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The authors aim to review a five‐year multi‐study research programme on the role of public dialogue in the social and cultural sustainability of biotechnology developments in New Zealand.

The authors conducted a critical review of all the published research products from a five‐year government‐funded study of the cultural and social aspects of sustainable biotechnology in New Zealand.

The review research highlights how New Zealand Government policies on biotechnology, which motivated the research programme, were fore‐grounded on economic progress and competitive positioning. Thus, debate on sustainable biotechnology issues became cast in economic and technical terms, while public dialogue became seen as diversionary and unsubstantiated. The analysis concludes that the programme was ineffective in influencing government policy and fell victim to the very problem of science governance that its purpose was designed to address.

The research develops implications regarding the ability of government‐funded sustainability research to influence policy.

The review focuses on the purpose, content, outcomes, and context of the research programme and identifies a number of key themes that arose from the programme that are useful for other sustainability policy researchers. The reviewers conclude that this case demonstrates that the marketization of the public sphere depoliticises the social and cultural construction of the nation's future.

The purpose of this paper is to address studies of New Public Governance (NPG) as a post-New Public Management (NPM) tendency. Although NPG is considered a contrast to NPM and its market incentives, it argues that the practices emerging in tensions of NPM and NPG discourses indicate not a clear-cut shift away from NPM, but rather changes that combine competition with collaboration and trust.

It offers a discourse approach to advance the theorizing and empirical unfolding of the tensions of contradicting, yet co-existing discourses of NPM and NPG and their effects in practice. Drawing on a case study from the Danish daycare sector, it investigates local collaborative governance initiatives that develop new quality-management methods.

The study elucidates how NPM and NPG discourses collide in local practices of public sector management within daycare. It shows that the discursive tensions between such value-laden practices indicate a changing marketization associated with collaboration and trust, yet also competition.

To research it becomes critical to advance theoretical and empirical knowledge on the constitutive effects of such complex discursive tensions in public organizations.

To practice it becomes necessary to acknowledge and handle co-existing, yet contradicting management discourses, and not mistake their opposing values as necessarily distinct, but rather as entangled in practice.

The paper contributes with original findings that shed new light on colliding management discourses in practices and their effects within the public sector area of daycare.

In Postmodern Public Administration: Toward Discourse (1995), Fox and Miller call for a postmodern discourse that can radicalize the reformist tendencies in public administration theory. This first edition neglects a powerful ally that can deepen this view of the decentered subject and illuminate some roadblocks to postmodern discourse theory, Michel Foucault. This paper challenges Fox and Millerʼs phenomenological notion of the self and offers Foucaultʼs characterization of the subject as an alternative that addresses how selves are created in and through discourse. This paper argues that the redemption of authentic discourse that Fox and Miller desire is not possible precisely because of the nature of the subject as already constituted. However, this does not mean that rich discourse ceases. Political ethics are still possible for deformed and decentered subjects.

This research investigates the presence of communitarian philosophy within contemporary Scottish public library strategy, exploring links between philosophy, politics and practice.

The paper follows a qualitative research approach, combining content analysis and discourse analysis methodologies for the analysis of a corpus of Scottish public library trust documentation according to a thematic framework of communitarian values.

The analysis revealed strong links between trust strategy and communitarian values but also highlighted contradictions within this form of communitarianism which belied a deeper neoliberal philosophical foundation. The research therefore identified a communitarian strategic service shift which introduced benefits of social inclusion, community autonomy and common good but also brought concerns of an inherently weakened communal foundation and the survival of a neoliberal status quo.

The analysis is focused on strategy in Scotland only and thus can only claim to be representative of that country. However, the growth in communitarian strategies in the public sector is informed from the analysis undertaken.

The paper provides a novel analysis of public library strategy and thus contributes to the understanding of public library practice in the modern era.

The impacts of communitarian philosophy in the public sphere are under-researched and how these changes impact the mission of libraries needs to be better understood.

This is the first analysis to consider public library strategy from a communitarian point of view. As such, it provides novel insights into a growing area of public service development.

Wicked problems require holistic and systemic thinking that accommodates interdisciplinary solutions and cross-sectoral collaborations between private and public sectors. This paper explores how public relations (PR) – as a boundary-spanning function at the nexus of corporate and political discourse – can support societies to tackle wicked problems.

This conceptual paper synthesizes literature on PR with a service ecosystem perspective. The authors use the service ecosystem design framework to structure the PR literature and develop a model of service ecosystem shaping for social change, which highlights the important role that PR can play in shaping processes.

The authors explicate how PR can (1) facilitate value cocreation processes between broad sets of stakeholders that drive positive social change, (2) shape institutional arrangements in general and public discourse in particular, (3) provide a platform for recursive feedback loops of reflexivity and (re)formation that enables discourse to ripple through nested service ecosystems and (4) guide collective shaping efforts by bringing stakeholder concerns and beliefs into the open, which provides a foundation for collective sense-making of wicked problems and their solutions.

This paper explains the complexity of shaping service ecosystems for positive social change. Specifically, it highlights how solving wicked problems and driving social change requires reconfiguration of the institutional arrangements that guide various nested service ecosystems. The authors discuss in detail how PR can contribute to the shaping of service ecosystems for social change and present a future research agenda for both service and PR scholars to consider.

This paper aims to explore the nature of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, which takes place in one‐on‐one meetings between institutional investors and their investee companies.

Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with representatives from 20 UK investment institutions to derive data which was then coded and analysed, in order to derive a picture of the emerging discourse of private climate change reporting, using an interpretive methodological approach, in addition to explorative analysis using NVivo software.

The authors find that private climate change reporting is dominated by a discourse of risk and risk management. This emerging risk discourse derives from institutional investors' belief that climate change represents a material risk, that it is the most salient sustainability issue, and that their clients require them to manage climate change‐related risk within their portfolio investment. It is found that institutional investors are using the private reporting process to compensate for the acknowledged inadequacies of public climate change reporting. Contrary to evidence indicating corporate capture of public sustainability reporting, these findings suggest that the emerging private climate change reporting discourse is being captured by the institutional investment community. There is also evidence of an emerging discourse of opportunity in private climate change reporting as the institutional investors are increasingly aware of a range of ways in which climate change presents material opportunities for their investee companies to exploit. Lastly, the authors find an absence of any ethical discourse, such that private climate change reporting reinforces rather than challenges the “business case” status quo.

Although there is a wealth of sustainability reporting research, there is no academic research on private climate change reporting. This paper attempts to fill this gap by providing rich interview evidence regarding the nature of the emerging private climate change reporting discourse.

While liberals agree that the best society is one that supports the equal exercise of personal liberty, there is little agreement among them on what policies best achieve this end. Conflicts within liberalism over the place of socially derived goals vis-à-vis personal liberty and autonomy create tension and skew public discourse on policy alternatives. In this article, I characterize the debate among dominant strands of liberal ideology and consider the effort of Charles Taylor to resolve these tensions. Finding his resolution unsatisfying, I explore the alternative conception offered by American pragmatism. I argue that liberal theories fail because they fall prey to the problem of principles-they attempt to justify axiomatic thinking rather than perpetuate society and culture. Pragmatism provides a justification for liberal public discourse as the best mechanism for constructing, evaluating and revising policies that support cultural adaptation to social, economic and technological contingencies.

Purpose — The chapter seeks to examine the impact of neoliberal language on the library profession in the United Kingdom. Since New Labour's election in 1997 public service restructuring in the United Kingdom took on a more oblique managerialist and consumerist approach. The impact of managerialism in the public library service has focused mainly on modernising and improving services to the individual user, and is based on scenarios where public libraries have to model themselves on the private sector, and where managers have been empowered over professionals.

Design/methodology/approach — The chapter uses a mixed methods approach by combining content and discourse analysis to examine how neoliberal discourses have impacted on public librarianship through examination of government policy documents, and other works on public libraries in the era under study.

Findings — The study highlights neoliberal narratives within public library policy documents in the period, with emphasis on deprofessionalisation and consumerist attitudes related to public choice evident. The discussion reveals how narratives of elitism and decline are used to describe the public library service, which reinforces negative stereotypes of a service in distress.

Research limitations/implications — The study only relates to the period 1997–2010 with an emphasis on the United Kingdom, thus cannot be seen to be representative of all public library services.

Originality/value — The study utilises a mixed method approach to examine narratives within public library policy, and reflects on an important period in public library development, and offers a unique insight into the period.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the threats and potential of Big Data for strategic communication. It explains the concepts of datafication and Big Data and establishes the social and cultural context of Big Data from the way those constructing algorithms superimpose their value systems and cultural references onto the data. It links Big Data and strategic communication through the segmentation devices and strategies both use and propose discourse analysis as a valid method for the critique of Big Data. The importance of strategic communication for the public sphere suggests that Big Data can pose a serious threat to public discourse.

This is a conceptual and theoretical paper that first explains and interprets various new terms and concepts and then uses established theoretical approaches to analyze these phenomena.

The use of Big Data for the micro-segmentation of audiences establishes its relationship with strategic communication. Big Data analyses and algorithms are not neutral. Treating algorithms as language and communication allow them to be subjected to discourse analysis to expose underlying power relations for resistance strategies to emerge. Strategic communicators should guard the public sphere and take an activist stance against the potential harm of Big Data. That requires a seat at the institutional technology table and speaking out against discriminatory practices. However, Big Data can also greatly benefit society and improve discourse in the public sphere.

There is not yet empirical data available on the impact of datafication on communication practice, which might be a problem well into the future. It also might be hard to do empirical research on its impact on practice and the public sphere. The heuristic value of this piece is that it laid down the theoretical foundations of the phenomena to be studied, which can in future be used for ethnographic research or qualitative studies. It might eventually be possible to follow personalized messages generated through datafication to study if they actually lead to behavior change in specific audience members.

As guardians of the public sphere strategic communication practitioners have to educate themselves on the realities of Big Data and should consciously acquire a seat at the institutional technology table. Practitioners will need to be involved in decisions on how algorithms are formulated and who they target. This will require them to serve as activists to ensure social justice. They also will need to contribute to organizational transparency by making organizational information widely available and accessible through media bought, owned, and earned. Strategic communicators need to create a binary partnership with journalists of all kinds to secure the public sphere.

The paper exposes the role of algorithms in the construction of data and the extent to which algorithms are products of people who impose their own values and belief systems on them. Algorithms and the data they generate are subjective and value-laden. The concept of algorithms as language and communication and the use of Big Data for the segmentation of society for purposes of communication establish the connection between Big Data and strategic communication. The paper also exposes the potential for harm in the use of Big Data, as well as its potential for improving society and bringing about social justice.

The value of this paper is that it introduces the concept of datafication to communication studies and proposes theoretical foundations for the study of Big Data in the context of strategic communications. It provides a theoretical and social foundation for the inclusion of the public sphere in a definition of strategic communication and emphasizes strategic communicators’ commitment to the public sphere as more important than ever before. It highlights how communication practice and society can impact each other positively and negatively and that Big Data should not be the future of strategic communication but only a part of it.

This study seeks to understand the opinions of internet users toward extreme speech on social media platforms and their willingness to censor such speech. The purpose of this paper is to examine how norms of freedom of expression are changing in an online communication environment dominated by these platforms.

Four focus groups were conducted in this study. Participants needed to use at least one social media platform daily. Groups were homogeneous in terms of race and gender: African-American females, African-American males, white females and white males.

Participants in general did not report a strong willingness to censor extreme speech on social media platforms. Rather, they expressed apathy and cynicism toward both their own and social media companies’ ability to combat extreme speech and make online discourse more positive. Female participants tended to value the overall health of public discourse and protection of more vulnerable social media users on social media platforms. African-American female participants called for platforms to recognize a special duty to protect minority users, whom they saw as responsible for the platforms’ success.

Focus groups are useful for providing exploratory rather than generalizable data. However, by increasing the understanding of how individuals define extreme speech on social media, these data can reveal how individuals rhetorically shape the social media platforms and interpret their role in democratic discourse.

This research takes the rich field of studying tolerance toward extreme speech to new territory: the online realm where public discourse (and especially extreme discourse) is hosted more and more.