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Information and influence campaigns are a particularly cogent example of the broader phenomenon we now term strategic political communication. If we think of political communication as encompassing the creation, distribution, control, use, processing and effects of information as a political resource, then we can characterize strategic political communication as the purposeful management of such information to achieve a stated objective based on the science of individual, organizational, and governmental decision-making. IICs are more or less centralized, highly structured, systematic, and carefully managed efforts to do just that. Strategy in Information and Influence Campaigns sets out in comprehensive detail the underlying assumptions, unifying strategy, and panoply of tactics of the IIC, both from the perspective of the protagonist who initiates the action and from that of the target who must defend against it. Jarol Manheim’s forward-looking, broad, and systematic analysis is a must-have resource for scholars and students of political and strategic communication, as well as practitioners in both the public and private sectors.

This analysis explores the transformation of public communication in the United States from a two-step flow of messages passing from mass media through a social mediation process, to a one-step flow involving the refined targeting of messages directly to individuals. This one-step flow reflects both a transformation in communication technologies and fundamental changes in the relations between individuals and society. Opinion leaders who played a pivotal role in the two-step paradigm are increasingly less likely to \"lead\" because they are more likely to reinforce latent opinions than to reframe them. And because the mass media in the one-step flow are increasingly fragmented and differentiated, they contribute to the individualizing process through shrinking audiences, demographically driven programming, and transmitting targeted political advertising and news spin.

Research within the agenda-setting framework has generally ignored the potential influence of purposive efforts by external actors (those outside the political system) to manipulate media coverage related to their interests. The present study uses interrupted time-series analysis to examine one such set of manipulative efforts, those undertaken by professional public relations consultants to influence the images of foreign nations as portrayed in the United States press. Data represent New York Times coverage of six nations that signed public relations contracts with American firms during the period from 1974 to 1978, and one nation that expressly rejected such a contract. The analysis identifies consistent patterns of improvement along two primary dimensions of national image, visibility and valence, which are associated in time with the public relations contracts.

Socially responsible investing (SRI) is all the rage these days, and who could quarrel with the impetus to channel investment funds toward pro-social applications and away from antisocial ones? It is a movement that, by its very name, has an inherent claim on the moral high ground of the global economy, a claim that gives to the movement its legitimacy, its appeal, its dynamism and its growing power. It is a claim to moral authority that deserves closer examination. The SRI movement is designed to generate leverage on corporate behaviours through the pooling and application of wealth in sufficient volume to force changes in corporate governance, in corporate behaviour, and, collectively, in public policy. More than that, it is designed to take maximal advantage of the growing interconnectedness of the global economy.

An anti-corporate campaign is a coordinated, often long-term and wide-ranging program of economic, political, legal and psychological warfare designed to attack the viability of the essential stakeholder relationships on which any corporation depends. By turning these stakeholders into pressure points against the company, the successful campaign strikes at the company where it hurts most while simultaneously depriving it of its best lines of defense. Anti-corporate campaigns attack the legitimacy of the corporation as a social form. Several actions are employed with considerable regularity, including: 1. Defining and defending the moral high ground. 2. Bringing secondary pressure on the company's financial arrangements. 3. Attacking shareholder value. 4. Boycotting the company's products or services. 5. Litigation and regulation. It was organized labor that first breathed life into the anti-corporate campaign. In its attacks on corporations, the labor movement recognizes certain boundaries that must not be crossed. The same cannot be said of some other NGOs that are now employing these techniques.

At the outset, I suggested that information and infl uence campaigns can be conducted at different levels of complexity and sophistication. We are now at a point where we can elaborate a bit more on that argument.