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Until recently stakeholder communication has tended to be mostly unidirectional and simple. However, the advent of the Internet has brought unprecedented change. Stakeholder communication is no longer unidirectional, and as stakeholders increasingly communicate with each other this communication becomes infinitely more complex. Unfortunately many of the tools and models of PR were developed and refined in a pre‐Internet world. This paper introduces an integrated Internet stake‐holder communication matrix (I²SCM), and explains its use for the identification of issues that need to be managed with regard to the Internet and2 PR.

This paper seeks to explore the meaning of the stakeholder concept in politics, using theories drawn from the fields of management, political science and public relations. In particular, the theory of stakeholder identification and salience is to be used as a framework.

This qualitative study involved in‐depth interviews with 23 politicians and political advisers in Western Australia and was conducted in the style of a grounded theory investigation.

The results indicate that in politics, as in business, controversy and confusion continue to surround the stakeholder concept. Participants thought “stakeholder” should imply possession of a legitimate interest in an issue, but did not believe this was always the case. There is a gulf between how politicians think stakeholder status should be accorded in principle and what happens in reality. In practice, power seems to play a far greater role than legitimacy in determining stakeholder salience among political decision‐makers.

Although the study focuses on a single jurisdiction (Western Australia), there are implications for policy development in other contemporary democracies. Excluding or marginalising stakeholders with a legitimate right to be heard contributes to the phenomenon known as “democratic deficit”, whereby citizens feel alienated from the political process.

This is one of the few empirical studies to investigate the application of stakeholder theory – as developed in the management literature – to politics. It integrates theories from different disciplines of direct relevance to what should be the primary focus of public relations – the management of stakeholder relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine external event stakeholders’ strategic actions to advance their interests in tourism events, based on their resource relationships with the event. It takes the novel approach of examining stakeholder influence strategies from the external stakeholder perspective.

The study used a qualitative case study research design, with five government-owned tourism events in Sarawak, involving primary data from 37 interviews with external stakeholders.

The stakeholders perceived that they were not overly dependent on the events studied due to their short duration. Two types of resource relationships were found: event-dependent stakeholders and event non-dependent stakeholders. Stakeholders were found to be deploying various influence strategies, which were largely subtle, positive and collaborative in nature, regardless of whether they were event-dependent or event non-dependent stakeholders.

The findings are limited to the context examined in this study. Going forward, stronger public–private partnerships and formalised resource relationships are needed to ensure continuity of resource supplies and greater event innovation.

The study adds to the knowledge of how event external stakeholders exert their influence in accordance with their interests and resource dependency relationship with government-owned tourism events in the context of Sarawak, Borneo.

Contemporary organisations rely on a wide range of publics or stakeholder groups in order to achieve their corporate objectives. The specific publics involved vary from organisation to organisation and situation to situation but typically include customers/clients, end users, shareholders/investors, employees, suppliers, governments, pressure groups, local communities and the media. Unresolved conflicts between organisations and any one or a number of these publics can seriously compromise the achieve ment of marketing and other corporate objectives. This paper examines the evolution of two separate bodies of literature which are essentially concerned with the same issues, but are framed by different academic and professional disciplines. It seems to be the case that management and marketing researchers often fail to take into account parallel literature from the discipline of public relations — even when purporting to offer an interdisciplinary approach. Equally, the public relations literature frequently fails to speak the language of business and defines such key business activities as marketing too narrowly.