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AbstractThe purpose of this study was to understand employees' cognitive and communicative reactions to allegations of corporate misconduct levied against their organization, and identify factors that may impact employees' reactions to such allegations. Specifically, this study focused on the idea of identity fusion as a key factor in helping buffer the organization against the negative cognitive and communicative impacts of corporate crises. Surveys conducted among American employees of large corporations revealed that identity fusion indeed mitigated their negative cognitive and communicative reactions to misconduct allegations, and encouraged positive megaphoning behaviours. Furthermore, identity fusion experienced by employees also mediated the relationship between employee–organization relationships and positive and negative megaphoning intentions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Employees are key organizational stakeholders whose value to the enterprise's functioning has long been emphasized in business communication literature. The present study serves to integrate business communication, organizational psychology, and leadership literature to advance a theoretically grounded model explaining employees' job engagement. Drawing upon recent advances in consumer psychology and social identity scholarship on brand identity fusion, this study examines how employee-organization identity fusion, or a visceral feeling of oneness with the organization experienced by employees may contribute to their job engagement. Surveys conducted among employees belonging to corporations with one thousand or more employees revealed not only the power of authentic leadership and symmetrical communication in engendering employee-organization identity fusion, but also how leadership and communication can foster workers' job engagement. The theoretical and managerial implications of this work are discussed (132 words).

The purpose of this study was to examine issue- and organization-specific factors that may influence customers' reactions to allegations of environmental irresponsibility. This study focused on the idea of brand identity fusion to examine how it may act as a figurative shield against the negative cognitive and behavioral impacts of misconduct allegations. To do so, online surveys were conducted among Australian citizens in October 2018. Brand identity fusion lowered customers' perceptions of perceived moral inequity and triggered rewarding behavioral intentions despite the allegations. Situational motivation about environmental issues was found to positively affect boycotting and lower buycotting intentions as well as perceived moral inequity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

In this study, we explore the relationship between two types of public sentiment toward the government (i.e., public engagement and cynicism) on publics' information transmission behaviors, i.e., megaphoning, about the government. In doing so, we unpack how citizens' perceptions of the communication strategy adopted by the government, as well perceived authenticity of the government's communication impact their sentiments toward the government. An online survey was conducted in South Korea (N = 1112) to understand these relationships. The results revealed that perceived use of bridging strategy by the government is associated with public engagement, and perceived use of the buffering strategy is related to public cynicism. We also found perceived authenticity to be significantly associated with public engagement and negatively associated with cynicism. Finally, the two types of public sentiment were found to partially mediate between perceived government communication strategies and citizens' positive and negative megaphoning. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.

The identification and engagement of supportive publics or fan publics to being a part of an organization's communication efforts and activities has very recently emerged as a key agenda among public relations scholars and practitioners. While discussions on fandom and fan activism can be found extensively in the social sciences (e.g., Lee, 2011; Parry, Jones & Wann, 2014; Millward & Poulton, 2014), public relations as a field is yet to address fans as a public of interest. A few efforts have been made to build the connections between relationship management research (e.g., Bruning, Dials, & Shirka, 2008), public relations, and fandom (e.g. L'Etang, 2006; Dimitrov, 2008), yet these efforts remain few and far between.

As more people choose to get health information online, health-related topics continue to be the target of misinformation. From targeted misinformation campaigns about the safety of tobacco, the mainstreaming and subsequent adoption of scientifically flawed research about vaccines, to the misinformation-driven stigmatization of HIV, health communication as an academic discipline has been faced with the challenge of stemming the flow of misinformation and correcting individuals' misinformed beliefs. To that end, scholars have devoted much time and effort to understand the antecedents and consequences of health-related misinformation, as well as strategies to correct misinformation and inoculate others from misinformation. In this essay, we review research on health-related misinformation, with a special emphasis on two major journals in the field, that is, Health Communication and the Journal of Health Communication, and interrogate the nature of health-related misinformation. We close this essay with a conceptualization of misinformed yet vocal health communicators, whom we term health misliterates.

The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) how allegations of gender discrimination affect consumers' relationship with the brand in question, and (b) individual-level factors that affect consumers' negative affective response to the allegations and eventually, consumer-brand relationships. Findings from a survey conducted among 473 Americans indicate that individuals' relational perceptions with a corporate brand whose products/services they consume are negatively affected by allegations of misconduct, in this case, gender discrimination. Results revealed that individuals' moral orientation and anticorporate sentiment predicted their perceptions of moral inequity of corporate behavior, which in turn affected their negative affective response to the allegations. Such negative affective response then affected individuals' consumer–corporate brand relationships.

AbstractThis study examined the influence of a crisis on relational perceptions and the role of an empathetic response from stakeholders by investigating students' perceptions of their relationship with a university following an on‐campus shooting. Findings show that despite the generally positive relationship, the university maintains with its students, the crisis had a negative impact on the students' perceptions of their relationship with the university. Furthermore, results show how emotions, especially empathy, about an organization in a crisis situation can influence stakeholder relationships. This research helps provide nuance to the extant scholarship on crisis and emotions by introducing stakeholder empathy as a theoretical construct. Results also demonstrate that crisis managers who invest in relationship building before a crisis may elicit empathy more than blame in a crisis and may emerge with less relational damage.

Researchers and practitioners are beginning to look to community‐based participatory research (CBPR) approaches in their efforts to address social problems with those directly affected by them. Yet additional methods and tools are needed. In this article, we propose storytelling as a participatory method in the context of peacebuilding. Drawing on the Conflict Family, an example of cultural storytelling from a locally led peacebuilding initiative in Ghana, we illustrate the ways in which storytelling emerged as a co‐constructed, culturally relevant, collaborative, reflexive, and memorable participatory strategy that functioned as a catalyst for action. Storytelling helped create a dialogic space for participants to discuss land disputes in their communities. This study contributes to what is known about storytelling by showcasing how cultural storytelling can promote local citizens' ownership for CBPR approaches. It also reveals the ways storytelling can serve as a CBPR method that encourages a relational orientation and the co‐construction of meaning, as well as inspire transformation among local citizens, particularly in conflict situations and peacebuilding contexts.

Abstract
The concept of relationships is one that is central to numerous subfields within communication, including interpersonal, organizational, and public relations. This conceptual paper investigates the notion of relationships and proposes a framework to understand and explicate corporate-community relationships (CCRs), a specific type of organization-public relationships (OPRs). In developing this framework, we draw upon existing literature and our experiences in Liberia related to natural resource management (NRM) as part of a multi-year collaborative peacebuilding initiative. We advance a framework of CCRs that (a) helps develop further empirical research and knowledge about these relationships and (b) contributes to the practice of more transformative relationships between Western and Asian multinational corporations (MNCs) and local communities in West Africa and beyond. This framework puts forth our conceptualization of CCRs as (a) constituted by the communicative, (b) dynamic, constantly influenced by macro and micro factors, and (c) complex. Drawing on our framework, we also advance some guiding questions for a research agenda in this area.