To speak or not to speak: How public relations can influence authentic corporate social advocacy and support organizational reputation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past decade, organizations have faced pressure to speak out on divisive social and political issues, a practice scholars define as corporate social advocacy (CSA). Although there are benefits to engaging in CSA, CSA also carries inherent risks, including to organizational reputation. As such, several scholars posit that CSA has emerged as an important function of the public relations practice. This capstone furthers the research on this theory through the following thesis: when public relations professionals are given the autonomy and have the influence to use ethical decision-making frameworks in guiding their organization’s CSA efforts, the CSA is more likely to be authentic and positively impact the organization’s reputation. Academic literature on CSA, public relations excellence, ethics, and reputation formed the foundation of a normative theory, which the researcher tested through a survey and in-depth interviews with public relations professionals at Canadian and American corporations. Results demonstrate that most public relations professionals are empowered to participate in their organization’s CSA decision-making and strategy development, which drives authentic CSA and may contribute to a positive organizational reputation. Moreover, public relations professionals who consider ethics in their CSA decision-making are more likely to achieve authentic CSA. This research surfaced practical recommendations for promoting authentic CSA that may contribute to organizational reputation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".