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My research aims to empower people to achieve their fullest potential in a sustainable manner while embracing and celebrating their social identities. My research is positioned at the intersection of corporate social advocacy, critical public relations, corporate social responsibility/sustainability, and culture.
My current research focuses on situations where brand and corporate activism, environmental conservation, and socioeconomic development collide with intersectional social justice issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and other axes of inequality and oppression.
My doctoral dissertation is a postmodern analysis of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) activism within the non-Western socioeconomic context of Ghana. I have authored publications on communication, public relations, sales, and marketing communications.
I have presented various research projects at major international communication conferences, and published in reputable communication journals.
Explore some of my books, book chapter contributions, journal articles, dissertations, theses, and long essays here.
Given that more CEOs are taking activist stances, this chapter addresses the dearth of literature on CEO activism within non-Western contexts by analyzing an external-facing activist CEO speech, “Down the Up Escalator: Reflections on Ghana’s Future by a Senior Citizen,” delivered by Sir Sam Jonah, the former Chairman of Anglogold Ashanti, and the current Chairman of Jonah Capital. We followed a theory-guided approach in performing a framing analysis of the selected text to enable us to transcend the manifest meanings, decipher the latent meanings, and isolate the major frames and emergent framing devices. This study seeks to invigorate the CEO activism literature by adopting a unique focus on the African context and applying framing theory to closely examine a speech by a CEO activist in the Global South. This study contributes to the nascent field of CEO activism and speechmaking in public relations and strategic communications by offering a typology of four major activist CEO speech frames, including the governance frame, the solutions frame, the assault on democracy frame, and the silence frame. Also uncovered are framing devices such as metaphors, repetitions, epigrams, coinages, idiomatic expressions, and colloquialisms. In a field currently dominated by Western (American) cases, this study illuminates our understanding of CEO activism by contributing perspectives from a non-Western activist CEO. The study also contributes to the growing streams of literature in the African School of Thought in Public Relations, Afrocentric sustainability philosophies, and concepts of inclusive capitalism such as Africapitalism.
Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are publicly speaking to greater good issues largely unrelated to the operations of companies and/or the profit-maximizing logic, through diverse social resistance campaigns. While CEO activism may produce some positive outcomes, it has been suggested that it may also be associated with some negative outcomes for societies, corporations, and CEO activists. These toxic outcomes highlight the need for guidelines for engaging in such campaigns. This study seeks to address the largely unbroached CEO activism guidelines question. Data collection involved interviews with 24 men and women who self-identified as activist CEOs in Ghana. The thematic approach informed data analysis. The findings augment the current thin literature on guidelines for activist CEO campaigns. It offers a model of guidelines for safer and more effective CEO activist campaigns based on the lived experiences of participants in the study. It discusses three distinct types of CEO activism campaign guidelines, including (i) ex-ante (campaign ideation and pre-campaign phase) guidelines, (ii) process (campaign implementation phase) guidelines, and (iii) ex-post (campaign evaluation phase) guidelines. The findings enrich literature streams on corporate social advocacy/CEO activism and sustainability transitions and contribute empirical data from real-life men and women CEO activists within a non-Western context. It also extends the growing literature on the African School of Thought in Public Relations, Public Relations for Social Responsibility, and Responsible Management in emerging markets, viewed from an Afrocentric perspective.
This chapter offers an overview of important aspects of how public sector entities across the African continent are leveraging digital and social media channels to achieve various strategic ends, including enhancing public communication, more effectively engaging citizens in democracy and governance, improving public service delivery, crisis communication and management, government image enhancement, boosting internal communication within public sector organizations, and achieving financial goals. The chapter profiles significant facets of the African sociocultural milieu, including some contemporary stimulants and barriers to digital and social media use by public sector organizations across Africa. Overall, the chapter illuminates patterns of employment of major social media channels by public sector organizations in Africa. It uniquely positions the book as helping develop a systematic approach to understanding many transformations taking place within the African public sector landscape, with the view to enriching understanding of social media practices and how these could be better integrated into the operational activities of public sector institutions in Africa. It discusses integrated literature review and textual analysis as major methods for collecting and analysing data for the entire book and describes the overall structure of remainder of the book.
The chapter discusses social media within the context of Africa’s public sector. This chapter suggests that social media usage by governments and public sector organizations on the African continent displays remarkably different characteristics than how such communication and media channels are deployed within commercial settings. The chapter illustrates how social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and LinkedIn are deployed by public sector organisations across Africa to achieve strategic communication objectives. The chapter argues that social media channels are pivotal in enhancing public sector communication due to their characteristics such as interactivity, participation, and user-generated value. Social media strategies adopted by government agencies on the African continent may involve a push strategy, which focusses on providing information to the public; a pull strategy, which seeks to engage and interact with target audience, and a networking strategy that focusses on information sharing. This chapter suggests that the use of social media vehicles among public sector organisations on the continent of Africa may go through diverse stages. These include an initial stage of using social media to provide information to target audiences, very much akin to propagandist, press agentry, and public information models. This is followed by an intermediary stage that involves employing using social media channels to engage and interact with the target publics in a manner that ensures receiving some feedback. Then, there is an advanced stage where public sector organizations employ social media use for two-way communication, collaboration and co-creation, but also for boosting service delivery. This chapter contributes to the relatively nascent literature streams on the nature of social media in the public sector in Africa.
This chapter interrogates Africa’s public sector organisations’ major objectives for using social media. The review of the literature and social media accounts found that social media platforms are used to provide information to citizens. The secondary objective is to identify effective pathways for offering opportunities for citizens to engage with public sector organisations in Africa. The chapter also identifies that social media platforms assume increased importance during times of crisis to manage emergencies in Africa. Social media platforms are an integral part of delivering e-government services in African countries. On the political front, social media plays a crucial in promoting democracy and citizens’ political participation. This chapter acknowledges the role played by social media platforms in enhancing government communications, engagement, and participation in governance.
This chapter aims to provide an understanding of the factors that serve as catalysts for social media adoption by public sector firms in Africa. Using the Technology Organisation Environment (TOE) framework, this chapter explains how social media technology is adopted and used by public sector organisations in Africa. Social media adoption is an organisational context, and hence the TOE can best be used to understand the factors affecting the adoption of the technology. On the technological factors, African countries have the capability to fully use their technological capabilities to introduce all social media platforms. The crucial issue of concern is that public sector organisations must see social media as having potential benefits to promote communications. The external environmental factors involving pressure from government and citizens for public sector organisations to use social media is mainly due to the increasing use of the technology by citizens across Africa. In most African countries, governments have policies in place to take advantage of the enormous benefits of social media. This chapter argues that several organisational factors, including top management support, resource availability, and skilled human resource to sustain social media technologies are significant tonic factors that catalyse the adoption of social media by Africa’s public sector.
The adoption and use of social media is influenced in part by the prevailing political environment. The use of social media in Africa is fraught with some challenges due to the lack of political will, and sometimes opposition from some government institutions. The chapter provides the reasons why social media is viewed as anti-democratic within the African socioeconomic context. Some of the toxic factors have been found to include the promotion of misinformation, fake news, hate speech, and voter manipulation. The chapter also provides some examples of social media ban in Africa supervised by governments that perceive the technology as destructive. This chapter as well advocates for the promotion of social media because of its democracy-deepening function and concludes that social media must be promoted to develop democracy on the African continent.
Social media has been described as having the potential to enhance the delivery of e-government services. The chapter relies on examples of social media use in providing e-government services in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Rwanda and Nigeria. From the literature, the chapter found that social media provides a convenient and effective ways for governments to communicate with citizens on e-government services. Social media enables citizens to gain access to e-government sites and facilitates engagement with users of e-government services. The use of government portals to provide e-government services can be augmented with social media accounts providing communications about the services and serving as an avenue to engage the public about e-government services. This chapter makes a strong case for integrating e-government portals with social media accounts in the African public sector.
This chapter offers some reflections on the use of social media public sector organisations in Africa. The first part proposes some social media use strategies that can guide the use of the technologies to achieve intended objectives. The chapter recommends that governments must develop a social media policy for public sector organisations to use as a guide. The use of social media to attain communication objectives and enhance political participation are also proposed. The chapter recommends that social media platforms can be used to promote the delivery of e-government services in Africa. The last part of the chapter provides some tips for using social media proposed by Kaplan to enhance the effectiveness of using the technology by public sector organisations in Africa.
Assuring sustainability across the African continent – the cradle of humankind – is an ethical public relations responsibility. There is insufficient research about public relations as a tool for supporting sustainability goals across the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent, one that the rest of the planet relies upon for forests. The United Nations Foundation’s sustainable development core goals (SDGs) offer an important framework. To begin filling the gap, we address the challenges of making sustainability happen here, given a long history of negative colonial and neocolonial forces operating in many of Africa’s nations. Despite these impediments, indigenous, pre-colonial Afro-centric philosophies of communalism/collectivism and harmony with the natural environment that support sustainability efforts are enduring. We interrogate six indigenous philosophies which resonate with values that make contemporary public relations ethical. We discuss why professional public relations shaped by Afro-centric philosophies are welcomed, globally, and are critical for addressing sustainability across the continent.
There are rising calls for the adoption of responsible management practices in virtually every economic sector of both developed and developing economies. Among others, efforts to promote responsible management have been championed by governments, international organisations, academic institutions, and industry regulators. In developing economies, such moves have spawned numerous success stories across diverse sectors such as energy, mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Despite these glowing achievements, a plethora of challenges persist that threaten the sustainable development agenda. Against this backdrop, we address some crucial pathways for the sustainability logic and responsible management philosophy, as exemplified by contemporary practices across various sectors within the emerging markets context. We conceptualised responsible management as built on three pillars and examine the contribution of this triad of cognate concepts and practices: corporate social responsibility, green business, and sustainable management. We argue that social responsibility is pivotal to responsible management since it is imperative for corporations to consider the interests of multiple stakeholders, including employees, the society, the environment, future generations, and not only the interests of companies and investors. Akin to corporate social responsibility are sustainable management practices. We applaud current sustainability transitions concerning initiatives by businesses to drive meaningful and rewarding sustainability action. However, considering the upsurge of irresponsible and unsustainable business practices that harm the biosphere, needlessly kill wildlife, deplete natural resources, and destroy vegetation, the chapter explicates some specific ways in which businesses in emerging markets can drive green business initiatives from thought to finish, as expressed through green sourcing, green processing, green production, and green consumption practices. We also make recommendations regarding how governments, policymakers, and managers can support and embed the responsible management agenda in emerging markets. The chapter recommends that organisations must reimagine present-day sustainability actions by adopting innovative and sustainable initiatives such as reducing consumption, recycling, remanufacturing, reusing resources, and employing cutting-edge technology to monitor business processes across the entire value-chain from manufacturing to the end-user. At the micro level, we advocate that firm managers, entrepreneurs, and individuals must propel efforts in adopting responsible management practices. Finally, this chapter introduces the multisectoral chapters contained in the pages of this book, outline contributions to theory, and discuss practical managerial and policy implications
This chapter offers an inquiry into the emerging phenomenon of corporate social advocacy, also known as CEO activism, in a non-Western sociocultural context. It addresses gaps in CEO activism research, including a dearth of non-Western contexts, dominance of modernist perspectives, and omission of female activist CEO voices. I apply alternative theoretical lenses of Caritas, Ubuntu, Africapitalism, and postmodernism to examine facets of CEO activism in Ghana. Data were collected through long interviews with 24 activist CEO men and women and data underwent hermeneutic phenomenological theme analysis. Findings suggest that CEO activism in Ghana is motivated by a range of factors previously not articulated in the literature on CEO activism. Brand activism typologies adequately describe the causes/issues advocated by activist CEOs in Ghana – as findings advance perspectives of non-Western society CEO activists. Hence, this chapter internationalizes the CEO activism phenomenon for the public relations literature while extending diversity, equality, and inclusion, sustainability, postmodern values, and insider activist perspectives to also include Caritas, Ubuntu philosophy, and Africapitalism.
We enjoin stakeholder theory, radical-cultural feminist theory, and critical race theory with critical intersectionality to critique findings which suggest that there still are significantly more men than women on nearly every Fortune 500 board of directors, with only six corporations featuring (50-50%) gender equity in 2017. Also, only 4.1% board members are women of color and 9% are men of color. Sixty-five people of color on corporate boards serve on more than one board. This means there are even fewer people of color filling top corporate leadership positions than meets the eye. The proposed alternative course of action is for boards of directors to follow the example of the small handful of peer Fortune 500 corporations that have achieved greater levels of board diversity, equity, and inclusion.
2507 University Ave Des Moines, IA 50311
Office: Meredith 110