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An issue and event were tracked for 90 days on Twitter, cable television, and large newspapers. The mortgage and housing crisis was an ongoing issue, and the BP oil spill was an ongoing event. As expected, the results suggest media as a predictor of Twitter for the two issue agendas studied. However, this study shows that the agenda-setting effects on Twitter are not equal in regard to issues and events. The agenda-setting effect of the media appeared to be stronger for the issue observed here. Moreover, initial evidence is provided that agendas for the ongoing events were more volatile than ongoing issues. For ongoing events, it appears that agendas are most reflective of the real-world cues that initiate them. This suggests that when real-world cues are largely absent, the media are less salient, and the agenda is more stable and ongoing. Finally, increased temporality appears to better reveal agenda-setting effects for events. Relaxed temporal measures appear to reveal the agenda-setting effect of ongoing issues more effectively. Events are not all equal; neither are issues. As such, the media and Twitter behave differently. This distinction has not yet been made in the literature.

It is crucial for corporate communication to know how different public sources frame a crisis and how these sources influence each other. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of Facebook by examining – if the public represented on Facebook contributes distinct frames to the discursive negotiation of a crisis at all, and whether the public represented on Facebook is able to influence the crisis framing of news media.

The authors compared how four different public sources framed the Nestlé Kit Kat crisis: news media, corporate communication, NGOs, and Facebook users. The authors therefore, coded 5,185 sentences from the four sources and conducted a frame-analysis through the detection of co-occurrence between actors and attributions. A cross-correlation with a seven-day lag in each direction was applied to detect the frame-setting effects between the public represented on Facebook and news media.

While the public represented on Facebook is found to apply distinct crisis frames in comparison to conventional sources, its frame-setting power is limited. In contrast to findings from political communication, it is rather the news media that influences the crisis framing in social media. The role of the public represented on Facebook, hence, appears marginal in comparison to news media that remain a major force in the discursive negotiation of a corporate crisis.

As a first study, crisis framing in social media is compared with that of news media, NGOs, and corporate communication. Second, so far there have been no studies in the corporate communication field investigating the frame-setting effects between social media and news media. Contrary to social media’s promising frame-setting power ascribed by some scholars, the authors do not find such effects with Facebook, the most popular social media tool to date.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the interrelationships that exist between politicians' Twitter agendas, news websites agendas and public agendas at the first level during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections for the two front-runners of the elections, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras. Three researches were conducted to assess the issues agendas of candidates' tweets, news websites coverage as well as the issue importance of the public for an 18-day period prior to the elections. At the issue level, although Twitter and media agendas align more, they are distinct from public agenda. Overall, Twitter proved to be an ineffective tool for influencing the news websites and public agendas during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections with online media agendas being slightly more powerful. Moreover, the public agenda did play a role in shaping Twitter as well as media content but in a counterbalancing manner. In addition, this study confirmed that agenda building and setting dynamics at both levels vary based on the issue and candidate being analysed.

This study aims to examine factors, beyond child requests, that influence parents’ perceptions of the most important gifts to give their children by assessing the influence of television advertising on children’s programming.

Using agenda-setting as a theoretical and methodological template, a content analysis of 7,860 commercials in children’s programming was compared using a questionnaire to 143 parents of 240 children to test the transfer of salience between advertising and parents’ perceptions. The study also examined the role of child purchase requests in this relationship.

The product categories that most prevalently advertised on children’s television had a significant relationship with the product categories that parents perceived to be the most important to give their children as gifts. Furthermore, the results indicate that this relationship was not contingent upon parental advertising mediation or child product requests.

The results are limited to a single broadcast market during the Christmas season. Strategically, the research suggests that advertising through children’s television programming may be an effective way to directly inform parents’ gift-giving consideration sets, and this target and outlet should be strategically evaluated in subsequent campaign decisions about the marketing mix.

The findings add new insights to the gift-giving literature, indicating that advertising in children’s programming may be an alternative direct influence on parents’ perceptions. This research also extends research on advertising agenda setting into the new context of commercial advertising of consumer products.

The authors examine the extent to which a controller's involvement in project functions (namely definition and scope, organization, constraints management and risk management) cascades down to project performance.

The authors test the study’s framework using survey data from a sample of project leaders in German and Swiss firms. Responses were analyzed using the partial least squares (PLS) technique.

The authors find that controllers contribute to project success via the previously described project functions. Further, the study reveals the crucial role of controllers in managing uncertainty and project risks.

Although the arguments used in this research were not country specific and suggest that the findings of this study also apply to the controller professional in general, this study clearly acknowledges that further research is needed to address the effects of this role in different jurisdictions given the specific characteristics of controllers acting in German-speaking countries.

The authors provide insights on the role of controllers at an operational level, like project management, highlighting the need for controllers to support an effective project governance.

The authors add to the literature by examining the role of controllers in highly knowledge-intensive, highly pressured, task-driven, interdependent and dynamic operational settings, thus contributing to a better understanding of how controllers function at an operational level. The authors also strengthen a broader role of controllers in project management that goes beyond their historical controlling activities to include more modern functions, extending previous studies analyzing their professional identity.

Corporations in all industries recognize the demand for responsible business behavior and have developed corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs accordingly. This paper examines to which extent sustainability practices – unrelated to the actual ingredients of a consumable product – affect brand equity, taste perceptions, and perceived emotional value. In an experimental setting, effects were determined of the presence or lack of a sustainability-marketing message within a beer brand’s promotional material. The constructs were measured in a survey, and a PLS-SEM was used to analyze the results. In the factor model, all constructs proved to be sufficiently reliable and valid. The experiment’s results indicate that taste perception is positively influenced by the presence of a sustainability message.

The present study attempts to contribute to the knowledge of how customer satisfaction, loyalty and commitment are defined and relate to each other in the Greek context.

It is based on 200 responses collected from 20 service providers in four service settings: financial services, retailing, entertainment and transportation services.

Both factor‐ and reliability analyses provided satisfactory results. Surprisingly, company satisfaction was not interpreted as a conceptually distinct construct from customer loyalty; a conceptual overlap also emerged between attitudinal loyalty and loyal behavioral actions such as word of mouth; whereas customer commitment was highly positively associated with loyalty (and satisfaction), according to expectations. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to investigate potential moderating effects of gender and service setting on the satisfaction‐commitment and commitment‐loyalty relationships. Although significant differences were identified, both gender and service setting did not moderate the relationship between satisfaction and commitment and between commitment and loyalty in the sample studied.

It may be relevant for future research to replicate the present study utilizing transaction‐specific and/or facet satisfaction measures instead of the overall, cumulative satisfaction construct employed in the present investigation. Moreover, incorporating measures of purchase loyalty and instrumental commitment as well as financial performance indices and use of longitudinal approaches in different sub‐sectors may also lead to an enhanced understanding of the dynamic nature of the variables analyzed.

While the relationship between customer loyalty and satisfaction as well as between commitment and customer loyalty are well understood in the literature, the inter‐relationships among these constructs are not so well illustrated. The discriminant validity of satisfaction and loyalty needs to be further investigated – highlighting potential effects of culture, method and measure variance. To the knowledge of the researcher no prior study has attempted to address these issues in the Greek context, unfamiliar to many readers.

This paper is an investigation of the volume, nature and tone of news media coverage of the federal Lifeline Program from its inception to 2018. It aims to examine whether news media coverage is correlated with significant episodes of reform in the program.

Using the ProQuest Major Dailies database, articles covering the “Lifeline Program” were analyzed. Specifically, a quantitative codebook was developed, based on the literature, and four coders were trained to systematically analyze the 124 articles that discussed the program between 1985 and 2018.

The findings suggest that reforms in the program were preceded by significantly higher volumes of media coverage; however, the analysis is unable to confirm that negative media coverage has a stronger agenda setting effect. In addition, no significant difference was found between positive and negative news stories in their use of research-based information.

This study is interdisciplinary in its ability to combine policy and journalism studies as a mechanism to understand the relationship between the two forces.

This paper examines whether target returns act as specific goals that impact risk-taking when individuals make investment decisions.

Using an experimental setting, the authors assign either a low or a high target return to participants and ask them to make independent investment decisions as the risk-free rate fluctuates around their target return and, for some of them, becomes negative.

Building on cumulative prospect theory, the authors find that the prevailing reference point of participants is the target return, regardless of the level of the risk-free rate. This result still holds even when the risk-free rate is negative, suggesting that (1) the target return drives risk-taking more than does a zero-threshold and (2) negative rates are limited as a tool to stimulate appetites for risk. In a follow-up study, the authors show that these conclusions remain valid when the target return is endogenously determined.

The authors' original approach, which pioneers the use of target returns in both the positive and negative interest rate contexts, provides insightful results about the “reach for yield” among regular people.