Interviewed by the Network’s Special Advisor, Rod Cartwright and Co-Chair, Katherine Sykes
9.00 – 9.45 am GMT, Monday 20th January 2025
For the Network’s first event of 2025, we will be in conversation with Rupert Younger, founder and director of Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation.
2025 promises to be no less momentous or potentially tumultuous than 2024, and our opening event of the year takes place on the morning of President Elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
Rupert co-founded leading global strategic communications agency Finsbury (now FGS Global) with Roland Rudd in 1994, and is co-author of The Reputation Game and The Activist Manifesto. His third book, Forked Tongues, will be published in 2025. He is also the Founder and Academic Director of Oxford’s internationally-renowned Corporate Affairs Academy.
Established in 2008, the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation is home to social evaluations research at Oxford, exploring how organisations manage social evaluations such as reputation, status, celebrity, legitimacy, stigma and trust.
Drawing on Rupert’s long and esteemed career as a corporate advisor, writer and educationalist, we will explore his personal experience of advising on issues, crisis, risk and resilience.
We’ll look at how his work approaches the question of how businesses orient themselves to meet new and emerging societal issues – or ‘Alignment Challenges’ as the Centre calls them – including stigma, crisis and governance.
And we’ll explore Rupert’s and his team’s research into ‘Practice Challenges’ – “business activities that pose both opportunities and threats for organisations and how they are perceived by key stakeholders” – including AI, activists and activism, fake news and political engagement.
Hot on the tail of the our Best Practice Guide to Social Media and Crisis Communication, published in October 2024, join us for the first exciting session of what promises to be another year of world-class Network events.
Contact: Felix Östman
Email: [email protected]