Sandra Jacobs

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Amsterdam

Purpose Although issue management has received ample attention, changes in the media landscape and increased societal scrutiny are currently challenging organizations’ communicative handling of issues. This raises the question of how communication professionals currently perceive and communicatively deal with issues, and what impact issue response...

Student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) are used for various purposes, are omnipresent in academic teaching, and cause tensions within universities. Their analytical power is contested, and specific uses are problematised for negative effects on lecturers and academic relationships. This interpretive interview study addresses how academi...

Purpose Since public sector organizations provide services to citizens but struggle with poor perceptions of their functioning, it is valuable to examine how their online responses to complaints on social media could impact their reputation. Yet, surprisingly little is known about effects of public organizations' webcare. Therefore, this study asse...

Little is known about how the complex notion of higher education quality is understood and (strategically) handled by a specific group of key university actors: directors of educational programmes. A framing analysis of in-depth interviews was conducted to explore how bachelor- programme directors in Dutch social science departments understand and...

Although journalism and media coverage are known to induce, inform, and affect public accountability processes, little is known about media-covered accountability. This study therefore explores accountability processes of Danish and Flemish agencies as subjects of the news. Drawing on news construction literature, our quantitative content analysis...

Purpose Social countermarketing (SCM) aims at influencing existing socio-cultural norms, public policies or political decision-making. Existing empirical accounts of SCM give limited insights into their success. The authors analyze SCM strategies and their public resonance by studying the diagnostic and prognostic frames and responsibility attribut...

Social media platforms provide major opportunities for online activism and the emergence of digital counterpublics. Research on counterpublics has focused on actors and their narrative strategies aiming at deconstructing dominant discourses. Less attention has been paid to how the interplay between actors and platform-specific functions affects the...

Issue arenas, as places for societal discussions, have recently been studied as an important aspect of organizational environments. While a fundamental part of any issue arena is the distinction between active and passive actors, empirical analyses have mainly focused on active stakeholders. We approach issue arenas as communication networks in whi...

Communication managers in public sector organizations operate in increasingly complex environments. An influential political realm, diverse stakeholder environments, and media scrutiny combined with macro-level developments in the public sector put high demands on their media and stakeholder relations. Media are both important stakekeepers and sour...

The role of the media in public accountability has often been discussed. This is especially the case for public sector organisations, whose accountability relations have changed in the shift from government to governance. In this paper, we develop a typology of the ways mass media are involved in public accountability processes. Media can stimulate...

Introduction We live in a ‘monitory democracy’ (Keane, 2009). On the one hand, many executive functions have moved away from central governments in what Rhodes (1994) termed the ‘hollowing out of the state’. On the other hand, monitoring functions have partially moved away from parliaments to a host of non-parliamentary institutions, ranging from i...

Purpose Visibility in the media is considered important for organizations, as it is alleged to affect their reputation, public legitimacy, and stakeholder relations. Strategies for media relations often discern corporations, public organizations, and NGOs. The media attention for those organizations is however often studied in isolation. This stud...

Higher education quality is a vague, ambiguous, multiple, and essentially contested concept. Quality’s contested character involves endless disputes about its proper use which makes it problematic to handle in governmental policies. Wittgenstein’s notion of language games is used to understand how, through time, higher education quality is enacted...

This study assesses relationships between mass media orientations of communication professionals in organisations and their external communication strategies. We assume that mass media orientations within an organisation may affect an organisation’s external communication strategies of bridging and buffering. A survey among 150 Dutch communication...

The role of the media in public accountability has often been discussed. This is especially the case for public sector organisations, whose accountability relations have changed in the shift from government to governance. In this paper, we develop a typology of the ways mass media are involved in public accountability processes. Media can stimulate...

The aim of this study is to assess the mass media orientations of communication professionals: Is past media coverage for their organization related to the way communication professionals currently evaluate the importance of the media for their organizations? Following the debates on mediatization and reciprocal effects of media coverage, we assume...

Autoriteit in beeld. Over toezichthouders en medialogica in het nieuws Publieke organisaties staan van oudsher bekend als nieuwsmijdende organisaties. Ze voeren belangrijke publieke taken uit met een soms grote invloed op de samenleving, maar ze opereren relatief onzichtbaar achter gekozen politici die voor hen het woord voeren en op grond van bure...