Public Relations Review最新文献

Using a qualitative approach, this study explores the role of empathy as a critical skill that can improve public relations practice. Specifically, it investigates how South Korean public relations practitioners perceive the role of empathy based on their life and work experiences, beliefs, and feelings. This theme is considered within the context of the Korean culture of Shim-Cheong, a state focused on “we-ness,” and Cheong. The study results reveal three important aspects of empathy for public relations practitioners: 1) an empathic appraisal that allows evaluation of public emotions, 2) a sensitivity that enables detection of/predicts a change in public mood, and 3) sympathetic arousal that ensures sincere communication of empathy in a crisis. When the public perceives organizations and their issues as problematic, public affect changes from positive to negative. Empathy as capacity, intuition, and attitude allows public relations practitioners to determine when public affect has significantly changed South Koreans in the culture of Shim-Cheong. Since South Koreans tend to express positive moods more readily than negative emotions, practitioners can use an affect monitoring system to identify social trends and perform more in-depth analyses to assess contextual meanings and identify potential risks.

In 2021, Netflix and Spotify became the center of debate over controversial content. As a form of protest, Twitter (X) users engaged in hashtag activism using #NetflixWalkout and #CancelSpotify. Hashtag activism provides online activists and organizers a mechanism to produce and disseminate (counter)narratives quickly. In both cases, users employed the hashtags to support the streaming services’ stances or pressure them to alter their activities. While previous studies have examined the use of hashtag activism in constructing narratives, particularly in larger social movements, much of this extant work focuses on one narrative, even though divergent and conflicting narratives emerge in these situations. To better understand how participants cultivate online discourse surrounding corporate connections to social issues, we analyze the primary competing narratives and supporting frames that emerged in #CancelSpotify and #NetflixWalkout. While the intended narrative reflected the organizers’ intentions, a counter narrative that challenged these intentions also emerged. Critically, the intended narrative was the primary driver of content and social media user engagement, suggesting that although hashtag activism has limitations and challenges, it also provides an avenue through which individuals can foster a narrative and reach audiences. In addition, findings revealed that individuals contributing to the intended narrative were more apt to provide mobilizing information than those participating in the counter narrative. However, mobilizing frames still featured less frequently than commentary-driven frames.

This bibliometric analysis examines the evolution of digital public relations research over a 27-year span and assesses its academic trajectory. This study seeks to clarify 1) the prominent contributors to the field, 2) key articles shaping the field of digital public relations, and 3) the predominant research themes explored longitudinally. The data, encompassing citations in six public relations journals from the inception of digital public relations until 2022, allow us to conclude that the growth and popularity of digital public relations is steady in the scholarship. Our findings offer a comprehensive overview of the current research and highlight the integral facets that have consistently underpinned digital public relations research.

Past crises are often collectively retold, recalled, and reconstructed on social media when a new crisis occurs, resulting in a special form of collective memory in crisis communication contexts: crisis memory. Through the lens of social constructionism, this study explores the crisis memory of SARS co-created on Chinese social media during COVID-19. First, based on a content analysis of 5677 Weibo posts, seven types of crisis memory narratives are identified (nationalism, heroism, identity, trauma, criticism, historical reference, and personal experience), and their differential usages by multiple users are analyzed. Second, with an online survey of 785 Chinese netizens, the influences of these crisis memory narratives on various perceptions (perceived organizational reputation, perceived threats, and perceived self-efficacy) and behaviors (protective behaviors) in the unfolding public health crisis are examined. Overall, this study provides a new perspective for crisis communication research that moves beyond the strategic communication of current crises to involve constructed narratives of past crises.

This paper examines how ethics of care (also known as care ethics) can be applied to public relations, drawing insights from a two-stage empirical study. The first stage explores industry best practices from award-winning campaigns, followed by elite interviews with leading practitioners to understand how care ethics can be infused into various organisational, personal, and professional contexts. The paper examines contested connections between care ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics, building on early work by Virginia Held and others, to develop a multi-level agency model of enacting care ethics. This fuses an array of concepts: caring-about, caring-for, self-care, habitus, and the lateral integration of care as a form of ‘caring citizenship’. In turn, this fusion advances ethics of care as a shared practice between caregivers and care-receivers, shifting its focus from essentially within the private to the public sphere, locating public relations in this process.

Despite the prominence of global environmental challenges, promoting publics’ engagement with issues related to environmental sustainability has proven difficult. Publics have perceived them as distant issues that do not have imminent impact requiring immediate actions. However, publics’ disengagement has in turn accelerated environmental deterioration. Applying construal level theory, this study explores factors that cause publics’ disengagement but also ways to promote information behaviors in an environmental sustainability issue. An online survey was conducted of a nationally representative sample of 507 Australians in November 2022. Using food waste as an issue that negatively affects environmental sustainability, structural equation modeling was conducted to test the effects of the dynamics of psychological distance, feasibility, and desirability on publics’ disengagement, information seeking and information forwarding. When individuals consider food waste a distant issue, they also consider it to be undesirable and infeasible to act upon, with the result that they disengage. However, this study finds that while psychological distance is negatively associated with desirability and feasibility, it is positively associated with information seeking and forwarding. We find, in particular, that desirability positively contributes to information seeking and forwarding. However, feasibility is negatively associated with information seeking and forwarding. Implications for public relations theory and practice are discussed (203 words).

The current study examines how communicated commitment to diversity relates to employee voice behaviors through the mediating role of perceived organizational authenticity and organizational identification. Through a quantitative survey with 657 employees who work for a variety of organizations in the United States, the study’s results indicated that communicated commitment to diversity plays a critical role in fostering perceived organizational authenticity, which in turn encourages organizational identification and employee voice behaviors. The study also found that diversity management moderated the relationship between communicated commitment to diversity and perceived organizational authenticity.

Despite a growing trend in corporate social advocacy (CSA), public responses to a company’s stance on controversial issues have been understudied. Using an online survey targeting U.S. adults, this study examines the theoretical mechanisms underlying consumers’ multifaceted reactions to CSA using Dick’s stance on gun control as a specific case of CSA. Drawing on attribution theory and moral emotion theories, this study finds that positive moral emotions—gratitude and elevation—fully mediate the relationship between perceived intrinsic CSA motives and brand loyalty intention (primary impact), as well as willingness to pay more for companies advocating the same cause (secondary impact), thereby amplifying the overall impact of the advocacy. In contrast, CSA lacking intrinsic motives triggers negative moral emotions (anger), which in turn undermines brand loyalty intention. However, perceived extrinsic CSA motives have no significant influence. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.