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This paper analyses how the world's largest corporations communicate about sustainability and sustainable development in their non‐financial reports. It investigates the concept use, definitions and attempts at operationalization, and the rationales that corporations give to engage with them. It is concluded that the corporations typically opt to treat sustainability and sustainable development as given and unproblematic instead of addressing the fundamental problems of today's practice or the dilemmas of the concepts. The most striking finding, however, is that so many of the corporations no longer argue that they are on a ‘journey’ towards sustainability, but that they have already integrated sustainability principles and that they have worked like this for years. Such arguments arguably inhibit the change in business models that many commentators call for. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Based on extensive fieldwork, the present article illustrates how the logic of the news media is expanding from influential communication departments to the practices, routines and priorities of traditional career bureaucrats. To theorize the mediatization of a traditional bureaucratic rationale, the article proposes a typology for how rule-based public organizations adapt to and adopt the news media’s implicit ‘logic of appropriateness.’ We emphasize the importance of (1) the news rhythm and (2) news formats, but also (3) how and why being in the media is valued by civil servants, and (4) how this leads to a reallocation of resources and responsibilities within the organization. We find that career bureaucrats both anticipate and adopt a news logic in their daily work. The normative implications of these transformations are discussed in the final section of the article.

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The advent of social media has spurred democratic optimism and been seen as something that help political public relations establish and maintain good relationships with key publics. Still, research has shown how, for instance, political candidates in the United States by large did not respond to messages on their Facebook walls. Another popular social media platform, Twitter, has often been deemed as an elite medium, thus reducing its democratic potential. The findings in this study show a different picture. Most of the politicians in the sample do use Twitter and its @message functionality. Furthermore, the extent to which they communicate with ordinary citizens is larger than expected. Still, it is a clear tendency that the exchanges are found in user clusters with little overlap between them. The researched party leaders mostly approach other Twitter users in unique clusters. Thus, Twitter probably functions to maintain good relationships with, literarily, followers. As Norwegian party leaders use the @message functionality more frequently than before – especially to engage in communication with citizens – maybe we are seeing a shift in how political actors engage in online interactivity.