Where is public affairs going?

This paper suggests the future direction in which public affairs practice is developing and advances a number of propositions about public affairs and political systems which provide the context in which public affairs practitioners operate. The paper examines the changing nature of the political systems in which public affairs functions and argues that, by inference, public affairs practice is culturally specific. The paper explores these contextual issues from both a European and a global perspective. The paper argues that an understanding of public affairs should be recognised as an essential element on management teaching syllabi and laments the fact that this is far from the case. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Public affairs: an American perspective

This paper explores the development and broadening scope of public affairs practice within the United States of America and charts the factors that have influenced its current development. To understand the scope of how public affairs has developed in the United States, it is necessary to examine the historical evolution of the function in the USA and the early 20th century influence of the US government on defining and regulating its definition of public relations and public affairs, which resulted in the still‐in‐effect Gillett Amendment. Since then, public affairs has expanded into the private as well as the public sectors as corporations and organisations recognise the need to gain public trust for their ventures. In the US today, public affairs practitioners perform duties that range from issues management to environmental scanning to legislative affairs. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Balancing Governance Capacity and Legitimacy: How the Norwegian Government Handled the COVID-19 Crisis as a High Performer

This essay addresses how the Norwegian government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Compared with many other countries, Norway has performed well in handling the crisis. This must be understood in the context of competent politicians, a high-trust society with a reliable and professional bureaucracy, a strong state, a good economic situation, a big welfare state, and low population density. The Norwegian government managed to control the pandemic rather quickly by adopting a suppression strategy, followed by a control strategy, based on a collaborative and pragmatic decision-making style, successful communication with the public, a lot of resources, and a high level of citizen trust in government. The alleged success of the Norwegian case is about the relationship between crisis management capacity and legitimacy. Crisis management is most successful when it is able to combine democratic legitimacy with government capacity.     

Governing Under Pressure: German Policy Making During the Coronavirus Crisis

The global threat of the coronavirus pandemic has forced policy makers to react quickly with totally new policy-making approaches under conditions of uncertainty. This article focuses on such crisis-driven policy learning, examining how the experiences of China and South Korea as early responder states influenced the subsequent coronavirus crisis management in Germany. The first reaction of the German core executive was the quick concentration of decision-making power at the top of the political hierarchy. Asserting the prerogatives of the executive included the radical simplification of the relationship between politics, law and science. State actors took emergency measures by recourse to a single piece of legislation—the ‘infection protection law’ (Infektionsschutzgesetz)—overriding other elements of the legal order. They also limited the government’s use of scientific expertise to a small number of advisors, thereby cutting short debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of the government’s crisis measures. Finally, German actors failed to understand that some of the earlier Chinese and Korean responses required a precondition—namely public willingness to sacrifice privacy for public health—that is absent in the German case.     

Gauging the Rigor of Qualitative Case Studies in Comparative Lobbying Research. A Framework and Guideline for Research and Analysis

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 particularly its potential for theory building. To propose a framework for researchers conducting lobbying case studies as well as for reviewers receiving such work, we apply a positivistic approach on case study rigor from management studies and expand the framework to tackle the specific challenges of comparative qualitative lobbying research. Thus, we expand the research framework by a set of variables specific to public affairs: We add enrichment for internal validity, contextuality, and comparability for external validity, interdisciplinarity for construct validity, and hypertext-searchable databases for reliability. Thereby, we aim to transfer the lessons learned from management studies in terms of rigorous qualitative case studies to public affairs to help build novel and explanatory theory in the field and to provide guidance to researchers how to design a rigorous case study.     

Reframing Democracy: Governance, Civic Agency, and Politics

Developments in public affairs that stress governance— not simply government—hold possibilities for reframing democracy. Governance intimates a paradigm shift in the meaning of democracy and civic agency—that is, who is to address public problems and promote the general welfare? The shift involves a move from citizens as simply voters, volunteers, and consumers to citizens as problem solvers and cocreators of public goods; from public leaders, such as public affairs professionals and politicians, as providers of services and solutions to partners, educators, and organizers of citizen action; and from democracy as elections to democratic society. Such a shift has the potential to address public problems that cannot be solved without governments, but that governments alone cannot solve, and to cultivate an appreciation for the commonwealth. Effecting this shift requires politicizing governance in nonpartisan, democratizing ways and deepening the civic, horizontal, pluralist, and productive dimensions of politics.     

Lessons from NPAs crisis in Indian banks

Nonperforming assets (NPAs) crisis in Indian public sector banks is one of the biggest challenges before the current government in 2017. The finance ministry, Government of India, and the central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, are worried about the surging NPAs in Indian public sector banks because of their huge macroeconomic impact and systemic risk to the financial system. If not paid timely attention, it can hamper the economic and financial stability of the nation. Rising NPAs in Indian public sector banks are a result of bank specific, macroeconomic, and political factors. In order to control the surging NPAs in Indian public sector banks, the government and the Reserve Bank of India have implemented new crisis management framework which however is not immune to several challenges. This paper looks at NPAs crisis from the lens of crisis management, stakeholder's engagement, government relations, and issue management. Harris and Fleisher ( 2016 ) identify crisis management, stakeholder engagement, government relations, and issues management as important organizational activities that constitute part of public affairs. This paper follows a tripartite structure where it first investigates the causes of NPAs in Indian public sector banks. Second, it examines the crisis management framework developed by the policy makers and highlights the key challenges. Third, in light of these challenges, it makes recommendations to tackle the NPAs crisis in Indian public sector banks.     

Public affairs,issues management,and political strategy: opportunities,obstacles, and caveats

This paper evaluates research in corporate public affairs, social issues management and political strategy, and theoretical integration of the three areas and also cross‐disciplinary and cross‐institutional collaboration, especially with business or government officials. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

The Well-Ordered Society under Crisis: A Formal Analysis of Public Reason vs. Convergence Discourse

A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly.     

Public affairs in Australia: Evolving and enhancing corporate performance

This article is an attempt to provide a helicopter view of the influences and responses that have shaped the corporate public affairs function over four decades from non‐existence to an important and settled profession in Australia's major companies. It reflects the perceptions and experiences of an observer with a background in public administration, politics, academia, industry association leadership, and consulting to companies and industry organisations over that period. They are further informed by surveys and other studies conducted by the organisation supporting public affairs departments, the Australian Centre for Corporate Public Affairs (the Centre) since its inception in 1990. The article charts the emergence from two distinct, low level management silos—one supporting communications and the other, government affairs—to create an integrated strategic management function. The central story is of waves of innovation in concepts and practices, developed mainly overseas, being embraced with enthusiasm and becoming a dominant focus, before settling into the broad toolbox of public affairs. This occurred particularly in the period 1990–2005 during which the function took its shape. With such a broad and ambitious sweep, it is inevitable that bold generalisations begging exceptions must be made.     

How to build a time machine for public affairs executives

Temporal factors such as time and timing are so self‐evident in public affairs that they are rarely mentioned and even less frequently researched. Time is seen as the independent variable—a scaffold that underpins a calendar of communication events, legislative and regulatory processes, or issue lifecycles. However, time is a more complex and essential variable to contemplate than public affairs (and most other) executives give it credit for. This paper explores 16 unique ways to think about time, applying those dimensions to the Amazon HQ2 (second headquarters) selection process to illustrate how public affairs executives could use them to illuminate aspects of strategy and behavior they might otherwise not consider. Strategically, understanding interconnected dimensions of time improves clarity in the choice‐making process, allowing public affairs executives to exploit ideal timing as they execute their strategies.     

Public relations for public affairs

The term ‘public affairs’ has now become a much‐discussed topic in continental Europe's political and economic circles, including Germany and Austria. The problem is that few people really understand just what the term means. Many people have the impression that ‘public affairs’ is another way of describing lobbying. Others perceive it as classic public relations. In Europe many decision makers of the business world lack the specific knowledge of policy making; however, until now just a few such executives have taken advantage of the real opportunities opened up by using the services of professional public affairs consulting. Communications companies in Europe are now offering public affairs consulting as part of their services, with increasing success. The first task to make public affairs better known in Europe therefore must be public relations for public affairs. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

National Parliaments and the Eurozone Crisis: Taking Ownership in Difficult Times?

The eurozone crisis suggests a significant reinforcement of executive dominance in EU policy-making. Opaque emergency decisions taken at European summits as well as treaties established outside of the EU legal framework facilitate the side-lining of democratically elected chambers. This development entails the risk of a new wave of de-parliamentarisation in EU policy-making. An effective scrutiny of crisis management by national parliaments is, however, indispensable for taking national ownership of the reforms in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper investigates national parliaments’ involvement in the development of instruments to combat the crisis. Based on a quantitative dataset of crisis-related parliamentary activities in 2010–2012, the article observes a very uneven engagement in the scrutiny of crisis management. Institutional prerogatives in EU affairs as well as macro-economic factors can partly explain the observed variation. Surprisingly, however, crisis-related parliamentary activity is not a reaction to Eurosceptic attitudes either in parliament or among the public.     

Combining Structural Forms in the Search for Policy Tools: Incident Command Systems in U.S. Crisis Management

As governments search for policy tools to deliver public services, two choices—hierarchy or network—are portrayed as stark alternatives. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has adopted a practitioner‐based innovation known as the Incident Command System (ICS) that assumes that crises require a network of responders, but that these networks should be managed by a hierarchy. While the ICS illustrates the potential for mixing hierarchies and networks, it was mandated by policymakers willing to make broad assumptions about the applicability of the ICS on limited evidence. An overdependence on practitioner claims displaced careful analysis of the underlying logics vital to understanding the operation of the policy tool. A case study of the ICS in managing an exotic animal disease outbreak points to the importance of crisis characteristics and management factors as contingencies affecting the operation of the ICS.     

Public affairs in Hungary today: summarized through the eyes of a practitioner

This is not an academic overview on public affairs in Hungary, as this has already been written very well by many others. I would like to share my views and experience as a practitioner and give a quick insight into how public affairs is regarded in my country and how it developed after the change of the political system in Central and Eastern Europe. I will refrain from explaining what public relations or public affairs entails as I think this is unnecessary for anyone reading this. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

External affairs and trusted family businesses: A research agenda

In the past two decades, the Journal of Public Affairs has solidified corporate public affairs as a legitimate leadership skillset vital to driving future business growth. Yet, more work at a persistently overlooked gap in the Journal, the intersection of public affairs and family businesses, might shed new light on thriving, trusted, and sustainable business practices. This paper examines the unique contributions of family businesses as trusted influencers. As one of the most prominent forms of business, worldwide, family businesses persistently enjoy unusually high levels of public trust while collectively employing millions of wage earners yet their contributions to corporate external affairs research ostensibly have been largely overlooked. These “silent” community and social influencers offer a potentially new perspective on effective public outreach given their persistent and unique trust advantage. Family business' trust-based capabilities can potentially bring new insights to understanding effective stakeholder engagement, credible communications, and issues management—the sweet spot of corporate public affairs functions. Future research opportunities based on relational- and locational- advantages of trusted family businesses are identified.     

Integrating public affairs information strategy with organizational practices in healthcare delivery organizations

To develop and implement policy, lawmakers rely on the input from external experts and stakeholders. Public affairs professionals are responsible for monitoring the sociopolitical environment and responding to public policy proposals on behalf of firms and organizations. However, how public affairs operate intraorganizationally and develop information strategies is not clear nor consistent in the literature. The purpose was to explore how public affairs engage with internal stakeholders to leverage their knowledge for information strategies in responding to policymakers. Knowledge transfer served as a theoretical framework through a qualitative multiple case study of 3 not-for-profit healthcare delivery organizations. Primary data were collected using semistructured interviews from public affairs (n = 11) and healthcare professionals (n = 18) along with a review of organizational documents and public records. Patterns and themes emerged through cross-case synthesis, presented as a process-based model and theory. Public affairs structures and decision-making processes varied across cases indicating no coherent approach by practitioners. Intraorganizational engagement and knowledge transfer processes were managed both consistently and ad hoc, through informal and formal methods. Practitioner strategies and tactics were identified to facilitate internal interaction such as filtering policy issues and effective communication methods. Common institutional barriers were identified that made stakeholder engagement a challenge. This study provides insight into understanding how public affairs practice internally and supports the fundamental importance of linking knowledge into public policymaking.     

Nano‐Industry Operationalizations of “Responsibility”: Charting Diversity in the Enactment of Responsibility

The Collingridge dilemma—the problem of reacting to emerging technology either “too early” or “too late”—is one that is readily recognized by developers and promoters of nanotechnologies. One response can be found in the rise of a discourse of “responsible development” in the science and innovation policy landscape. While a number of commentators have discussed the potential of such initiatives, it remains unclear how responsible development is actually being configured “on the ground,” in private sector nanotechnology. This paper addresses this question by analyzing empirical engagements in Europe and the United States in order to map industry operationalizations of “responsibility” in these contexts. We show that a number of different articulations of “responsibility” are present, including as a response to public lack of trust and perceived public pressure, and as the management of risk. We close by relating these findings to the theoretical literature on responsibility, other contemporary accounts of the ways in which responsible development can be operationalized, and the possibilities that these articulations of responsibility may open up.     

Reputation management as an interplay of structure and agency: A strategic-relational approach

Reputation scholars in the field of regulation tend to focus on the strategic nature—or: “agency”—of reputation management. We know fairly little about the precise nature of the dynamics and conflicts between structural and agential factors that are experienced by regulators in practice, and how these dynamics impact reputation management and its outcomes. This study addresses these questions, using conceptual language from the strategic-relational approach to study the reputation management of the Belgian financial regulator during an event of high reputational salience: the global financial crisis. The results present an image of a regulator as a strategic actor who—either consciously or more intuitively—calculated its possible moves in light of a strategically selective context (which, in turn, was constantly evolving as a result of strategic actions). This contributes to a more complex and behaviorally realistic understanding of regulatory reputation management.