Strategic communication planning and its requirements have evolved considerably over the past 20 years as a reflection of the needs of our changing world; people, technology and the requirement for military and civilian actors to work together. Nowhere has this change been more pronounced than with the development of international humanitarian intervention missions that necessarily involve military and international aid actors working in mutual dependence in areas of natural and man-made crises. Using the 2007-2011 period of the combined war and humanitarian intervention mission in Afghanistan, this study develops the requirements for a strategic communication plan for the humanitarian aspects of that mission with implications for practical reach to all long-term crises. It establishes the real from the ideal practices by the international community (military, humanitarian aid, international bodies) and, based on recommendations from the expert literature, presents a strategic communication planning format that guides both the practitioner and theoretician.

This thesis approaches the topic of communication strategies that can influence and improve peace negotiations and conflict resolutions. The aim of this thesis is to highlight ways in which the use of communication can possibly pave the way towards a world with less conflicts by researching two communication approaches called nonviolent communication and strategic communication. To achieve a greater understanding of the two communication models, they will be applied to the case study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Consequently, this thesis will also include a comparative analysis which will highlight differences and similarities between the two approaches where, as a result, the core of communication will be discussed.Overall, this thesis will highlight the importance of communication. Communication is a topic that affects all areas of life, the area of religion included. This thesis argues that both nonviolent communication and strategic communication are essential approaches in realising what the core of communication entails. To conclude, this thesis states that both of the two chosen communication models are useful, and can possibly pave the way towards a world with less conflicts, but in different ways. This thesis demonstrates that communication can build bridges, make connections, and restore faith in humanity.

This study examines the relevance of an established public relations theory, relationship management, to investor relations. Having emerged during the 1950s, investor relations is a relatively new field that integrates the disciplines of communication, marketing, finance, and securities laws compliance. Through qualitative interviews focused on six publicly traded companies on the West Coast, the study provides insight into the relationship management function of investor relations from the perspectives of those whom investors ultimately hold accountable for a public company's performance - CEOs. The dominant theme emerging from the study is the constant challenge CEOs of public companies face as they engage in relationships with investors, primarily due to the constraining effects of regulatory requirements. While the study confirmed that the interviewees value L. C. Hon and J. E. Grunig's qualities of trust, satisfaction, control mutuality and commitment in relationships with investors, CEOs' most frequently discussed relationship quality that they work to achieve is trust.

This study examines how LGBT activists and LGBT youth make meaning of a strategic advocacy campaign. By examining activist and advocacy efforts aimed at youth, this research brings to light how LGBT organizations use campaigns to articulate identity and, conversely, how LGBT youth articulate notions of identity. Through the lens of the It Gets Better Project, a nonprofit activist organization, this dissertation uses in-depth interviews with organizational members and chat-based interviews with LGBT youth to study the meanings participants brought to the campaign. Strategic communication has been instrumental in construction of LGBT as a cohesive collective identity and has played a vital role in the early stages of the gay rights movement. This research demonstrates how contemporary LGBT advocacy, through strategic communication, works to shape understandings of LGBT youth. Instead of focusing on the Internet as a democratic space that equalizes power differentials between an organization and its publics, this study shows that the construction of identity is the result of a dynamic process between producers and consumers in which power is localized and does not simply belong to an organization or its public. This research challenges the Internet as a democratic space and demonstrates that identity is a discursive struggle over meaning that is bound up in the intimate dance between producers and consumers of a campaign. In contrast to functionalist understandings of public relations that privileges the organization, this dissertation contends that a cultural-economic approach focuses on the processes of communication. A cultural-economic approach gives voice to the diverse audiences of a communication campaign and addresses the role communication plays as a discursive force that influences the construction of identities.

The difficulties faced by the United Kingdom in realising its stabilisation objectives in the War in Afghanistan (2001-2014) have precipitated a change in rhetorical approach by successive British Governments, from one based on liberal normative principles to one that emphasises traditional, rationalist precepts of ‘national security interests’. This transformation of ‘narrative’ is identified in this work as chronologically analogous with the institutionalisation of ‘strategic communication’ practices and doctrine emanating from the defence establishment of the British state. In this work, I argue that changes in narrative approach and the emergence of strategic communication can be understood as a consequence of an overburdened British state attempting to free itself from a ‘transnational dilemma’ (King 2010): that is, to find a means of appealing coherently and succinctly to the benefits of participation in collective security whilst avoiding threatening the viability of collective security membership by acknowledging its costs. This transnational dilemma has been exacerbated by intra-state competition over the material and ideational aspects of British strategy in Helmand, and is traceable by close empirical analysis of three competing ‘policy narratives’ for Afghanistan: stabilisation, counter-narcotics, and counter-terrorism, respectively. Intra-state competition can, in turn, be conceptualised as the result of embedded inter-state relationships of political obligation and military cooperation referred to by Edmunds (2010) as the ‘transnationalisation’ of defence policy. UK policy in Afghanistan has been guided by transnational issues, specifically the maintenance of NATO as a collective security apparatus and of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, through which Britain secures and projects its national interest. I argue that the UK’s grand strategic commitment to transnationalisation underscores an ‘unstatable’ ultimate policy of meeting the expectations of the United States and NATO, and that the development of various policies and narratives for Afghanistan can be understood primarily in such terms. In Afghanistan, transnationalisation and the concordant pursuit of satisfying American and NATO expectations has come at the cost of a significant divestment of strategic autonomy, which has uprooted traditional, nationally-based concepts of strategy and policy to the transnational level and resulted in a strategic vacuum wherein intra-state competition has flourished. This, I argue, has compromised the ability for Britain to link policy to operations (to ‘do’ strategy)d in Afghanistan, a point which can be empirically measured by reference to the discordant and contradictory aspects of aforementioned policy narratives, which have been rooted in the institutional interests of various elements of the state. Strategic communication has arisen out of this situation as a means for the state to overcome the transnational dilemma by promoting a unified ‘strategic narrative’ for Afghanistan that has reconfigured the narrative for the conflict to one that emphasises the conflict not in terms of collective security but in ‘national’ terms. This work concludes by arguing that, in sidestepping rather than confronting the core dilemmas of British strategy, the emergence of strategic communication can be seen as posing as many problems as solutions for the UK state.

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This thesis consists of three chapters in microeconomic theory concerning strategic interactions among parties with asymmetric information. The first chapter, ''Cheap Talk with Private Signal Structure" (co-authored with Maxim Ivanov) and published in Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 132 (2022), pages 288-304, addresses the question of how a designer of information --- which is privately observed by other players --- can benefit from designing it privately. The second chapter, ''Multidimensional Signaling with a Resource Constraint" (co-authored with Seungjin Han), studies competitive monotone equilibria in a multidimensional signaling economy where senders invest in their multidimensional signals (cognitive and non-cognitive) while facing a resource constraint. The third chapter, ''Consumer Privacy Disclosure in Competitive Markets", studies how competition among multi-product sellers with market power shapes the implications of consumer privacy on market outcomes. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In a dynamic world of constant changes, social and technological developments have made crisis communication and crisis management more valuable than ever to organisations. Previous research has suggested that organisations with a certain entrusting relationship to stakeholders might not share premises for crisis communication with corporate organisations. Furthermore, the field of crisis communication suffers from a lack of studies focusing on organisations´ communication on social media during crisis. Using text analysis, this study investigates the Swedish trade union Kommunal’s communication on Facebook during the crisis in January 2016. Results show that Kommunal did not utilize a crisis frame similar enough to the crisis frame used by stakeholders and media, and that Kommunal did not accept enough stakeholder and media attributions of crisis responsibility. The results produces questions for further research about the balancing act between being consistent and adjusting to the crisis situation when communicating during crisis, as well as about if organisations are affected not only by their own crisis history and prior relationship reputation, but by the crisis history and prior relationship reputation of similar organisations as well.

This dissertation focuses on the use of strategic communication in the context of contemporary environmental activism. It examines the case of Bold Nebraska, a grassroots advocacy group opposing the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline in the state of Nebraska. Such an analysis of activist communication informs several areas of research, including public relations theory and practice, social movement theory, and environmental communication. To understand the construction of strategic communication within such activism, this study employs a movement framing analysis, a media framing analysis, and a rhetorical analysis. A quantitative framing analysis of Bold Nebraska’s website communication against the pipeline during the five-year period of 2011 to 2015 assesses how activists craft and project strategic messages. A framing analysis of Bold Nebraska’s national media coverage during the same timeframe highlights the relationship between activist framing and mainstream news coverage. Finally, a rhetorical analysis of Bold Nebraska’s 2014 Harvest the Hope concert is provided to understand the role of rhetorical appeals in building an environmental activism metanarrative or master frame. Taken together, these three approaches provide both a more holistic means to considering environmental activism campaigns in the context of strategic communication, and fill in the gaps for understanding the interplay of social movement organizations, public relations, and persuasion. This study brings a framework of strategic advocacy framing to the realm of environmental politics, and builds upon this framework by considering the dynamic of populism in activism. It also explores the role of strategic communication in evolving a movement organization’s metanarrative as it toggles between short- and long-term goals. Finally, it identifies a civic environmental persuasion built upon the attributes of narrative, hyperlocalization, engagement, and bipartisanship in order to build broad support and influence public policy.

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