Welcome to Jump 4
Welcome to Jump 4. Because practitioners often miss great academic studies. Because I do a lot of reading.
Some admin, I haven’t quite decided how frequently to publish this newsletter. Being realistic I don’t think I can keep producing a newsletter every week, and I will need some holiday in the next month. So for now, aiming for every two weeks
…in this edition:
* Nike’s corporate social advocacy
* Cricket Australia’s 2018 crisis
* Canada to get tough on enforcing lobbying regulations
* Lobbying the World Health Organisation
* Bird song on the Tokyo underground
FEATURED Research: Nike’s Corporate Social Advocacy
Think I am allowed to fit in an paper with some topicality with the 2020 Olympics currently taking place in Japan. Damion Waymer and Nneka Logan (Alabama and Virginia Tech) earlier this year had a paper published looking at Nike’s Corporate Social Advocacy.
Historically associated with social irresponsibility through shocking treatment of workers and human rights violations, in the last decade Nike have attempted to associate themselves instead with confronting barriers of access and inequality. One example is their sponsorship of former NFL quarterback turned-activist Colin Kaepernick, working with him to question if certain iterations of the US flag were racially offensive.
Their paper asked how does Nike’s organisational history coupled with its current Corporate Social Advocacy (CSA) enhance our understanding of engagement? Now engagement is a slippery term. It is widely used in PR academic writing and by practitioners. But often quite vaguely. This paper opts for this definition:
“Engagement is defined as a dynamic multidimensional relational concept featuring psychology and behavioral attributes of connection, interaction, participation, and involvement, designed to achieve or elicit an outcome at individual, organization, or social levels…The social and relational aspects of engagement help to expose worldviews that orient communicative exchanges between organizations and publics” (Johnston & Taylor, 2018, p. 10).
The paper analysed Nike’s recent statements and campaign actions that were related to issues of social justice. It found that Nike’s communications were creating engagement with brand fans, fans of sponsored athletes, media and Nike’s critics. The subject of the engagement was gender and racial justice.
What is interesting is that, through sceptical eyes, the authors saw some value in Nike’s CSA engagement:
“The company took a bold stance on sensitive social issues and then built communication campaigns around them as well as utilized their progressive stance to orient corporate actions on endorsements and sponsorships. This set of actions laid a foundation for various forms of stakeholder and public engagement, to include those who wanted to disengage with the company as a result of its controversial stances. While some may view disengagement or backlash negatively, counter opinions are an important part of a healthy democracy and marketplace of ideas. The right, ability, and capacity to dissent fuels Nike’s challenges to male patriarchy and racial injustice that characterize its CSA.”
Link to full paper: https://tinyurl.com/ed6v6mkk
OVER THE (PAY) WALL
* Sport related paper 2: Crisis communication in international sport. The 2018 Cricket Australia ball tampering (i.e. cheating) crisis. What is interesting about this paper by Ashlee Morgan and Violetta Wilk (Edith Cowan) is that they track public sentiment toward the brand in crisis – Cricket Australia – over time to see how it would evolve.
The paper uses a framework to categorise the stages. Starting with the early development of an identity and labelling of the crisis. The next stage was sense making, where audiences focus both on blame and contextual discussion of broader issues. Then a focus on the changes occurring or being implemented by Cricket Australia. Finally the rebuilding and cautious moving forward.
The paper concludes that studying audiences requires factoring in sarcasm, especially in online commenting on sports, where frankly, there’s a whole lot of sarcasm going on.
* Alexander Buhmann (BI Norwegian Business School) and colleagues take a deep, deep dive into some of the most prominent attempts to develop professional standards of measurement and evaluation of public relations campaigns.
Full paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvshx
* How has the Ultra-processed food industry been attempting to lobbying and influence the World Health Organisation and its policies?
NOTABLE
* Already held up as having one the better sets of lobbying regulations, Canada is considering new reforms. Canada’s federal Commissioner of Lobbying made a number of new recommendations. The one that caught my eye was around enforcement measures “such as requiring training, imposing administrative monetary penalties, and ordering temporary lobbying prohibitions for relatively minor infractions”. If that recommendation is accepted Canada will truly be in a different league of lobbying regulation.
CULTURAL HINTERLAND
Jake Cunningham in Little White Lies magazine on the use of bird song in film soundtracks. An article in which I learnt this about the Tokyo underground system…
I found a short youtube video where you can hear the bird song