The study investigates how shareholders are constructed and engaged with through public relations in the Australian financial sector. The web sites and annual and sustainability reports of major Australian companies and investment funds were examined through qualitative content analysis. Findings indicate that a hierarchical distinction exists within the discrete but amorphous stakeholder group known as shareholders, where privilege and disadvantage exist alongside disparate levels of power and agency. This is perpetuated by and through irresponsible public relations, which constructs a discourse of ownership that excludes citizens as legitimate stakeholders limiting their capacity to influence more ethical corporate decisions and practices. Recommendations are offered for how public relations might engage shareholders more responsibly. may call a pension fund. 1 We posit that, because of irresponsible corporate public relations practices that fail to engage with citizen investors, citizens are unfamiliar with the rights and responsibilities they hold as shareholders, and therefore are inhibited from influencing how the financial sector and large companies are governed. This has consequences for the accountability of large business to society.We focus our study on one major sector of the Australian economy and seek to identify, illustrate, and interrogate the process of engagement with shareholders as stakeholders in the Australian financial sector. We are interested in understanding how shareholders, as primary stakeholders, are constructed and engaged with through the formal public relations' activities of listed companies and the institutional funds (superannuation funds) 2 that invest in them. Because we are concerned with the ethical status of stakeholder engagement, our aim is to examine the (ir)responsibility of public relations as stakeholder engagement.
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