Anne Vestergaard

Facebook and the public framing of a corporate crisis

Purpose – 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. Design/methodology/approach – The authors compared how four different public sources framed the Nestle 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. Findings – While the public represented on Facebook is f...

Humanitarian appeal and the paradox of power

Humanitarian organizations have in the past 10 years enjoyed immense support with their western publics. At the same time, however, the humanitarian sector is under increasing pressure from various sources, under scrutiny for its administration costs, its marketized practices and its alleged politicization. Some say that humanitarianism is in crisis. This article examines the development of humanitarian advertising through analysis of 124 newspaper ads published in the period from 1970 to 2005. Using a discourse analytical approach which combines institution analysis with multimodal text analysis, it draws out the most marked changes that can be observed in the mode of appeal employed during this period, with a view to understanding the impact of the changing conditions of existence of humanitarian organizations on their public appeal. The article exposes an increasing submission of humanitarian organizations to external demands, in terms of their choice of beneficiaries for public attention and in terms of the symbolic relations they set up between donors and beneficiaries. It is argued that this development is associated with a paradox of power and results in humanitarian organizations surrendering their moral authority and professional expertise.

Identity and Appeal in the Humanitarian Brand

Non-profit organizations belong to a sector where the diffusion of corporate norms and values has been very pronounced in recent years, bringing into play inherent tensions between commercial and noncommercial logics. This chapter examines humanitarian discourse as an example of a domain of social life that is branded and marketed as if it were a corporate product. It discusses the factors that brings this change about and, on the basis of analyses of two humanitarian TV spots, investigates the consequences in terms of the transformed organizational identities that emerge from their mediatization.

Introduction: Social Media and Civic Engagement

Social media have been praised for their potential for facilitating civic engagement. At a time when one of the most difficult problems facing democracy in the Western hemisphere is the decline in citizens’ participation in politics (Dahlgren, 2009), this potential has been vested with hopes that social media can help reinvigorate extra-parliamentarian political participation — i.e. participation beyond the rights and obligations of liberal citizenship (e.g. voting) — and thus strengthen democratic accountability at national and international levels (e.g. Castells, 2013; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). These accounts have highlighted new possibilities for bottom-up, self-organizing participation such as direct democracy and for bypassing mass media gatekeepers and taking action to address issues directly. At the same time, sceptics have pointed to challenges social media pose to extra-parliamentarian political participation. These accounts have highlighted the dominance of commercial interests, individualization, non-committal participation — or ‘clicktivism’ — and security and censorship (e.g. Dahlgren, 2013; Gladwell, 2010; Juris, 2012; Uldam, 2014).

The Power of Words and the Words of the Powerful

This symposium engages with the All Academy Theme by arguing that the power of words – their capacity to condition our understandings of the world and our possibilities to act in that world – is tied to the power of those who utter them. Taking Corporate Social Responsibility, and particularly CSR communication, as its focus, it addresses the power of corporations over public discourse on issues of CSR, including the role of social media platforms and discussion forums. This symposium explores the issue from two perspectives: (1) the power of corporations over opportunities for people to have a voice and be heard on what affects their lives and (2) the impact of corporate voices on wider publics. The Ideological ‘Truth Effects’ of Discursive CSR Presenter: Peter Fleming; Queen Mary U. of London Management of visibility: silencing critical voices in the (online) public sphere Presenter: Julie Uldam; Copenhagen Business School CSR Rhetoric of Retailers under Austerity: The Case of Greece and the Sale of Nat...