish or eliminate, as charity is dominated by the state.

This study explores the association between political connections and corporate charitable giving from the perspective of China’s Charity Law of 2016.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.

Organizational theorists and strategy scholars are both interested in how organizations deal with ambiguity, especially in relation to implementation. This chapter examines one source of ambiguity that organizations face, which is based on their efforts to implement moral mandates. These mandates, which are related to areas such as environmental sustainability and diversity, are inherently ambiguous, as they lack a shared understanding regarding their scope and associated practices. They are also often broad and systemic and may be unclearly aligned with an organization's strategy. Due to these challenges, in this chapter, we theorize that collective action at the field level is necessary for organizations to advance and concretize moral mandates. We examine this theorizing through the case of the implementation of sustainability in higher education. We hypothesize and find support for the idea that when an organization's members engage in collective action at the field level, those organizations have an increased likelihood of achieving sustainability implementation. To gain insight into this field-to-organization relationship, we qualitatively examine 18 years of conversations from an online forum to develop a process model of moral mandate implementation. We theorize that collective action functions as a field-configuring space, in which actors from a variety of organizations come together to (1) refine the scope of the mandate and (2) create an implementation repertoire that actors can draw on when seeking to bring sustainability to their own organizations. Overall, our study provides a model of how ambiguous moral mandates can be implemented by highlighting the important role of collective action across organizations in concretizing those mandates and providing actors with the tools for their implementation.

Against the background of actively promoting the reform of mixed ownership in China, this study regards government ownership in private sector enterprises (PSEs) as an important political connection mechanism and examines private holding listed companies in high-polluting industries that sold China A-shares from 2012 to 2019.

Using regression models such as Tobit and negative binomial estimation, the research empirically examines the impact of government ownership in PSEs on the corporate fulfillment of their environmental responsibilities.

Government ownership can effectively promote PSEs to fulfill their environmental responsibilities. Government ownership, as a corporate-level political connection mechanism, enables the government to provide firms with more environmental protection subsidies and environmental tax incentives, encouraging firms to fulfill their environmental responsibilities. When considering the policy risks faced by PSEs, government ownership effectively reduces the impact of policy uncertainty on firms’ fulfillment of environmental responsibilities. Additionally, verifying the economic development level of the city in which the firm is located makes the positive impact of government ownership on fulfillment of environmental responsibilities of PSEs in regions with lower economic development levels more significant.

Unlike existing studies that generally use the personal political identity of entrepreneurs to measure the political connections of PSEs, this study regards government ownership in PSEs as an important political connection mechanism. It provides a useful reference for China to formulate environmental protection policies for PSEs.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the influencing factors of the government’s trust decision-making in the private sector; second, it explores how these influencing factors affect the government’s trust decisions.

A theoretical model was established, and a questionnaire survey was conducted among 152 professionals. The collected datas were analyzed by the structural equation modeling (SEM) method.

The study identified four critical factors that influence the government’s decision to trust the private sector in public-private-partnership (PPP) projects. All the four factors have a positively correlated impact on the government’s trust decision-making. The structural equation path analysis shows that the most important factor affecting the government’s trust decision-making is the trustee’s (private sector) trustworthy characteristics, and the path coefficient is 0.92. The path coefficients of risk perception and the trustor’s trust tendency are 0.83 and 0.74, respectively. The influence of the legal system environment on government trust decision-making is moderate, with a path coefficient of 0.68.

This paper contributes to the literature in two aspects. First, the factors influencing decision-making to government trust in the private sector in PPP projects have been identified. Second, a comprehensive view of the mechanism of government trust in the private sector in PPP projects has been theorized by the SEM method.

Corporations are now taking stands on contemporary and controversial social issues that share no obvious connection to the corporations’ business practices. At the same time, political polarization continues to intensify, which begs the question: Are these corporate stands – referred to as corporate social advocacy (CSA) – and political polarization related to each other, and if so, how? The purpose of this study is to provide a conceptualization of the connections between CSA and political polarization through a series of propositions that can be tested in subsequent research studies. Corporations have influence in society, and the ways in which they communicate on controversial social issues could further intensify or help assuage political polarization. Conversely, political polarization may be causing CSA in the first place, which would put into question the legitimacy and desirability of CSA because of the environment from which CSA is cultivated.

This study is designed to be conceptual, and the approach is based on theory building.

The study conceptualizes the relationship between CSA and political polarization to be symbiotic because both are bidirectional causes of each other. Engagement in CSA is also argued to be positively associated with perceptions that corporations contain particular political ideologies, i.e. more “liberal-leaning” or “conservative-leaning.” This study also predicts that – dependent on particular conditions – CSA will also lead to an increase in both boycotts and skepticism.

This study will contribute to scholars’, practitioners’ and consumers’ understanding of the causes and effects of CSA. The way in which political polarization is potentially causing CSA puts into question the legitimacy of corporations engaging in CSA in the first place. If CSA is cultivated in the soil of political polarization, is CSA desirable for corporations? Conversely, the way in which CSA is potentially causing political polarization also puts the legitimacy of CSA into question. If CSA is causing political polarization, is CSA desirable for society?

Corporations are an influential part of society, and thus will influence how society views controversial social issues. If the predictions in this study hold, corporations will play an important role in either intensifying or reducing political polarization, and political polarization will also play an important role in how corporations communicate about CSA issues.

Research focused on CSA is burgeoning, yet limited studies have examined how CSA and political polarization interact. Although there could be positive aspects of corporate involvement in CSA, this study examines some of the potential negative aspects of corporate involvement in CSA. Future research will also be able to test the propositions proposed in this study.