Search results

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.

Organizations remain a vital sociological topic, but organizational sociology, as a subfield, has evolved significantly since its inception. In this paper, I argue that organization sociology is becoming increasingly disconnected from organizational theory, as currently conceived. The focus of sociological research on organizations has become more empirically grounded in the study of social problems and how organizations contribute to them. Sociologists continue to see organizations as important actors in society that play a role in shaping social order and as contexts in which social processes play out. I propose two main sociological approaches for organizational research, which I describe as “organizations within society” and “society within organizations.” The first approach examines the role of organizations as building blocks of social structure and as social actors in their own right. The second approach treats organizations as platforms and locations of social interactions and the building of community. These approaches are somewhat disconnected from the sort of grand theorizing that characterizes much of organizational theory. I argue that the problem-oriented sociology of these two approaches offers a vital way for organizational scholars to expand and theoretically revitalize the field.

Despite considerable evidence of the benefits of organizational transparency, policies to enhance transparency often fail or are met with resistance and unexpected results. In part, this is due to a lack of knowledge about the drivers of organizational transparency and their interrelationships. This study examines the interplay among the forces that influence organizational transparency, and thus answers numerous calls for developing a deeper theoretical understanding of the determinants of organizational transparency. We propose three forces that influence organizational transparency and theorize how they combine in nonlinear ways to form five archetypical transparency regimes that organizations operate within. We then discuss contingencies to organizational transparency within each regime.

We employ configurational theorizing to capture the complexity of transparency and the nonlinear relationships among the forces of transparency.

We propose three forces that influence organizational transparency: institutional, societal, and leadership. We identify configurations of the three forces that yield five archetypical transparency regimes. We then discuss contingencies for cultivating organizational transparency within each regime. Vanguard transparency and pioneering transparency represent the desired regimes for fostering organizational transparency. In contrast, hollow transparency and deceptive transparency reveal a combination of determinants that cultivate less desirable forms of organizational transparency. Paradoxical transparency represents a regime in which socially desirable outcomes are associated with undesirable consequences for an organization.

This paper is among the first to theorize the drivers of organizational transparency and to discuss the limits and boundaries of organizational responses to transparency determinants.

Despite the many benefits of transparency, we explain why efforts to enhance organizational transparency often fail or are met with mixed results. By considering the three forces, managers and policymakers can avoid unexpected and undesired organizational responses to transparency regimes.

We propose five transparency regimes that place a spotlight on social contingencies to enhance transparency.

This study offers an integrative theory of organizational responses to transparency determinants and develops its theoretical foundations. The model integrates the fragmented empirical findings from previous studies on the determinants of transparency and draws attention to overlooked institutional, societal, and leadership forces that influence organizational transparency.

This research finds out to what extent companies’ names are influenced by the place’s attributes versus the official branding policies of a place and, consequently, whether and how local companies “buy into” the place’s strategies put forth by official bodies.

This paper is both conceptual and empirical, as a mixed quantitative and interpretive approach is used. The companies’ names of a tourist industry (the tour and guiding companies) in three destinations are compared and pitched against the branding of these cities. The companies' names are classified into categories to ascertain whether they reflect (or diverge from) the official strategies. Finally, a conceptual model is developed to explain the findings: the strategic naming model (SNM).

Our main finding is that the overall business features of a place being stronger determinants to the naming strategies than tourist destination branding initiatives. The intrinsic features of a place seem thus to be “above” destination branding policies. The researched features account for different naming strategies, such as highly original names, flat names or non-strategic names.

As the work is based on a convenience sample, it cannot claim strong representativity. The fact that each of the three data sets was processed by a different researcher might bring up personal biases.

This work is a call for a more intensive use of naming strategies to the companies’ advantages, as naming is found out to be strategy used to a very low degree. Thanks to this research, companies will understand the different naming possibilities and be able to apply them to their strategies by choosing names which express “uniqueness” or “belonging”. Practitioners will also be aware of whether they are communicating towards the industry or towards the market.

No works were found that empirically pursue our research goals. Therefore, this research might be considered as a novelty. The proposed SNM model explains and relates the most usual company naming techniques, which were unrelated up to date.

Organizations are confronted with problems and political risks to which they have to respond, presenting a need to develop tools and frames of understanding requisite to do so. In this article, we argue for the necessity of cultivating “political judgment” with a “sense of reality,” especially in the upper echelons of organizations. This article has two objectives: First to highlight how a number of recent interlinked developments within organizational analysis and practice have contributed to weakening judgment and its accompanying “sense of reality.” Second, to (re)introduce some canonical works that, although less in vogue recently, provide both a source of wisdom and frames of understanding that are key to tackling today’s problems. We begin by mapping the context in which the need for the cultivation of political judgment within organizations has arisen: (i) increasing proliferation of political risks and “wicked problems” to which it is expected that organizations adapt and respond; (ii) a wider historical and contemporary context in which the exercise of judgment has been undermined – a result of a combination of economics-inspired styles of theorizing and an associated obsession with metrics. We also explore the nature of “political judgment” and its accompanying “sense of reality” through the work of authors such as Philip Selznick, Max Weber, Chester Barnard, and Isaiah Berlin. We suggest that these authors have a weighty “sense of reality”; are antithetical to “high,” “abstract,” or “axiomatic” theorizing; and have a profound sense of the burden from exercising political judgment in difficult organizational circumstances.

This study aims to explore vocational education as stated in the basic constitution, law, government and ministerial regulations in the Indonesian context. This study aims to outline the Indonesian vocational education paradigm based on regulatory documents.

This research uses a qualitative document analysis approach by extracting vocational themes regarding senior high school and higher education from the available documents. The keywords used for document document analysis are education, vocational school and vocational higher education. These words are forced to be used to distinguish the types and levels that exist in Indonesian education.

The findings of this study identified that the political paradigms of vocational education, such as equality and justice, naming (regulative), purpose and life skills, the curriculum of local cultural value, decentralized authority, link and match and future paradigms are important themes raised in this study. This is a study to explore the politics of Vocational High School and Vocational Higher Education in Indonesia.

The vocational education policy documents in Indonesia that were analyzed may have been forgotten. As a result, the forgotten documents are not included in the analysis document. Forgotten interpretations and documents are part of the limitations of this research.

It is hoped that the findings of this research will have an impact on improving vocational education policies in Indonesia. This can also be a comparison for other countries in looking at vocational education paradigms and policies. In general, these research findings can help in improving vocational education policies. However, this research still has limitations in terms of the number of documents analyzed.

This study contributes to the promotion and political debate of vocational education nationally and internationally. The study further explores how interest groups are taking a role in achieving Vocational High School and Vocational Higher Education policies that are compatible with today’s needs and demands.

This study aims to understand the perceived emotions of human–artificial intelligence (AI) interactions in the private sector. Moreover, this research discusses the transferability of these lessons to the public sector.

This research analysed the comments posted between June 2022 and June 2023 in the global open Reddit online community. A data mining approach was conducted, including a sentiment analysis technique and a qualitative approach.

The results show a prevalence of positive emotions. In addition, a pertinent percentage of negative emotions were found, such as hate, anger and frustration, due to human–AI interactions.

The insights from human–AI interactions in the private sector can be transferred to the governmental sector to leverage organisational performance, governmental decision-making, public service delivery and the creation of economic and social value.

Beyond the positive impacts of AI in government strategies, implementing AI can elicit negative emotions in users and potentially negatively impact the brand of private and government organisations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research bridging the gap by identifying the predominant negative emotions after a human–AI interaction.

This paper aims to unravel the puzzle that the United Kingdom’s high-quality government accounting and fiscal architecture is associated with low-quality outcomes, including poor productivity growth, high public debt, public services which do not meet citizen expectations and historically high levels of taxation. It contributes to public sector accounting research in the fields of fiscal transparency and governance.

This paper uses Miller and Power’s (2013) economization framework and Dunsire’s (1990) concept of collibration to explain why being a global leader in public sector accounting reform and in fiscal and monetary architecture has not protected the UK from weak governance. The intersection of economization’s roles of accounting with modes of government accounting clarifies the puzzle.

Whereas accruals government accounting contributes to fiscal transparency, this is not a sufficient condition for well-judged policy and its effective application. Collibration is the dominant mechanism for mediation in the fiscally centralized UK, but it has failed to deliver stable outcomes, in part because Parliament is limited in its ability to hold back inappropriate behaviour by the Executive. Subjectivization has disrupted adjudication because governments at all levels resist constraints on their behaviour, with unpredictable and often damaging consequences.

This paper provides insights through the combined lens of economization and modes of government accounting, demonstrating the practical value of this conceptualization. Although some causes for unsatisfactory outcomes are specific to the UK, there are cautions for accounting and fiscal reformers in other countries, such as Member States of the European Union.

Previous research acknowledges the importance of stakeholders for destination branding. However, there is a lack of studies examining which specific online user discourses are triggered by stakeholder responses to destination brand communication. To address this gap, the purpose of this study is to analyze online user discourses initiated by stakeholder’s reactions to a destination image video and thus enhance knowledge on brand communication and management.

The authors investigated 2,187 online comments to 19 medial stakeholder reactions to a destination management organization (DMO) image video both by running a manual as well as a software-based content analysis. The explorative empirical study identifies seven major categories reflecting online user discourses triggered by stakeholder reactions to destination brand communication.

The explorative study indicates that stakeholder reactions to destination brand communication trigger online comments evolving within both the inner and outer tourism system. The discourse subjects, in turn, reflect both user-generated content of brand cocreation and brand codestruction. The findings expand literature in that previous studies on brand cocreation mainly refer to service encounters.

By identifying which online user discourses are triggered by stakeholder reactions to DMO brand communication, the authors provide managerial implications. Specifically, the authors suggest guidelines for all stages of destination communication campaigns to support online user discourses reflecting brand value cocreation and preventing brand value codestruction.

The study responds to a lack of research on online user discourses initiated by stakeholder reactions to DMO brand communication. Contrary to previous studies, the authors identify specific online user discourses relating not only to the inner but also to the outer tourism interest system. Revealed discourses, in turn, reflect brand cocreation and brand codestruction.

先前的研究确认了利益相关者对于目的地品牌塑造的重要性。然而, 目前缺乏研究探讨利益相关者对目的地品牌传播的反应, 会引发哪些特定的线上使用者论述。针对这个缺口, 本研究分析由利益相关者对目的地形象影片的反应所引发的线上使用者论述, 进而增进品牌传播与管理的知识。

作者通过手动和软件内容分析, 调查了 2,187 条在线评论, 涉及 19 个媒体利益相关者对目的地管理组织形象视频的反应。这项探索性实证研究确定了七个主要类别, 反映了利益相关者对目的地品牌传播的反应所引发的在线用户讨论。

本探索性研究表明, 利益相关者对目的地品牌传播的反应, 引发了在旅游系统内部和外部演变的在线评论。话语主体反过来反映了用户生成的品牌共创和品牌共建内容。 以往关于品牌共创的研究主要涉及服务接触, 而我们的研究结果拓展了这一研究领域。

通过确定利益相关者对目的地管理组织品牌传播的反应引发的在线用户话语, 我们提供了管理方面的启示。具体来说, 我们为目的地传播活动的各个阶段提出了指导方针, 以支持反映品牌价值共创和防止品牌价值共毁的在线用户话语。

我们的研究回应了由利益相关者对目的地管理组织品牌传播的反应所引发的线上使用者论述研究的缺乏。与先前的研究相反, 我们发现特定的线上使用者论述不仅与内部旅游利益体系有关, 也与其外部有关。所揭示的论述反过来反映了品牌共创和品牌共建。

Investigaciones anteriores reconocen la importancia de las partes interesadas en la creación de marcas de destino. Sin embargo, faltan estudios que examinen si los discursos específicos de los usuarios en línea son desencadenados por las respuestas de las partes interesadas a la comunicación de la marca de destino. Para colmar esta laguna, el presente estudio analiza los discursos de los usuarios en línea iniciados por las reacciones de los grupos de interés a un vídeo de imagen de un destino, mejorando con esto los conocimientos sobre comunicación y gestión de marcas.

Los autores investigan 2.187 comentarios en línea a 19 reacciones de grupos de interés mediáticos a un vídeo de la imagen de una OMD mediante un análisis de contenido tanto manual como basado en software. El estudio empírico explorativo identifica siete categorías principales que reflejan los discursos de los usuarios en línea desencadenados por las reacciones de las partes interesadas a la comunicación de la marca de destino.

El estudio exploratorio indica que las reacciones de las partes interesadas a la comunicación de la marca del destino desencadenan comentarios en línea que evolucionan dentro del sistema turístico interno y externo. A su vez, los temas del discurso reflejan tanto el contenido generado por los usuarios como la cocreación y la codestrucción de la marca. Nuestros hallazgos amplían la literatura en el sentido de que los estudios anteriores sobre cocreación de marcas se refieren principalmente a encuentros de servicios.

Al identificar qué discursos en línea de los usuarios desencadenan las reacciones de las partes interesadas a la comunicación de marca de los OMD, aportamos implicaciones para la gestión. En concreto, sugerimos directrices para todas las fases de las campañas de comunicación de los destinos, con el fin de apoyar los discursos en línea de los usuarios que reflejan la cocreación del valor de la marca y evitar la codestrucción de dicho valor.

Nuestro estudio responde a la falta de investigación sobre los discursos en línea de los usuarios iniciados por las reacciones de las partes interesadas a la comunicación de marca de las OMD. A diferencia de estudios anteriores, identificamos discursos específicos de usuarios en línea relacionados no sólo con el sistema de intereses turísticos interno, sino también con el externo. Los discursos revelados reflejan a su vez la cocreación y la codestrucción de la marca.

The main aim of this article is to broaden the notion of strategic intent in public relations. It also develops an understanding of the social value of what can be defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe based on strategic intents and the development of modernity.

The study is based on both historical research and empirical material from the Norwegian tuberculosis campaign from 1889 up to 1913, when Norwegian women achieved suffrage. The campaign is analysed in the framework of modernity and social theory. The literature on lobbying and social movements is also used to develop a theoretical framework for the notion of strategic intent.

The study shows that strategic intent can be divided into two layers: (1) the implicit strategic intent is the real purpose behind the communication efforts, whereas (2) the explicit intent is found directly in the communication efforts. The explicit intent may be presented as a solution for the good of society at the right political moment, giving an organisation the possibility to mobilise for long-term social changes, in which could be the implicit intent.

The distinction between explicit and implicit strategic intent broadens our understanding on how to make long-term social changes as well as how social and political changes occur in modern societies. The article also gives a historical account of what is here defined as the first modern health communication campaign in Europe and its social value.