Public Relations Review最新文献

For corporations engaged in corporate social advocacy (CSA), establishing legitimacy among publics is challenging when they take stands along clear ideological lines on controversial issues. This study examined two questions: (1) how would the congruence between individuals’ political ideologies and corporations’ CSA stances influence perceived CSA legitimacy; and (2) how would individuals’ political ideology strength moderate this relationship? A computational analysis was conducted to examine individual-level ideological congruence and perceived CSA legitimacy in six real-world CSA events. Pairing sentiment analysis with a self-trained model for individual ideology detection, this study cross-analyzed naturalistic data generated by 5181 ordinary users involved in the CSA events on Twitter. It was found that individuals’ perceptions of corporations involved in CSA were highly dependent on the extent to which their own political ideologies were congruent with the corporations’ CSA stances. Also, the influence of ideological congruence was amplified among individuals with stronger political ideologies. However, CSA legitimacy perceptions can be highly situational, with individual events potentially yielding varied results depending on factors such as the issue’s socio-historical context. This study overall demonstrates the important role that individual-level political factors can play in influencing publics’ CSA legitimacy perceptions. This study also highlights the feasibility of using cutting-edge computational methods in assessing publics’ voices on social media as a source of CSA legitimacy.

This study investigated how employees react to corporate moral violations against external stakeholders, such as customers, the community, and the environment. Drawing from the deonance theory, we examined the relationships between employees' perceptions of corporate moral violations, their moral emotions (anger and sympathy), and their moral actions (external whistleblowing and compensating behavior) when they witness their company's ethical transgressions targeting external stakeholders. In addition, the study examined the moderating effects of employee-oriented corporate social responsibility and perceived moral violation intentionality on the impact of moral violation on employees’ emotional and behavioral reactions. The proposed model was tested using an online survey panel of 417 full-time U.S. workers. The results mostly supported the hypotheses, indicating that perceived corporate moral violation interacted with employee-oriented CSR and moral violation intentionality to affect employees' anger and sympathy, which, in turn, influenced their moral actions.

A trend of increased specialisation in public relations has been widely asserted but little substantiated. Specifically, there is no longitudinal study of the development of specialist coverage in the principal trade journal of the industry, PR Week. Neither has there been an exploration of the perspectives of PR Week UK’s senior managers on specialist-practitioner identities. This article seeks to fill these gaps.

This examination of specialist coverage in PR Week 1985–2010 finds a punctuated process of constructing specialist practitioner identities within an institutional subsystem. We examine over 220 editions of PR Week, in the UK, over a 26-year period. We calculate that there was indeed a statistically significant trend of published regular specialist pages.

We analysed editorial announcements about regular specialist pages and interviewed three former senior managers from PR Week. We considered page titles as both content and discourse. We also adapted Bucher et al.’s (2016) framing strategies. In doing so, we revised one of Bucher et al.’s strategies, re-terming the ‘self-casting’ strategy as a media casting strategy in the context of a trade publication’s framing of a profession’s boundaries.

Building on the scholarship of Edwards and Pieczka (2013), we suggest that the trade media play an institutional role in boundary setting. A trade publication's role in the promotion of jurisdictions was, and has not been, previously ascribed by Abbott (1988) or Waisbord (2019). We newly find that when PR Week introduced specialist pages, the publication’s executive actively sought to bring sector-specialist practitioners, with waning identification with the profession, back into the PR fold. Like a sheepdog, PR Week played a proactive institutional role in the professional reframing of public relations around specialisms. Yet the boundaries that PR Week defended were fuzzy given that over 95% of the regular specialist pages titles did not include the name ‘PR’. We also argue, that in establishing the specialist pages PR Week executives not only championed PR’s legitimacy, but also sought to protect the magazine’s market and to enhance the title’s journalistic brand.

Despite increasing interest and involvement in corporate social advocacy (CSA) among companies, there are growing concerns among public relations scholars and practitioners regarding the undesired outcomes of CSA communication. To advance the knowledge of whether and how CSA communication might contribute to enhancing publics’ support for an organization, a 3 (organizational issue stance: pro-refugee immigration vs. against-refugee immigration vs. open dialogue) x 2 (social media comment civility: civil vs. uncivil) between-subjects online experiment was conducted with a U.S. adult sample (N = 1388). We found when the organization expressed its pro-refugee immigration stance (in contrast to advocating against refugee immigration or calling for open dialogue), greater support toward the organization was intended by participants. Advocating for open dialogue about refugee immigration resulted in undesired effects only when social media user comments following the CSA communication were uncivil, as it led to higher level of conflicted and cynical feelings sequentially, which in turn lowered participants’ intended support for the organization. Political ideology and pre-existing issue stance were key moderators influencing participants’ responses to the organization’s CSA statement. Theoretical and practical implications for public relations scholars and practitioners are further discussed.

Visual misinformation about ongoing contaminated food crises poses a significant threat to organizational well-being and public health, particularly when people share incorrect images on social media. Corrective responses and highly credible media sources as effective strategies geared toward combating crisis misinformation. Extending Lewandowsky and colleagues’ (2012) corrective strategies for debunking misinformation, the concept of visual misinformation, cognitive process, and the theory of social sharing of emotion, this study aims to advance research on visual misinformation in public relations and crisis communication. A 2 (image veracity: incorrect vs. true) x 2 (corrective strategy: simple rebuttal vs. simple rebuttal + fact elaboration) x 2 (source credibility: high vs. low) between-subjects eye-tracking experiment was conducted to test the effects of these features on visual attention and intention to share. Additionally, we explored the mediation effects of emotional surprise and perceived crisis severity on sharing posts. Results showed visual cues (e.g., images and sources) and textual cues (e.g., corrective strategies) led to different allocations of visual attention. We found visual attention significantly mediated the effects of combined corrective messages on sharing. Additionally, feeling surprised also significantly mediated the effects of messages with low credible sources on sharing. This study provides insights into advancing crisis communication theory and offers evidence-based recommendations for health organizations and practitioners to better fight against food crisis misinformation.

Given the critical role of legitimacy in attracting key resources for organizational survival and growth, organizational and strategic communication research has long sought to understand the mechanisms essential in improving organizational legitimacy. Guided by stakeholder research and configurational thinking, we examine three interconnected communication mechanisms for relationship management in organizational legitimation: (a) information visibility, (b) organizational listening, and (c) cross-sector partnerships. Based on survey and archival data from 44 U.S. nonprofit organizations, we employed a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify the pathways to high or low organizational legitimacy. Our results reveal the combinations of these factors can complement or substitute for one another to explain legitimacy. Specifically, high pragmatic legitimacy requires effective listening to stakeholders and collaborating with government agencies. By contrast, in low pragmatic legitimacy, organizations are often hindered by limited capacity for information visibility, ineffective listening to stakeholders, and no collaboration with corporate partners. These results suggest theoretical contributions to stakeholder research in public relations and organizational and strategic communication scholarship, as well as practical implications for improving organizational legitimacy for mission-driven organizations.

This study examines the association between the engagement of a U.S.-based PR firm by the Kenyan government and subsequent shifts in the tone of news coverage in four major U.S. media outlets. Through quantitative content analysis, the study identifies discernible shifts toward more positive reporting about Kenya during the period of PR firm involvement. By carefully delineating the association between PR engagement and changes in media portrayal without asserting direct causality, this research underscores the significance of strategic PR activities in influencing media narratives. The findings illustrate the intricate dynamics between international public relations practices and media framing, contributing valuable insights into the potential impact of PR efforts on national image cultivation in a global context.

This systematic review examined social media research in public relations scholarship in English language between 2015 and 2020 by analyzing 380 articles from 143 journals sampled from multidisciplinary research databases. The analysis focused on research methods, data collection sources, type of social media being studied, use of theoretical frameworks, and differences between PR journals and non-PR journals. Key findings include: (a) PR journals and a few communication journals, which have often been sampled in the existing review studies, contributed to less than half (46.84 %) of the articles included, (b) significant differences between PR journals and non-PR journals in use of survey (X² (1, N = 380) = 4.33, p = .04), and use of theoretical frameworks (X² (1, N = 380) = 12.70, p < .001), (c) social media (N = 380, 36.6 %), together with platforms that are off social media but online (N = 380, 37.1 %), was the most frequently used data collection source, and (d) about half (N = 380, 47.2 %) of the articles belonged to the lower level on the extent of theoretical framework use continuum. Implications of these findings for future systematic review studies in public relations are discussed.

This article argues that sustainability also appeals to the creation of PR content when organizations compete for attention. It starts with the idea that attention is a valuable resource in society and organizations compete for attention, increasing the quantity of content and messages and releasing them through multiple media channels. Content inflation, hyperbole, and exaggeration are the norm since competition is strong to attract attention. And, since attention is limited, this almost unlimited amount of content detracts society’s attention from more relevant collective and social problems. This article describes how contemporary public relations, especially after the implosion of social media, contributes to the Tragedy of the Commons (TOTC), providing relevant data about the impact of corporate content on journalism and social media. This article, appealing to the concept of sustainability and philosopher Byung Chul-Han’s ideas of the hypertrophy of storytelling, concludes that an ecology of PR would solve the problem and represent an inexpensive method of CSR for corporations, and that this “reduction of noise” would make the public sphere more viable.

Social network analysis (SNA) has developed as a salient area of research within public relations, particularly for examining the structure, dynamics, and outcomes of interactions among social actors. Yet, SNA is both theory and method, the latter of which needs to be further explored in networked public relations research, especially given the predominance of the quantitative paradigm. Network research is not required to use quantitative methods as it should not be seen as prescriptive of one approach. This paper thereby proposes the integration of a qualitative approach to SNA by introducing a visual mapping approach for networked public relations scholarship, detailing a four-step process to design, conduct, and analysis. It further presents how an advancement of this methodological lens and technique connects to various parts of the wider public relations field.