Yolandi Botha PhD

Strategic sustainability communication has the potential to acculturate internal and external organisational contexts. Strategic sustainability communication could broaden societal values and social learning while building collaborative networks toward societal, environmental, and economic well-being. Arguably, internal and organisational communication is the starting point to convey and achieve an organisation’s sustainability messages and goals. Thus, this chapter takes a two-pronged approach to strategic sustainability communication from an organisational perspective. Firstly, as we argue, a necessary precondition for communication for sustainability is several considerations for sustainable employee engagement. These considerations are grounded in an approach that allows for reflectivity and encourages radical leadership thinking towards a decentralised leadership approach. Such an approach may be facilitated by the strategic communication professional as the broker of collaboration. This, arguably, contributes to the establishment of an innovation culture for curiosity-driven knowledge within an organisation. Such a culture has the potential to build a transdisciplinary response to complex problems. Secondly, these considerations for sustainable employee engagement collectively serve as enablers for communication about sustainability, addressing the sustainability issues and goals of the organisation while encouraging a desire within employees to extend these sustainability practices outside the organisation.

The Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA), a special interest group that publicises the romance form and provides opportunities for readers to network and discuss the genre, has run a dedicated annual survey since 2009. The survey results between 2009 and 2023 illustrate the changing reading practices of respondents, especially in terms of modes of reading, preferred subgenres of romance, purchasing habits, information sources about new romances, and book formats. This article describes key survey results in terms of the changing characteristics and practices of the respondents. Key findings include that respondents generally read quickly, they read a lot, tend to always carry a romance novel, increasingly embrace eBook use, undertake most reading at home, and increasingly try a broad range of romance subgenres. The surveys provide insights into the importance of social media marketing and recommendations for readers to learn about new books. The ARRA survey data between 2009 and 2023 provides insights for writers who wish to strategically market their texts while showing some of the changing practices and trends of respondents. Overall, this paper emphasises that the romance reading respondents are highly committed, engaged and discerning in their decision-making and reading practices.

This article addresses the gap in crisis response literature by exploring rebranding as crisis response from a stakeholder relationship management perspective, drawing from the collaborative pillars of co-creation, social capital, sense-making, and sense-giving. The rebranding of Facebook to Meta is explored as a pragmatic scancis (a crisis that transfigures into a scandal) to understand its rebranding strategy as a crisis response. Through the thematic analysis of 50 online articles published between September 2021 and November 2021, a strong emphasis was placed on the crisis Facebook/Meta was facing, leading to the rebrand. Using the theoretical lens of primary and secondary crisis response strategies, it was found that Facebook/Meta used a defensive approach to divert the attention of stakeholders with the brand, while limited evidence was found that Facebook/Meta prioritized their stakeholders in their secondary crisis response. The process of influencing the sense-making and meaning construction of stakeholders by Meta was considered negatively and thus not aligned with the concept of sense-making, resulting in its inability to co-create a rebranded company that garnered the support of its stakeholders. This article moves beyond existing studies that focus on the building blocks of stakeholder relations in crisis response contexts through an exploration of four collaborative pillars of social capital, co-creation sense-making, and sense-giving. The article uniquely extends rebranding to crisis response literature by proposing a rebranding co-creation framework that provides much-needed guidelines to organizations facing a morally induced crisis.

Organizational credibility is an important component of organizational survival. The need to build and maintain organizational credibility in the social media context is specifically significant, largely due to the popularity of the medium in the current interactive communication environment. Social media, however, create a challenging environment for accurate information consumption, because it excludes the journalistic gatekeeper, are subject to misinformation and allow for information proliferation by both official and nonofficial users. For organizations to enhance their credibility in the social media context, it is important, firstly, to determine what constitutes social organization credibility. To establish an enhanced understanding of social organizational credibility and to build towards a formal conceptualization, this article quantitatively explored the preliminary identified determinants of social organizational credibility among active social media users. An exploratory factor analysis indicated that social organizational credibility consists of the determinants of trustworthiness, qualified resonance, homophily, personable interaction, informed conversation, and apt social word-of-mouth. Furthermore, the results also highlighted that an organization's connections (including social media influencers and experts) are also a key determinant of social organizational credibility. This research provides guidance as to how social media users assess an organization's credibility in the social media context, which could help alleviate the misinformation stigma that is associated with social media as an interactive communication platform. The identified determinants and the conceptualization of social organizational credibility extend existing organizational credibility literature and provide organizations with much needed guidelines to enhance their credibility in the social media context.

This article proposes a new concept, co-change-orientated communication (co-COC), whichencapsulates the daily social and communication processes of organisational members inmaking sense of change from a critical strategic communication perspective. Guided by anevolutionary approach to concept development, this article aims to quantitatively measure thepragmatic relevance of identified attributes and antecedents of co-COC to the development ofa fully-fledged concept at six high-change South African organisations. An exploratory factoranalysis confirmed that co-COC is attributed by meaningful dialogue, employee engagement,collaboration and co-creation, and the encouragement of dissent. It is bottom-up in nature andenabled by the antecedents of organisational agility, leadership agility, a change-able cultureand stakeholder engagement. Co-COC further extends theoretical development on the need forchange in approaches to communication that support ongoing organisational change and hasvepotential to assist communication professionals to recognise the need and pragmatic relevance ofcontemporary developments in strategic communication. The various antecedents and attributesof co-COC could also provide organisations with guidance on the implementation of changeorientatedcommunication approaches in support of ongoing organisational change.

The importance of stakeholder engagement for organisational survival is widely recognised and supported. The interactive, polyphonic organisational context has placed added emphasis on stakeholder engagement. Strategic communication professionals are increasingly becoming responsible for creating connection among diverse voices which necessitates their involvement in the stakeholder engagement process. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of the strategic communication professional in the stakeholder engagement process in contemporary, polyphonic (multivoiced) strategic communication. This was done by determining the pragmatic relevance of two approaches to stakeholder engagement, namely deliberate-emergent and radical-emergent. A quantitative research design was employed using a web-based survey, which was distributed to communication professionals in academia and practice. An exploratory factor analysis highlighted two approaches to stakeholder engagement that recognises the importance of stakeholder conversations and inputs, while honouring conventional planning as a key activity for successful stakeholder engagement. The results of this study provide guidance to organisational management on engaging stakeholders in line with the current polyphonic organisational context. The study also affirms the indispensable role of the communication professional in the stakeholder engagement process, either to provide stakeholder guidance or to contribute to stakeholder enablement and empowerment.

This chapter aims to define social justice; describe classic, modern and postmodern viewpoints of social justice; explain the link between social justice, identity and stakeholder relationships; outline how brand legitimacy is formed and influenced as a socially constructed concept; explain the shift from corporate social responsibility to corporate social responsiveness and explain how social justice leads to corporate social responsiveness in building brand legitimacy and social capital.

The increasing pluralistic business environment, where stakeholders continually challenge the treatise of organisational primacy, places more pressure on organisations to address and prioritise diverse stakeholder expectations. Stakeholders are central to the success of organisations, which necessitates engagement, transparency and responses to stakeholder concerns. Despite consensus in existing literature on the significance of stakeholder engagement, no common understanding on what it entails exists. Another gap is to approach stakeholder engagement from multiple stakeholder vantage points and to explore the role of the strategic communication professional in facilitating stakeholder engagement. The digital network revolution, among others, has brought about a “collaborative turn” that allows innovative and engaging opportunities to obtain valuable information from stakeholders through interactive conversations. These forces resulted in a paradigmatic shift in strategic communication where emergent processes and the rejection of linearity become prevalent. The role of the strategic communication professional is to facilitate a stakeholder engagement strategy that elicits dialogue, consultation and reciprocal relationships that are evolutionary and mutually defined. Based on this contextualisation, this paper proposes a theoretical, conceptual framework for multiple stakeholder engagement by drawing from the principles of polyphonic strategic communication. Depending on the controllability of voices, a polyphonic communication perspective for multiple stakeholder engagement allows interplay between a centralised strategic communication approach through stakeholder enablement and a more decentralised communication approach to elicit stakeholder empowerment. This paper serves as foundation for further empirical validation of the proposed multiple stakeholder engagement framework and emergent, multi-voiced approaches in strategic communication.