Professor Roger Peter Hayes’ presentation focuses on the topic of Corporate Diplomacy (CD), a sub-set of Public Diplomacy. He argues that with its close links to public relations and corporate affairs, CD is a promising area for further research and scholarly attention. Professor Hayes believes that Corporate Diplomacy is multi-disciplinary, since it joins the dots between International Relations, Business Management, Governance and Leadership, as well as Corporate Social Responsibility. Currently, these disciplines are compartmentalized, and with the emergence of CD as an inter-disciplinary study, the barriers between these disciplines could be broken, and new ideas could be formed through the fusion of these disciplines through the study of CD.
The study of CD is in great demand and of great necessity because the limitations on political leadership in some nations and their budget constraints made many governments unable to govern effectively. As such, international companies and their senior teams are under increasing pressure by activists, governments, regulators, communities, and customers to become part of the governance solutions in these countries and they are expected to develop standards and policy frameworks in collaboration with the public and/or non-profit sectors so that political and social problems at home and host countries can be solved. Therefore, it is important for international corporations to systematically build even more capacity and capability into the PR and related functions. Also, they need to expand their stakeholder engagement especially in high context political and cultural domains. At the same time, governments also need to learn these techniques from the private sector.
This is the sixteenth in a series of 'Politics and IR Brown Bag Lunch Sessions' organised by the Centre on Asia and Globalisation. Launched in 2017, the initiative aims to provide a more casual and intimate setting for CAG faculty members to share their nascent research ideas on international relations over lunch, as well as engaging in unconstrained and thought-provoking discussion.