Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine social enterprise sustainability by comparing recent international research with prior findings seeking to identify the important factors that facilitate social enterprise development.

The research used a concurrent, convergent mixed methods approach on a sample of 93 social enterprise leaders using surveys and face-to-face interviews. The participants were sourced from a cross-section of social enterprise organisational types from urban and regional locations in Australia and Scotland.

The findings support prior research, identifying resourcing, organisational capabilities, collaborative networks and legitimacy as influential in the success of social enterprises. However, the research contributes new knowledge by revealing an overarching growth orientation as the dominant factor in the strategic management for sustainability of these ventures. This growth orientation is generally associated with the intent to achieve profitability. Thus, social enterprise managers view a commercially focused growth orientation as an overarching strategic factor that underpins organisational sustainability.

The paper delivers new insights into the strategic orientation of social ventures of benefit to policy makers and practitioners alike. The findings are significant for policy makers providing perspectives into how governmental assistance can be targeted to develop sustainable social enterprises, particularly the need to support the growth of these ventures. Similarly, practitioners are alerted to the strategic imperatives of incorporating a commercially focused growth orientation and the latent potential that exists in the networks of social enterprise.

This paper seeks to offer a profile of Peter Bullimore, one of the most dynamic lived experience speakers and trainers in the mental health world.

A profile of Peter is built up through an in‐depth interview by psychologist Jerome Carson. Areas covered include: his experience of hearing voices; his work in Australia and New Zealand; stigma; recovery; inspiring individuals in mental health; his personal illness and medication; the media; and changes and challenges.

Peter tells us that hearing voices are signs of a problem not an illness, and are often linked to trauma. He feels British work on recovery is in advance of that in Australia and New Zealand. He sees a day when it will no longer be necessary to use the term schizophrenia. Instead of recovery people should be thinking of discovery.

For too long the only voices that have been heard in the mental health field have been the professional voices. Peter's is one of many new inspirational voices to have emerged from the developing service user movement.

This paper aims to provide a living tribute to the mental health activist and international trainer Peter Bullimore.

Peter provided a list of people to who he wanted to provide tributes. Jerome approached all these people. All agreed.

Several people from around the world attest to the influence that Peter’s teaching and personality have had on their clinical practice and on their lives.

The disappearance of an Open Mind has left a shortage of journals, which welcome the user perspective. Mental Health and Social Inclusion have always championed the voice of people with lived experience. These are selected tributes to one man’s work in the field of mental health.

These accounts provide insights into the work of a remarkable individual.

Students of the mental health professions are mainly exposed to work produced by their peers. The history of mental health is filled with the stories of professionals, not the people who have used services.

Historically accounts of psychiatry are written by mental health professionals. Service user or lived experience accounts are often written from the perspective of the person’s story of illness and recovery. There are comparatively few, which celebrate the additional achievements of specific individuals with lived experience.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extraordinary reputational challenge for brands in social media in an era of heightened political and cultural polarization. In a time when the tension between liberal and conservative consumers has grown significantly, brands are being threatened with boycotts from both the left and right. In this paper, the authors identify some core approaches for brands facing this dilemma.

The authors’ approach is to review the experience of various brands which have been the victims of consumer boycotts motivated by political considerations. The authors examined these events from the perspective of the severity/duration of their impact on the brand, how the brands chose to respond and how their response was perceived to suggest the approaches that seem to be most effective in mitigating brand damage.

The authors have found that the critical factors in mitigating brand damage are giving clear guidelines to employees about customer relations, understanding the composition of the customer base more deeply through the lens of politics and culture, developing a comprehensive risk management approach and creating a consistent point of view on handling political threats and boycotts to ensure consistency.

The authors’ evaluation is by definition subjective and the insights gained have not been tested empirically.

While the potential political threats to a specific brand are reasonably predictable, consumer perceptions are influenced by many factors only partially within the brand’s control.

Much as companies gained expertise in managing reputation crises throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the authors believe that brands adopting their approach to politically driven boycotts will gradually learn how to manage them and the threats will become a routine part of a brand’s relationship with its stakeholders.

While a great deal has been written about the nature and growth of politically driven brand threats, the authors believe this paper is an original contribution to how to manage them.

This chapter applies recent theoretical developments linked to the concept of culture to the field of public relations research and practice, notably through the prism of creativity as a vector of cultural change.

The chapter is theoretical in nature and draws on relevant scientific literature in the field of public relations research, but also the social sciences more generally, and illustrates the issues being discussed with reference to relevant public relations campaigns.

While the field of public relations has moved beyond simplistic models of cultural values and characteristics, it is argued that more complex visions of culture have been neglected. Specifically, drawing on structuration theory, culture can be seen as a ‘system-generating mechanism’ relying on creativity to uphold and renew cultural references and norms. In this perspective, public relations is both producing/reproducing culture and being produced by culture. It follows that the concept should be apprehended not as an ontological category but as a social construct, as the source of heuristic and discursive categorisations.

A call is issued for public relations to also question the ideological underpinnings of the production of symbols in which practitioners partake on a daily basis.

While the chapter fits into an emerging body of work discussing the cultural dimension of public relations, the link with creativity and the use of structuration theory to conceptualise this link contribute to its originality.