This article reports on the communication strategies that sports shoe giant Nike used to successfully protect its corporate social responsibility (CSR) reputation during the late 1990s. The article opens with a brief discussion of CSR and its critical importance to transnationals such as Nike. The opening also includes four research questions guiding this study. The article then discusses why frame analysis offers such a potentially rich approach to analyzing public relations controversies like this one. The Analysis section of the article examines how an anti-Nike coalition initially succeeded in imposing negative frames on two CSR issues and how this framing generated highly negative media coverage. The remainder of this section provides a detailed commentary on eight Web texts from Nikebiz. com and how the framing strategy behind these texts enabled the company ultimately to defend, even to enhance its CSR reputation.
This research focuses on the crisis that the documentary Blackfish precipitated at SeaWorld. The study begins with a brief account of the growth and evolution of SeaWorld and the financial and reputational damage that followed Blackfish’s release in 2013. A literature review of framing and frame theory follows. Next, the three issue-related, transformative frames embedded in the text/video of Blackfish are identified and analyzed; then the three main counter frames deployed by SeaWorld are identified and analyzed. The conclusion discusses how and why Blackfish prevailed in this high-profile framing contest. It does so by discussing the resonance, coherence, and credibility of the documentary’s anticaptivity narrative and its superiority over SeaWorld’s counterframing campaign. Perhaps even more important, the conclusion briefly examines how the tectonic shift in late-20th-century public opinion regarding animal rights—the kairotic backdrop of this crisis—forced SeaWorld to fundamentally change its business model in order to meet the dictates of this new ethos and to reestablish its postcrisis legitimacy.
Teaching and learning at business schools; transforming business education (pp. 47-62). Aldershot: Gower. van Hout-Wolters, B. (2000). Assessing active self-directed learning. In R. Simons, J. van der Linden, & T. Duffy (Eds.), New learning (pp. 83-99). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Marije van Amelsvoort is an assistant professor of Communication and Information Sciences in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Tilburg. Her research focuses on learning, in particular collaborative learning, learning with multiple representations, and learning with computers. She teaches general courses, such as methodology, and more specialised courses, such as Digital Collaboration, both alone and in collaboration with other teachers.
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