Public Relations Review最新文献

Major sporting events bring a range of social, economic, and reputational benefits for hosting nations and serve as a vehicle to showcase the nation brand. Social media engagement during sport events provides opportunities for community members to cocreate, curate and communicate their nation brand’s attributes. While research in nation branding and community engagement has examined the ways place-based communities contribute to nation branding, little is known about how and in what ways virtual communities contribute to their nation brand. This study addresses this gap by examining the virtual brand community (VBC) surrounding the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Using social network analysis and content analysis, the findings suggest that VBC contributions is dependent on the composition, participation, and cultivation of conversations focusing on the personality traits of a nation brand. Theoretically, the outcomes from this study advance understanding of leveraging the properties of VBCs in making contribution to the production and maintenance of an authentic nation brand, that values community perspectives facilitated through community engagement. For public relations, it extends the current research in digital social-level engagement in virtual settings and outlines future research in participatory approaches to nation branding. The growing use of major sporting events in supporting nation branding goals, particularly in Asian and African continents, suggests the outcome of this study has implications at regional and international levels to guide public relations managers in major events to facilitate sustainable VBCs for authentic place branding outcomes.

In July of 2021, Simone Biles shocked the world with her withdrawal from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics citing “mental health” as her rationale. Mental health remains a taboo subject within the realm of professional sports, and is often devalued, in stark contrast to the value placed on physical health. The present study explored Biles’s framing of her withdrawal and publics’ reactions to the withdrawal across two distinct social media platforms. Critical rhetorical analysis was used to analyze the Instagram posts made by Biles and a press conference transcript announcing and reifying her withdrawal, as well as 100 TikTok videos and 1000 comments illustrating publics’ reactions. Findings demonstrate that Biles’s framed her messages through genuineness, responsibility, resistance, and consistency. As a result of the frames used in the withdrawal messages, and the modality allowances afforded on TikTok (e.g., video, text, text and video, stitching), the space for dissent, as well as the ability to critique current power structures was created. From these findings, theoretically I argue that (1) framing theory can be used to create the space for resisting power, reclaiming agency, and challenging attacks of morality, and (2) theorize the ability of public relations to shape broader societal discourse. Practically, this research adds to the public relations literature (1) the value of new frames for image cultivation and the new role of publics for engaging in the acceptance, rejection, or co-creation of frames put forth by organizations and (2) the role of message modality for cultivating discourse and dissent.

Image Restoration Theory (IRT) examines the strategies that people, especially public figures, and organizations use when they face image and reputational threats. Past scholarship has not fully accounted for the impact of identity on an individual or group’s ability to invoke image repair strategies. We examine the 2022 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson through an intersectional lens to spotlight the constraints that minoritized populations, generally, and Black women, specifically, encounter when responding to reputational threats. Given the legacies of patriarchy and whiteness that operate in the West, Black women often lack the standing in the eyes of the public to defend themselves against attacks and accusations, an experience we describe as nonpersonhood. This point suggests that image repair strategies are not neutral, but embedded within socio-political and historical contexts. Via our analysis, we introduce Marginalized Image Navigation and Expression (MINE) principles as a conceptual framework that is useful for understanding the nuanced ways that images are navigated, negotiated, and expressed, especially for marginalized persons. Finally, we examine the implications of our arguments in the context of reputational threats against minoritized people and organizations.

The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.

Malcolm X

Morality is an integral part of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, the academic debate so far has mostly stated the importance of morality from a purely theoretical perspective, without empirically assessing it. We, therefore, draw on the moral foundations dictionary to conduct an automated content analysis of corporations’ (N = 277) annual CSR reports (N = 5010) over a period of 22 years. Looking into Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we investigated morality salience, differences across sectors, countries, and over time as well as the association of morality with different stakeholder groups. Results inform the broader debate on CSR and morality and highlight avenues for future research.

Advocacy organizations increasingly leverage social media and visuals to communicate complex climate issues. By examining an extensive dataset of visual posts collected from five organization accounts on two multimodal social media platforms, Twitter and Instagram, we conducted a cross-platform comparison of visual content categories and visual features related to climate change. Through deep-learning-based unsupervised image clustering, we discovered that visual content on both platforms could be broadly classified into five categories: infographics/captioned images, nature landscape/wildlife, climate activism, technology, and data visualization. However, these categories were not equally represented on each platform. Instagram featured more nature landscape/wildlife content, while Twitter showed more infographics/captioned images and data visualization. Through computational visual analysis, we found that the two platforms also presented significant differences in overall warm and cool colors, brightness, colorfulness, visual complexity, and presence of faces. Additionally, we identified platform-specific patterns of engagement associated with these categories and features. With the urgency to address climate change, these findings can guide climate advocacy organizations in developing strategies tailored to each platform’s specific characteristics for maximum effectiveness. This study highlights the significance of using computational methods in efficiently uncovering meaningful themes from extensive visual data and quantifying aesthetic features in strategic communication.

Organizational political ideology has recently received research attention, as more organizations engage in political activities to influence public policy and political regulation. However, there lacks a focus on interorganizational relationships as part of an organization’s political agenda. This study investigates political ideology as a mechanism of interorganizational relationship-building through politically active organizations’ agenda-building efforts. The study measures organizational political ideology through political donations, and investigates how it affects organizational relationship-building through press releases. We adopt a social network approach to examine interorganizational relationships predicted by the political ideology of the organization and the CEO at both the nodal and structural levels. After a computational analysis of 174,118 press releases by top political organizational donors, the findings show that an organization’s political ideology affected the mentions it received (i.e., in-degree), whereas its CEO’s political ideology affected its mentions of other organizations (i.e., out-degree). Value homophily did not significantly influence interorganizational representational networks, but mutuality and transitivity affected distinct patterns of connections among politically active organizations.

This study examined how two opposing advocacy organizations, National Rifle Association and Moms Demand Action, legitimize issues related to gun violence. Through topic modeling and social network analysis of tweets from both organizations, this study analyzed how advocacy organizations dealing with controversial issues use communication to achieve certain types of legitimacy. With the consistent outbreak of school mass shootings, this study also explored the communication strategies employed by advocacy organizations to manage issues and enhance legitimacy to garner policy initiatives. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

Although research in the field of investor relations has been experiencing a surge in recent years, one aspect of investor relations still commands little attention – media planning. Indeed, the research on the media mix investor relations officers use and the reasons behind such usage doesn’t seem to exist. Yet, this may be an important topic to investigate for public relations scholars. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that investor relations would be quite different from other public relations specializations in its media usage. However, research on media planning is not well developed in the general field of public relations itself and pales in comparison with research in such fields as advertising and marketing. This study addresses this shortcoming by developing a new approach to measuring media usage in public relations. This approach is then tested through a survey of investor relations officers. The results indicate that the main tactic used in investor relations is one-on-one interpersonal communication.

Discussions on social media during major disasters are robust and often have multiple frames of reference. Temporal perspectives, however, are still lacking in current understandings of social-mediated discussions during disasters and crises, but incorporating temporal perspectives can significantly enhance environmental scanning efforts as prescribed in the issues management framework. The purpose of the current research is twofold: to apply and validate the SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered) model to examine topics’ growth over time on social media and to understand how future orientation of social media users (an indicator of temporal distance) affects their construal of a disaster through supervised machine learning. We based our analysis on Twitter discussions during the Texas winter storm in 2021. Results of the study show great fit of the SIR model for topic growth, and that temporal distance affects users’ construal of the event in line with core predictions of construal level theory. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications on social-mediated discussions related to climate change-induced and -intensified disasters and issues management are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic received considerable attention from public relations scholars and research publications after the pandemic exploded. This study provides an overview of the status of COVID-19 public relations research in terms of topics, regional focuses, organization-public relationships, public relations approaches and themes, stages of the pandemic, and theoretical and methodological frameworks. This study also investigated how public relations research has described the characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We reviewed 126 articles published in peer-reviewed journals using quantitative and qualitative content analyses. We expect that this review provides new insights based on the current literature to advance public relations research in today’s fast-changing society.