Public Relations Review最新文献

Technologies such as intelligent and fully automatic driving are currently developing rapidly. However, product recalls by electric vehicle manufacturers occur frequently because of immature technology. As a crisis factor, product recalls of the focal company pose a risk of contagion to other players. Through a two-period time series analysis, the current study observes that online public opinion regarding Tesla exerts an indirect spillover over abnormal returns on non-focal companies (i.e., BYD, NIO, LI) from two aspects—social media buzz and public sentiment. Moreover, abnormal returns on Tesla directly spill over into abnormal returns on NIO and LI. The low brand equity proximity plays a role in the direct spillover effect. Besides, the time lag is two days in the direct and indirect spillover process. Under the guidance of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), we classify spillover crises as victim clusters of crisis types and put forth implications and suggestions in practice based on our findings.

This paper addresses the gap between crisis communication scholarship and the growing research on intractable issues and wicked problems in public relations. By synthesizing these literatures, the concept of intractability more clearly connects issues, risks, and crises within a community-oriented mindset. The literature review organizes crisis communication scholarship into rhetorical, perceptual, risk-oriented, and conflict-oriented categories, then introduces intractable issues and wicked problems as supplementary and beneficial frameworks. There are similarities and differences among crises and intractable issues, with distinctions mainly arising in terms of urgency and perceived proximity to organizations. Issues, risks, and crises can be mapped using the continua of immediacy/temporal urgency and organizational or societal issue centrality. This creates four quadrants: A zone of reputational crises, a zone of intractability, a zone of wicked problems, and a zone of organizational responsibility.

CEO activism is rising in popularity around the world due to growing social injustices, the inability of governments to address key concerns of their constituents (e.g., global warming, health, and safety), and abuses of power. Many people are simply fed up with the current state of affairs and want to see people in power held accountable. As a result, CEOs are taking public stances on timely issues. They are doing so not only because they want to win favor with their employees and customers but also because they feel an obligation—and pressure—to speak up and pursue greater good on behalf of others since they have platforms and visibility that are not shared by those whose lack similar status or vehicles to for their voices to be heard. This is a qualitative study that involved in-depth interviews with 24 CEO activists. Data analysis followed the hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The findings advance the CEO activism literature by focusing on the tactical repertoire of activist CEOs within the non-Western context of Ghana. Activist CEOs in Ghana use a broader portfolio of tactics than previously thought, offer a typology of CEO activism tactics, and help to internationalize CEO activism research. This study also expands upon nascent research streams such as responsible management, Africapitalism, Afrocentric philosophies of sustainability, and public relations for social responsibility.

Organizational crises have often been examined from the perspective of the crisis origin organization. Depending on the crisis type, other organizations might experience impacts because of the initial crisis. This emerging type of crisis—the crisis spillover—one that affects organizations along with the crisis origin organization, is under researched. The current research refines the “crisis spillover” concept and proposes a new perspective for this challenging crisis communication phenomenon by arguing in favor of a relationship between the crisis spillover and sticky crises, developing a conceptual framework, mapping out multi-layer characteristics of crisis spillover and delineating new directions for advancing research and practice for managing industry-wide complex crisis challenges. The framework, further refined based on feedback and evaluation from an expert panel composed of crisis communication executives, provides unique insights into the crisis spillover.

This article presents the findings of empirical research on the experiences of senior National Health Service communication practitioners in England during the Covid-19 pandemic, viewed through the prism of their emotional responses. Using narrative interviews with 15 senior communicators, the study discovered that contextual factors elicited the strongest emotional reactions, rather than dealing with the health crisis itself. Five common contextual factors were identified: ‘command and control’, working from home, social media, technology, and professional recognition. Linked to these factors were a range of emotions which can be clustered into eight main categories: stress and anxiety, guilt, frustration and anger, inadequacy, isolation, pride, excitement and a growing sense of confidence. The findings lead to a conclusion that internal contextual factors rather than the challenges posed by the progress of the disease itself determined the most significant elements of the experience of these practitioners. The study also identified the sources of personal support for communicators and their own recommendations for policy changes. The study concludes that health communicators were hindered by the environment in which they undertook their duties. Necessary policy changes will assist in ensuring this professional group can perform more optimally during major health crises in the future.

This study delves into the critical yet underexplored phenomenon of crisis spillover within the non-profit organization (NPO) sector. By investigating whether a crisis in one NPO affects others in both similar and differing sectors, this research sheds light on the far-reaching implications of negative expectancy violations in the wake of a crisis. Utilizing a single-factor (crisis type: no-crisis vs. low vs. high attribution of crisis responsibility) between-subject design experiment, the study unveils novel insights into how public trust and attitude are disrupted not just for the crisis-stricken NPO, but also for other NPOs across various sectors. The findings reveal a pervasive impact of a crisis, leading to diminished trust and unfavorable attitudes towards NPOs beyond the immediate crisis context. Interestingly, these spillover effects remain consistent regardless of the level of attributed responsibility for the crisis. This study not only highlights the interconnectedness and vulnerability of NPOs in crisis situations but also provides a crucial understanding of the broader sector-wide impacts, emphasizing the need for strategic crisis management across the NPO sector.

Public relations scholarship frequently studies relations between organizations and publics but rarely considers how the nature of organizations influences this interaction. In this essay, we review conceptions of the organization in several areas of public relations scholarship and find complexity that is unexplained by theory, causing a disconnect between public relations scholarship and practice. Using insights from stakeholder theory, essential contract theory, and intersectionality, we provide a new definition of the organization and 14 propositions about the nature of organizations. This definition is explained with a metaphor of an organization as a tent. The tent is composed of many stakeholders, each with multiple identities, utilizing contracts as poles to push and pull the organization in their preferred direction. An illustrative example is given of how this metaphor operates in a university. We call for a reorientation of public relations theory's relationships to organizations and suggest an important role for public relations and communication in constituting the nature of organizations and ensuring representativeness in decision-making.

In this paper, we present a digital tool named Diversity Perspectives in Social Media (DivPSM) which conducts automated content analysis of strategic diversity communication in organizational social media posts, using supervised machine-learning. DivPSM is trained to identify whether a post makes mention of diversity or a diversity-related issue, and to subsequently code for the presence of three diversity dimensions (cultural/ethnic/racial, gender, and LHGBTQ+ diversity) and three diversity perspectives (the moral, market, and innovation perspectives). In Study 1, we describe the training and validation of the instrument, and examine how it performs compared to human coders. Our findings confirm that DivPSM is sufficiently reliable for use in future research. In study 2, we illustrate the type of data that DivPSM generates, by analyzing the prevalence of strategic diversity communication in social media posts (n = 84,561) of large organizations in the Netherlands. Our results show that in this context gender diversity is most prevalent, followed by LHGBTQ+ and cultural/ethnic/racial diversity. Furthermore, gender diversity is often associated with the innovation perspective, whereas LHGBTQ+ diversity is more often associated with the moral perspective. Cultural/ethnic/racial diversity does not show strong associations with any of the perspectives. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are discussed at the end of the paper.

Through one pilot test and two main studies using experimental design, this research examines publics’ responses to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in corporate ability (CA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Results from Study 1 (N = 113) revealed that the application of AI in CSR practices generated greater word-of-mouth intention and purchase intention than that in CA practices, and perceived warmth of the company mediated this effect. Results from Study 2 (N = 122) replicated the results from Study 1, and further revealed the boundary conditions created by publics’ varying levels of uneasiness with robots. The more positive outcomes generated by the application of AI in CSR (vs. CA) practices were more pronounced among those with high levels of uneasiness with robots, but such an effect was not significant among those with low levels of uneasiness with robots. Findings were discussed based on interdisciplinary theoretical insights from the CA-CSR typology, HAII-TIME model, and Stereotype Content Model. Implications for public relations scholarship and practices were discussed.

This study explores an area that has not been widely researched in the Latin American and Caribbean region: the identification of a capability gap in relation to key strategic public relations and communication management issues and activities. To this end, this article presents findings and analysis from a survey conducted in 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2020. The existence of a capability gap in relation to key issues and activities in public relations and communication management is confirmed, which represents a challenge for the development of the public relations field as well as for higher education institutions across the region.