Irina Lock

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Amsterdam

With increasing numbers of publications, synthesizing research in management and organization studies (MOS) and the social sciences in general has become necessary to summarize knowledge, discover research gaps, and gather interdisciplinary insights. To do so, reviews of the literature depend on a rigorous method for searching specifically for MOS...

The increasing volume of images published online in a wide variety of contexts requires communication researchers to address this reality by analyzing visual content at a large scale. Ongoing advances in computer vision to automatically detect objects, concepts, and features in images provide a promising opportunity for communication research. We p...

Stakeholders debate issues of public interest in global online issue arenas, but political decision makers decide on these macro issues at national and supranational levels. A better understanding of the role of organizations in forming and monitoring such issue debates is necessary, given the influence of public affairs activities and media debate...

The digital age is a game-changer for the communication between organizations and stakeholders. Relationships are pivotal to public relations. However, their conceptualizations, measures, and normative assumptions have neither been analyzed systematically and across disciplines, nor have they been studied in light of the changing digital communicat...

Reputation and legitimacy are crucial resources for public sector organizations (PSOs) that have a high public visibility. These social judgments are formed by citizens’ direct experiences with such organizations and indirectly, via media coverage in which often covered organizations are evaluated. We empirically assessed 1) the drivers of reputati...

Purpose This study investigates, through a case study where organisations held opposing lobbying objectives, the argumentation strategies employed by organisations in their lobbying. Big Tech companies lobbied against proposed online harm regulations in the UK, with their objectives clashing with public interest groups with a health focus, who advo...

Purpose This paper develops a typology of argumentation strategies used in lobbying. Unlike in other strategic communication functions such as crisis or risk communication, such typologies have not been proposed in the sub-field of public affairs. Design/methodology/approach The article synthesises the strategic communication, political communicat...

Over the past two years, organizations and businesses have been forced to constantly adapt and develop effective responses to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The acuteness, global scale and intense dynamism of the situation make online news and information even more important for making informed management and policy decisions. This paper...

Strategische Kommunikationsmechanismen wie Framing, Storytelling oder Argumentation spielen in der politischen Einflussnahme auf die Europäische Union (EU) eine entscheidende Rolle. Public-Affairs-Manager in Unternehmen, Nichtregierungsorganisationen, Gewerkschaften, Branchenverbänden oder Beratungen sind einerseits strategische Kommunikatoren, die...

Zusammenfassung Bilder gewinnen in der Online-Kommunikation von Organisationen an Bedeutung, werden jedoch in ihrem Kontext rezipiert. In einem Online-Experiment wurde daher getestet, inwieweit inhaltlich passende multimodale Organisationskommunikation die wahrgenommene Glaubwürdigkeit erhöht und Täuschung mindert und ob sie dadurch die Absicht, si...

With the “visual turn” online, images have become increasingly important for companies to attract stakeholders to their online CSR communication. To investigate in how far businesses' visual sustainability language reflects a balanced triple bottom line, this study compared the most profitable European corporations' websites images (N = 21,841) and...

Recently, the field of strategic communication has been criticized for lacking a coherent theoretical synthesis. Recognizing that strategic communication is a sub-discipline of communication science, we study how the field is anchored in the corpus of established communication theories – including social science, interpretative, and critical approa...

This paper focuses on the framing strategies lobbyists apply to influence public policy in a case on nuclear emission data in Switzerland. Framing analysis is at the heart of communication science and has been applied in lobbying settings, but framing theory has not yet been fine‐tuned to the specificities of public affairs research. This qualitati...

The digital environment alters the way organizations use propaganda and facilitates its spread. This development calls for an outline of the features of propaganda by organizations on the Internet and to reconsider where public relations (PR) stops and propaganda begins. By means of a systematic review of primary research on organizational propagan...

Purpose – Companies in challenged industries such as fashion often struggle to communicate credibly with their stakeholders about their social and environmental achievements. Credible corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, however, has been described theoretically as a predictor of legitimacy for organizations in society, but never pr...

How do lobbyists get their way and what is the consequence for democracy of their strategies? It is frequently asserted that lobbyists appeal to the public interest to strengthen their proposals. This paper empirically corroborates this claim through four case studies cutting across different European cultural clusters and political systems. The pa...

How do lobbyists get their way and what is the consequence for democracy of their strategies? It is frequently asserted that lobbyists appeal to the public interest to strengthen their proposals. This paper empirically corroborates this claim through four case studies cutting across different European cultural clusters and political systems. The pa...

Engaging in comparative lobbying research is a challenging task, because public affairs is complex and highly context‐dependent. Thus, qualitative case studies have been researchers' primary choice. However, the case method has been subject to much debate surrounding its rigor, in terms of reliability, internal validity, and generalizability, and p...

While there is a large and ever-expanding body of work on the fields of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a noted absence of a single source on the methodology and research approaches to these fields. In this book, the first of its kind, leading scholars in the fields gather to analyse a range of philosophical and...

In this article, we posit that corporate political activities (CPA) such as lobbying make use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to advance instrumental goals. We juxtapose the theoretical foundations of the normative concept of political CSR and the strategic notion of nonmarket strategy to show that they are in opposition conceptually regar...

In contrast to authentic grassroots activism, in astroturfing, lobbyists sponsor an interest group that pretends to be a grassroots movement. In a vignette-based experiment, we investigate for the first time how astroturfing, compared to grassroots lobbying, reflects on stakeholders’ perceptions of organizational trust and authenticity, how perceiv...

Credibility is central to communication but often jeopardized by “credibility gaps.” This is especially true for communication about corporate social responsibility (CSR). To date, no tool has been available to analyze stakeholders’ credibility perceptions of CSR communication. This article presents a series of studies conducted to develop a scale...

Stakeholder theory, originally introduced in 1984 by philosopher Edward Freeman, is among the most influential theories today addressing the complex interplay of societal actors. It underwent several transformations and expansions, but the original Freeman model as well as the latest approaches places the corporation at the center positioning the t...

Literature review used for pilot study to the scale development project and presentation of pilot study's results at the Society for Business Ethics Annual Meeting 2014 in Philadelphia, US.

When in 2015 193 countries agreed on 17 sustainable development goals, the nations’ delegates signed a challenging agenda aimed to render this planet livable for future generations within the next 15 years. However, striving for sustainability has not yet led to achieving more sustainability or less unsustainability. Despite many efforts in develop...

Introduction Business ethics as an academic field is a relatively young discipline. The well-established journals in the field, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, and Business Ethics: A European Review, were founded as recently as the 1980s. Early research focused primarily on philosophical discussions of moral values, thereby r...

Glaubwürdigkeit ist ein grundlegendes Konzept der Kommunikationswissenschaft und gilt als zentrale Voraussetzung effektiver Kommunikation. Gerade in der PR und hier im Besonderen bei der Kommunikation über Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) ist glaubwürdiges Kommunizieren von Unternehmen ein Muss, um bei Anspruchsgruppen Gehör zu finden. Die bes...

As researchers pursue connections between strategic communication and management, they need to critique practices to develop norms that increase strategic communication’s long-term contribution to society. Norms of strategic communication are shaped by socially constructed standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and guide how strategic c...

Recently, researchers have claimed that food and beverage corporations should be excluded from the development of public health policy because their lobbying activities strategically undermine the promotion of public health. At the same time, recent political corporate social responsibility (CSR) theory holds that corporations have a responsibility...

When it comes to corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, skepticism and mistrust toward companies often prevail among both stakeholders and scholars. However, the overall content quality of CSR reports has only sparsely evoked researchers’ attention. Therefore, this paper focuses on the credibility of CSR reports, based on both human and sof...

Purpose: Whether companies consider corporate social responsibility (CSR) a strategic management task is mirrored in the department and governance structure of CSR. This article’s goal is to study the state of the art of CSR governance and operational structure within the most sustainable companies to arrive at a typology of CSR organization. Desig...

The aim of this article is to discuss quantitative content analysis as established in communication sciences as a method for research in business ethics. We argue that communication sciences and business ethics are neighboring disciplines, which allow the transfer of quantitative content analysis from communication sciences to business ethics. Tech...

In this special issue, we aim to cover two megatrends and their interaction: sustainability and digitalization. The well-established concept of sustainability is confronted with a technological leap referred to as a ‘digital revolution’ that opens the chapter of the digital age we live in. The proposed special feature—for the first time—sheds ligh...

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting practices toward stakeholder group investors. Quantitative content analysis was applied to 437 articles of CSR reports from the chemicals, and banking and insurance industries in Germany and Switzerland. The results were benchmarked to the Sarasin sustain...

Purpose: This article contributes an updated understanding of the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy. We argue that corporate philanthropy is different and external to CSR because of their different characteristics. Design/methodology/approach: This article is based on a literature review and discusses...

Many companies rely on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to communicate their corporate responsibilities. Currently, these publications are said to be non-credible communication tools in the eyes of many readers as a result of “cherry picking” behavior regarding the reported themes, weak comparability of the contents, and various differ...

Addressing the critique that communication activities with regard to CSR are often merely instrumental marketing or public relation tools, this paper develops a toolbox of CSR communication that takes into account a deliberative notion. We derive this toolbox classification from the political approach of CSR that is based on Habermasian discourse e...