Ensuring Corporate Security and Its Strategic Communication in Healthcare Institutions in Slovenia.

Ensuring corporate security is an essential and critical component of any healthcare facility to provide safe services to its patients and employees. Healthcare facilities must employ a variety of strategies to ensure corporate security. This includes developing a comprehensive communication plan that defines the roles and responsibilities of the various stakeholders. The objective of our study was to present the concept of corporate security in healthcare institutions and in the Slovenian healthcare system, to highlight current threats in healthcare institutions in Slovenia, to describe the importance of strategic communication of corporate security in healthcare, and finally to define the current state of corporate security in Slovenian healthcare institutions in Slovenia. A survey was conducted and distributed to healthcare institutions in Slovenia to obtain results. A total of 154 healthcare stakeholders participated in our study. The results showed that corporate security is present in Slovenian healthcare facilities, but additional efforts are needed to improve it, especially considering the current challenges related to the measures taken after the COVID-19 epidemic and the shortage of healthcare personnel. The legal processes of corporate security in healthcare facilities comply with applicable laws and regulations to protect the interests of their patients and employees. Operational security processes are currently provided primarily by internal providers. There is a need for improvement, particularly in the training and education of staff, who play the most important role in ensuring safety. To effectively establish comprehensive corporate security, strategic communication with all stakeholders is essential to ensure that their security policies and procedures are properly implemented.

The WHO?s communication strategies on social media during the early stage of the 2021 COVID vaccination campaign

The crisis caused by COVID-19 forced public and private actors to deploy various strategies on social media to communicate effectively with their public. This research analyses the institutional communication of the World Health Organization's Twitter account during the first quarter of 2021, with the aim of shedding light on their strategy and analyzing both its strengths and the areas with room for improvement in a crisis like the one studied. For this purpose, an ethnographic content analysis was run on the tweets published by the institutional account of the WHO and the responses issued by the public. A computer-assisted analysis was undertaken through two software programs (SPSS 27 and NVivo 11), and an online tool, Onodo - that helped us develop a sociogram with the different relationships between the actors involved in the crisis and risk communication of the WHO around the subject of vaccination. The main results show, on the one hand, that vaccination is not the focal point of the WHO's discourse at a time when the public's interest was centered on said thematic axis, and on the other, that the or-ganization was not able to create an effective dialogic space. Considering these findings, a reflection is encouraged to optimize professional praxis in future risk and crisis communication strategies in digital environments, expanding the scope of this study towards other organizations and/or time frames.

Civil society diplomacy: characterizing collective and connective actions for a shared cause

PurposeThis study proposes a description of the civil society diplomacy that emerged in the early solutions found to fight the COVID-19 crisis. The author analyses this concept as the intersection of the social movements of individuals and civil society organisations' and international health care. Its purpose is to determine the international structure of the connective actors aimed to find concrete solutions against COVID-19 and to characterize the communication visible on Twitter towards this civil society engagement.Design/methodology/approachBased on a data-driven approach, the author collected a large dataset of tweets from Switzerland between March and June 2020 and conducted a computational text analysis methodology.FindingsThe results showed who the participants were, provided a visualisation of the digital networking process between engaged and mentioned participants at national and international levels, and determined the emotions that emerged during three event phases.Originality/valueThe study reveals that features of connective social care actions and strategic collective communication can illustrate civil society diplomacy for a shared cause in times of health crisis.

The Environmental Dimension and the SDGs in the Strategic Communication of Triple Bottom Line Businesses

This paper analyzes the environmental dimension and the SDGs in the management of public relations in triple bottom line businesses in the context of Covidl9. For this purpose, we have conducted an exploratory-descriptive research through a questionnaire to 79 companies classified as triple bottom line companies or companies in transition towards more sustainable models from 27 countries. The results show that while most of the participants identify the environment as a stakeholder and consider the environmental dimension as very important for the management of their communication;only few companies consider the SDGs among the three most relevant issues related to sustainable development. From these data, we infer that although triple bottom line businesses are working to generate environmental value, in many cases they are not adequately identifying and communicating to their stakeholders. © 2023 Universidad Complutense de Madrid. All rights reserved.

Higher Education Institutions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Comparing Swiss Universities' Social Media Communication

Public communication has become more important to higher education institutions (HEIs), with many HEIs using social media to communicate with stakeholders. However, scholarship on the subject is scarce and mainly based on single-platform studies and small datasets. Therefore, we conducted a cross‐platform study to examine the communication of all Swiss HEIs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The results were based on two datasets: an automated analysis on data for all Swiss HEIs (n = 42) and their social media accounts from 2004 to 2021 (337,232 posts from 207 accounts), and a manual content analysis on 1,500 posts per platform. By including all HEIs in one country, this study allowed for a comparison of the results by HEI type: universities of applied sciences, universities of teacher education, and research universities. Results show that, in recent years, HEI communication increased on Instagram, but not on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter was used the most by research universities, while most Instagram and Facebook posts were from universities of applied sciences. Universities of teacher education were least active across all platforms. The content of communication across all HEI types was primarily self‐referential. Our analysis of how well HEIs used the affordances of social media communication relative to hypertextuality and multimodality revealed a generally high level of adaption. Moreover, our data showed no substantial impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on posting activities and engagement with social media posts by HEIs for the two first years of the pandemic. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio Press (Lisbon, Portugal).

Of Peacekeepers and Pandemics

Little is known about the role social media can play in support of peacekeeping missions, especially in times of crisis. Looking at the use of Facebook by the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article reconstructs social media practices of a peacekeeping mission in a global crisis. To assess how UNMISS used Facebook, it first connects research on discursive legitimation efforts by international organizations with work on strategic communication. Second, it provides a content analysis on Facebook posts published by UNMISS between 2018 and 2022 to determine how the mission engaged with its audience, how it framed its engagement, what topics were being addressed, and how the Covid-19 pandemic changed these communication patterns. Results show a conscious "propaganda for peace"strategy of the peacekeeping mission as UNMISS framed itself as a positive force for the peace process, using tailored communication strategies that rarely engaged in two-way communication, even in times of crisis. © 2023 Brill Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.

Alert but somewhat unaligned: public sector organisations' social media listening strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose: During the COVID-19 pandemic, public sector organisations produced thousands of social media messages weekly answering citizens questions and informing the public on safety related matters. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the pandemic shaped social media listening in Finland's public sector organisations and how these organisations aligned their listening and strategic communication to address emerging questions, news (real and fake) and rumours during the pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: Building on a theoretical background from strategic communication, organisational listening, digital marketing and public sector communication, qualitative interview data included communicators (N = 14) from all central Finnish public sector organisations in charge of COVID-19 communication. Findings were themed and analysed qualitatively to understand the level of alignment of strategic communication on social media. Findings: The findings revealed that the pandemic had strained public sector organisations' communication capabilities, forcing them to align their processes and resources reactively to enable useful content and limit false/misleading content. The results confirmed that organisational listening remained somewhat unaligned. A dual role of public sector communication as speakers but increasingly as listeners was highlighted. Originality/value: The study's findings point to organisational listening on social media being a central requisite for public sector organisations overcoming a crisis. © 2023, Taina Erkkilä and Vilma Luoma-aho.

Essays on economic analysis of social interactions

Chapter 1:An Equilibrium Model of Traffic Accidents: from the Peltzman Effect on Autonomous Cars We propose a population game to analyze drivers' driving behavior. Each driver interacts with a myriad of other drivers in a strategic substitute fashion, namely other drivers' reckless behavior encourages me to drive more carefully. We establish a set of reasonable assumptions, under which this game admits a unique Nash Equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the question that Peltzman (1975) raised: If the driving environment improves, drivers respond by driving more incautiously. Can this reaction lead to more auto accidents? To this end, we derive a sufficient condition that rules out this possibility. We then justify this sufficient condition using an empirical regularity we discover from data regarding mutual accidents between different groups of drivers. Throughout the analysis, we provide a definition of potential games for a continuum of players, where the interaction term depends also on their types. Also, the comparative statics result we produced, can be applied to a range of games with strategic substitutesChapter 2: Information Asymmetry in an Epidemic: A Game Theoretical Analysis of Communication Failure In an epidemic, individuals reduce social activities to protect themselves from getting infected. This also protects others from potential infections, but utility-maximizing individuals do not consider this spillover effect. Consequently, individuals choose a social activity that is higher than the regulator's preferred social optimum. When facing a novel disease such as COVID-19, the public often lacks knowledge of certain disease attributes such as the pass-through rate, the mortality rate, the number of current infections, etc. On the other hand, the regulator is often better informed. We build a game theoretic model to study how the regulator strategically communicates to the public, in the presence of misaligned incentives caused by the spillover effect. When the public uncertainty is large and the disease reproduction rate is high, the regulator loses credibility, and cannot reveal any information to the public. Communication failure can lead to the public under (or over) reactions. Compartmental models that overlook this information friction can significantly under-estimate the future infection rate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

EU Member States' Institutional Twitter Campaigns on COVID-19 Vaccination: Analyses of Germany, Spain, France and Italy.

The development of an effective vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus became the hope for halting the spread of the disease. In recent years, social networks have become important tools for political and strategic communication in the dialogue with citizens. Therefore, the messages emitted through them were important to address vaccine hesitancy and achieve collective immunity. This paper analyses the use of Twitter by politicians and institutions in EU Member States during the first fifty days after the Commission's marketing authorisation of the first COVID-19 vaccine (21 December 2020 to 8 February 2021). To do so, a triple approach content analysis was carried out (quantitative, qualitative and discursive on feelings) applied to 1913 tweets published by the official profiles of the prime ministers, health ministers, governments and health ministries of Germany, Spain, France and Italy, the four most populous EU countries. The results point out that politicians and institutions gave preference to other issues on their political agenda over vaccine-related issues. Moreover, previous research hypotheses, such as those related to the underutilization of the Twitter tool as a two-way communication channel with citizens, are validated.

Essays on economic analysis of social interactions

Chapter 1:An Equilibrium Model of Traffic Accidents: from the Peltzman Effect on Autonomous Cars We propose a population game to analyze drivers' driving behavior. Each driver interacts with a myriad of other drivers in a strategic substitute fashion, namely other drivers' reckless behavior encourages me to drive more carefully. We establish a set of reasonable assumptions, under which this game admits a unique Nash Equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the question that Peltzman (1975) raised: If the driving environment improves, drivers respond by driving more incautiously. Can this reaction lead to more auto accidents? To this end, we derive a sufficient condition that rules out this possibility. We then justify this sufficient condition using an empirical regularity we discover from data regarding mutual accidents between different groups of drivers. Throughout the analysis, we provide a definition of potential games for a continuum of players, where the interaction term depends also on their types. Also, the comparative statics result we produced, can be applied to a range of games with strategic substitutesChapter 2: Information Asymmetry in an Epidemic: A Game Theoretical Analysis of Communication Failure In an epidemic, individuals reduce social activities to protect themselves from getting infected. This also protects others from potential infections, but utility-maximizing individuals do not consider this spillover effect. Consequently, individuals choose a social activity that is higher than the regulator's preferred social optimum. When facing a novel disease such as COVID-19, the public often lacks knowledge of certain disease attributes such as the pass-through rate, the mortality rate, the number of current infections, etc. On the other hand, the regulator is often better informed. We build a game theoretic model to study how the regulator strategically communicates to the public, in the presence of misaligned incentives caused by the spillover effect. When the public uncertainty is large and the disease reproduction rate is high, the regulator loses credibility, and cannot reveal any information to the public. Communication failure can lead to the public under (or over) reactions. Compartmental models that overlook this information friction can significantly under-estimate the future infection rate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Panmemic inoculation: How Taiwan is nerfing the pandemic with cute humour

The article outlines the Taiwanese government’s strategy of using cute and humorous messages in its official communication via social media during the initial phase of COVID-19. Subjected to Chinese influence campaigns on social media, the government devised playful memes to ‘inoculate’ the public against disinformation and rumours. While the images contained important information, what made them appealing, memorable and spreadable as memes was their self-depre-cating humour and cute aesthetics. Adopting the memetic logic of replication, the communication strategy devised such benign, non-aggressive humour as part of a broad, holistic approach towards improving Taiwan’s democracy with technology-assisted, consensus-based decision-making. This strategy entailed wider-reaching social effects. Informed by an analysis of memes as a genre of cultural artefacts, the article traces how government-sponsored cute aesthetics resonated in society through being shared, imitated and repurposed. For example, government repre-sentatives such as ‘digital minister’ Audrey Tang and Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung became memetic icons animated through fan art. In this realm of increasingly self-referential social intimacy, ordinary citizens and the government co-created not only immunity to misinformation but also an affective community of Taiwanese national proportions. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

Marketing in a crisis: lessons from the “COVID election” in New Zealand

Purpose This paper aims to identify both the traditional and novel forms of marketing behind New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern's landslide victory in the 2020 New Zealand General Election during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This research analysed both qualitative and quantitative data, including over 70 primary sources, the perspectives of practitioners, polling and data from surveys with over 450,000 respondents. The qualitative data was analysed interpretively against established theoretical concepts, whereas the quantitative data was analysed through descriptive statistics. Findings This research found that COVID-19 drastically changed what the public prioritised, allowing Ardern and Labour to position themselves as guardians of government stability, while camouflaging previous delivery failures. Labour also used a more emergent market-oriented and "polite" populist political marketing strategy. Research limitations/implications While the survey data used is not a perfect sample of the population, it is the largest public opinion survey in New Zealand and, given its convergence with other sources, provides valuable insights into political marketing during a crisis more broadly. Practical implications This research reinforces marketing's most important aspect;the market should drive action. How decision makers respond to the market should depend on the environment. Thus, up-to-date market research becomes even more important during a crisis, as the environment changes rapidly. This leaves prior assumptions obsolete and implies strategy needs to be adaptive. Additionally, greater public attention provides governing leaders with the opportunity to present a more well-rounded leadership image. Originality/value To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first research to look at marketing while in government and election campaigning in the context of successful management of a global pandemic.

Civil society diplomacy: characterizing collective and connective actions for a shared cause

Purpose This study proposes a description of the civil society diplomacy that emerged in the early solutions found to fight the COVID-19 crisis. The author analyses this concept as the intersection of the social movements of individuals and civil society organisations' and international health care. Its purpose is to determine the international structure of the connective actors aimed to find concrete solutions against COVID-19 and to characterize the communication visible on Twitter towards this civil society engagement. Design/methodology/approach Based on a data-driven approach, the author collected a large dataset of tweets from Switzerland between March and June 2020 and conducted a computational text analysis methodology. Findings The results showed who the participants were, provided a visualisation of the digital networking process between engaged and mentioned participants at national and international levels, and determined the emotions that emerged during three event phases. Originality/value The study reveals that features of connective social care actions and strategic collective communication can illustrate civil society diplomacy for a shared cause in times of health crisis.

Communicating for legitimacy in the public sector: The case of the Covilha Municipality in Covid times

This paper seeks to understand whether there is a concern in a municipal body as the Covilha City Council to legitimize itself;gauge how it legitimizes the public processes of urgent matters, such as the Covid-19 process;and find out which categories of moral legitimacy suggested by Suchman (1995) are more important for the citizens of the municipality. In this case, legitimation through municipal communication was analyzed based on an in-depth interview with the professional responsible for communication, content analysis of press releases released by Covilha City Council, and with data collected in four focus groups in order to understand the legitimating processes and expectations from the citizens' point of view. The results show that there an intention on legitimizing that is not translated in a strategic or tactical-planned way. Although there is an intense communication around the urgent public process, with about 14 press releases referring to it in the period of six months, these are limited to a more informative character and to the dissemination of activity and political decisions, rather than strategic or with contents that seek legitimization processes with implicit and/or symbolic dimensions. From the analysis of communication management, despite the professionalization and even a structure in the body in question, there is no decision-making autonomy, nor monitoring of the public or planning according to analyses. In this way, ad-hoc communication may mirror momentary mental strategies of the manager and the team of communication and public relations professionals, but does not consider an analysis of publics, nor the production of specific materials for each segment of citizens. These findings are in line with conclusions from studies of government communication, which suggest the need for a strategic and not only tactical approach to build intangibles (e.g. Sanders and Canel, 2013). Furthermore, the study reveals that citizens have expectations in various dimensions, including public communication in awareness-raising processes and strategies with preference to better suited tools to all age groups. As a conclusion we can state that there is no satisfaction of the communicative needs and consequently legitimacy is in question. The focus group analysis shows that younger citizens seek and expect communication processes at the level of the role of politicians and dialogical processes;the dialogical and procedural expectations decrease with the age of the groups. However, there is a predominance of structural legitimacy in all Portuguese groups, which mostly include national and regional bodies. The roles of local processes are left to the background. Consequential legitimacy has less relevance. The professional practice of communication in the public sector in the case of Covilha Municipality regarding Covid falls short of what is proposed by the academic discipline. This study contributed to reinforce the idea that legitimacy and legitimation processes are always contextual and dependent on the environment and that, therefore, without research on publics, strategic management and strategic plans it is not possible to have an effective communication management in the public sector.

Strategic Communication and Political Ideologies in South America. COVID-19 Crisis Management in the Cases of the Populist Governments of Argentina and Brazil

With regard to strategic communication, there is a set of additive factors driving the strategic complexity that determines the magnitude of an issue and the path to follow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, different governments worldwide have played a variety of roles and their impact has been conclusive. In Latin America, current political and ideological antagonism has configured a diversity of contexts and scenarios that have conditioned public communication management, setting out from the assumption that they have variously weighted the different driving factors of the strategic complexity. Within the framework of the EUPRERA COM-COVID network, we present the cases of strategic communication management of the national governments of Brazil and Argentina during the second half of 2020 and their impact on the population from the sanitary, social and economic levels. Of 1,332 demographically weighted cases, we analyze the information channels, credible sources, types of messages and their effectiveness comparatively. The most relevant conclusion lies in confirming that the strategic factor model in the public sector is conditioned by the ideological profile of who governs and this determines the decisions and effectiveness of the management.

THE ROLE OF INTERNAL COMMUNICATION IN TELEWORK MANAGEMENT DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS

Among the changes brought about by the COVID-19 crisis, many affect the management of organisations. This is the case of the sudden implementation of teleworking policies, which, together with social distancing measures and periods of confinement, became widespread in the worst period of the pandemic. This research studies the role of internal communication in the management of telework during the Covid-19 crisis through document review and expert interviews. The results indicate that internal communication is a very important element for these policies and that during the pandemic its relevance in keeping employees aligned with the interests of the brands has been highlighted. To execute these policies, organisations have developed new channels, enhanced team cohesion and fostered empathy from leaders and the separation of work and personal life. Communication with employees is the cornerstone of these telework policies, which require the implementation of strategies and tools to facilitate the well-being and happiness of remote workforces. This paper also incorporates recommendations for internal communication management in relation to the new organisational needs arising during this period.

Joy: Using strategic communication to improve well-being and organizational success

As I write the introduction to this latest book in the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) Congress series for Emerald, I cannot help but hold some sense of irony. Our excellent Congress in Zagreb - held during early October 2019 - was another annual celebration of international exchanges of research and new ideas in the scholarship of public relations and strategic communication. The theme of the congress was 'Joy'. And yet, as I compose these introductory thoughts and reflections for the book, my fellow editors and I are each sitting in our home offices as many of you will have done. All of us experiencing for the first time in our lives an extraordinary, enforced lockdown during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) crisis in the spring of 2020. As such 'joy' may not be the first emotion academics and research students think of when reflecting on this challenging period of our lives, but it is perhaps poignant to recall the discussions and debates we held in Zagreb and the fascinating papers we shared during the Congress. Whilst many of the papers touched literally on the issue of joy, others explored related emotions and in some papers the flip or opposing sensations to positivity. In essence the theme of the 2019 Congress is perhaps never more appropriate than in times of stress, international emergency and genuine societal challenge. We need to be able to understand how and where we can sense happiness, well-being, social cohesion, togetherness, appreciation of others and, arguably, attributes of joy. Even before this exceptional year of 2020, it would have been possible to argue that we are living in an era of societal pessimism. That challenging viewpoint appears only to have been reinforced and heightened by the international experiences of the COVID-19 crisis. As we observe our everyday academic worlds, it is possible to see that everyone potentially has a voice, and in the contemporary climate it is very often used to criticize. Publics see problems and discuss them in multifarious ways and on a plethora of platforms and media outlets. And, in turn, academic research reflects this and often views the world through a negative lens and focuses on difficulties, issues and bad practices. With this meeting of the international public relations and strategic communication research community, it was the ambition of the Congress organizers from the University of Zagreb and the EUPRERA Board to encourage and promote some optimism in both the public discourse and academic research about the discipline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Countering hybrid threats: does strategic culture matter?: Defence Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates once again that hybrid threats are increasingly challenging European countries. Although there is international cooperation on the conceptual level, individual countries are responsible for the actual implementation of counter hybrid measures. This article compares the approaches of Finland, Germany and the Netherlands to counter hybrid threats, while taking into consideration their strategic culture. It shows that the countries differ in their approach to counter hybrid threats in terms of their organisation of security and the scope of measures taken to deter adversaries. These differences are mainly rooted in historical, institutional and political processes. The countries are rather similar in detecting hybrid threats and responding to hybrid attacks, which can be explained by the nature of hybrid threats. Consequently, strategic culture is a context that shapes but not ultimately determines how Finland, Germany and the Netherlands counter hybrid threats. The results of this article suggest that our current understanding of strategic culture is insufficient to describe and explain an actor's security policy in the contemporary security environment. It is recommended that the concept of strategic culture should be revised and has to be examined more broadly by including national security issues and a broad spectrum of instruments of power. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Defence Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The changing role and status of UK government communication during the Covid-19 crisis

It is posited that the Covid-19 crisis changed the role and status of UK government communication. With outputs from the government’s communication strategy and the Government Communication Service’s evaluation of its role and practice, the paper uses Bourdieu’s field theory to examine the changing position and status of government communicators within the political field and how this has influenced their communication practice. The findings suggest a new and enhanced role for government communicators, utilising the social capital inherent in the field. Some practitioners have moved closer to the centre of the political field because of the pandemic, with communication requirements driven by Covid-19 bringing the role of communication as a strategic management discipline to the fore. However, the increased demands for cultural capital, particularly regarding the communication of data, risk and uncertainty, together with structural changes to the field create risks to the new role and positioning of government communication in the UK. © The Author(s) 2021 Reprints and Permission: © ESSACHESS.

An Analysis of Government Communication in the United States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Recommendations for Effective Government Health Risk Communication.

Governments throughout the world can learn many critical lessons from examining instances of ineffective communication with the public during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Ineffective government communication has resulted in a great deal of public confusion and misunderstanding, as well as serious errors in responding to this evolving health threat, leading to disastrous health and social outcomes for the public and prolonging the pandemic, especially within the United States. This article uses systems theory as a template for analyzing government communication in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing governments with recommendations for establishing effective health risk communication strategies for use with the public. The communication strategies offered here promote the delivery of relevant, accurate, and sensitive information to key public groups, minimizing communication noise to guide desirable coordinated actions. These communication strategies can be applied locally, nationally, and internationally.