Routledge Research in Public Relations – serie

Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness shows how crisis communication plans and efforts for complex and challenging issues benefit when academic perspectives are connected with practitioner experiences. This book brings crisis and public relations scholars together with practicing professionals to integrate academic theories and research with the knowledge and lessons learned on the frontlines of crisis communication and management. This book illustrates how having insights and observations from both leading crisis communication scholars and professionals strengthens crisis management and communication strategies, plans, and coordination. Chapters co-authored by leading scholars and professionals highlight how academic theories and research can inform crisis management and response - and how practitioners can utilize, inform, and strengthen academic theories and research. For each topic area covered, examples and applications are provided that show how integrating public relations scholarship with practice can advance crisis communication effectiveness.This book represents a unique and timely contribution to the field of crisis management and communication. It will be an important resource for public relations and crisis management and communication scholars, educators, professionals, consultants, and graduate students.

Advancing Crisis Communication Effectiveness shows how crisis communication plans and efforts for complex and challenging issues benefit when academic perspectives are connected with practitioner experiences. This book brings crisis and public relations scholars together with practicing professionals to integrate academic theories and research with the knowledge and lessons learned on the frontlines of crisis communication and management. This book illustrates how having insights and observations from both leading crisis communication scholars and professionals strengthens crisis management and communication strategies, plans, and coordination. Chapters co-authored by leading scholars and professionals highlight how academic theories and research can inform crisis management and response - and how practitioners can utilize, inform, and strengthen academic theories and research. For each topic area covered, examples and applications are provided that show how integrating public relations scholarship with practice can advance crisis communication effectiveness.This book represents a unique and timely contribution to the field of crisis management and communication. It will be an important resource for public relations and crisis management and communication scholars, educators, professionals, consultants, and graduate students.

This book aims to provide an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the importance of relationships in public relations, delving not only into the organization-public relationships but also into interpersonal relationships within the industry in order to offer new, empirical insights into the impact and formation of such relationships. Theunissen and Sissons theorize that public relations cannot exist without interpersonal relationships and the ability to create and maintain such relationships. Taking a critical stance, the book will move beyond mere rhetoric and conjecture by providing solid evidence-based research results to inform their theories about the impact of relationships and dialogue on public relations thinking. Rather than following contemporary thinking, it aims to embrace current changes, look ahead and prepare a new generation for the challenges of 21st century public relations practice.

The civic and moral responsibilities of public relations are hotly contested topics. While many researchers call for focusing on ethics in public relations, they concentrate on ethics in relation to how people do their jobs. In actuality, emphasis should move beyond professional codes of ethics to include general morality and citizenship. Currently, as the profession receives greater scrutiny, it is important to be aware of the value of public relations in the community. This book centers on four areas of public relations’ conscience in order to examine its role in morality and citizenship: civic professionalism, corporate social responsibility, ethics, and public communication. This approach will help to answer the question of what is public relations’ responsibility to the public good.

This book expands the theoretical foundations of modern public relations, a growing young profession that lacked even a name until the twentieth century. As the discipline seeks guiding theories and paradigms, rhetorics both ancient and modern have proven to be fruitful fields of exploration. Charles Marsh presents Isocratean rhetoric as an instructive antecedent. Isocrates was praised by Cicero and Quintilian as "the master of all rhetoricians," favored over Plato and Aristotle. By delineating the strategic value of Isocratean rhetoric to modern public relations, Marsh addresses the call for research into the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical origins of the field. He also addresses the call among scholars of classical rhetoric for modern relevance. Because Isocrates maintained that stable relationships must solicit and honor dissent, Marsh analyzes both historic and contemporary challenges to Isocratean rhetoric. He then moves forward to establish the modern applications of Isocrates in persuasion, education, strategic planning, new media, postmodern practices, and paradigms such as excellence theory, communitarianism, fully functioning society theory, and reflection.

This innovative study considers one of the most important art and design movements of the 20th century, the Bauhaus, in conjunction with current research in public relations and organizational communication, elaborating on the mechanisms of internal and external communication available to influence the stakeholders in politics, society, industry, and the art world. In a movement where a substantial share of productivity ran in measures to highlight the public value of the institution funded by the taxpayer, the directors, and other persons in charge, the Bauhaus developed comprehensive strategies to communicate their messages to a variety of target groups such as politicians and economic leaders, intellectuals and other artists, current and prospective students, and the general public. To achieve this goal, the Bauhaus anticipated many instruments of modern public relations and corporate communications, including press releases, staging of events, media publications, community building, lobbying, and the creation of nationwide public presence. Rössler argues that as an organization, the Bauhaus cultivated corporate behavior and, most prominently, a corporate design which unfolded revolutionary power. The basic achievements of new typography (a label coined at the Bauhaus) determine visual communication to this day, while the Bauhaus moved from an institutional organization to a community. Beginning with an overview of the Bauhaus’ corporate identity and a close examination of the respective directors’ roles for internal and external communication, this book visits exhibitions, events, and the media attention they evoked in newspapers and contemporary periodicals, along with media products designed at the Bauhaus such as magazines, books, and bank notes.

Given the high rate of social media use by the public, organizations are compelled to engage with key audiences through these outlets. Social media engagement requires organizations to actively participate with public groups, and this highly-interactive exchange raises a new set of ethical concerns for communicators. In this rapidly changing communications environment, the long-term implications of social media are uncertain, and this book provides the much needed research to understand its impact on audiences and organizations.Through an examination of a broad range of ethics concepts including transparency and online identities, policies, corporate responsibility, and measurement, this book explores a variety of topics important to public relations such as diversity, non-profit communication, health communication, financial communication, public affairs, entertainment communication, environmental communication, crisis communication, and non-profit communication. The chapter authors, expert scholars within their fields of public relations, offer insights drawn from original research and case study examples of ethical dilemmas raised by social media communication.

Winner of The American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award, 2015This study of American public relations history traces evangelicalism to corporate public relations via reform and the church-based temperance movement. It encompasses a leading evangelical of the Second Great Awakening, Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, and some of his predecessors; early reformers at Oberlin College, where Finney spent the second half of his life; leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America; and twentieth-century public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee, whose work reflecting religious and business evangelism has not yet been examined. Observations about American public relations history icon P. T. Barnum, whose life and work touched on many of the themes presented here, also are included as thematic bookends. As such, this study cuts a narrow channel through a wide swath of literature and a broad sweep of historical time, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, to examine the deeper and deliberate strategies for effecting change, for persuading a community of adherents or opponents, or even a single soul to embrace that which an advocate intentionally presented in a particular way for a specific outcome—prescriptions, as it turned out, not only for religious conversion but also for public relations initiatives.

Winner of the 2014 NCA PRIDE Book AwardWhy are some voices louder in public debates than others? And why can’t all voices be equally heard? This book draws significant new meaning to the inter-relationships of public relations and social change through a number of activist case studies, and rebuilds knowledge around alternative communicative practices that are ethical, sustainable, and effective. Demetrious offers a powerful critical description of the dominant model of public relations used in the twentieth century, showing that ‘PR’ was arrogant, unethical and politically offensive in ways that have severely weakened democratic process and its public standing and professional credibility. The book argues that change within the field of public relations is imminent and urgent—for us all. As the effects of climate change intensify, and are magnified by high carbon dioxide emitting industries, vigorous public debate is vital in the exploration of new ideas and action and if alternative futures are to be imagined. In these conditions, articulate and persistent publics will appear in the form of grassroots activists, asking contentious questions about risks and tabling them for public discussion in bold, inventive, and effective ways. Yet the entrenched power relations in and through public relations in contemporary industrialized society provide no certainty these voices will be heard. Following this path, Demetrious theorises an alternative set of social relations to those used in the twentieth century: public communication. Constructed from communicative practices of grassroots activists and synthesis of diverse theoretical positions, public communication is a principled approach that avoids the deep contradictions and flawed coherences of essentialist public relations and instead represents an important ethical reorientation in the communicative fields. Lastly, she brings original new perspectives to understand current and emergent developments in activism and public relations brought about through the proliferation of Internet and digital cultures.

In this book, Johnston seeks to put the public interest onto the public relations ‘radar’, arguing the need for its clear articulation into mainstream public relations discourse. This book examines literature from a range of fields and disciplines to develop a clearer understanding of the concept, and then considers this within the theory and practice of public relations. The book’s themes include the role of language and discourse in establishing successful public interest PR and in perpetuating power imbalances; intersections between CSR, governance, law and the public interest; and how activism and social media have invigorated community control of the public interest. Chapters explore the role of the public interest, including cross-cultural and multicultural challenges, community and internal consultation, communication choices and listening to minorities and subaltern publics.

This book proposes a model of internal communication based on empirical research to demonstrate how contemporary organizations strategize, organize, perform, and measure it. Internal communication is the management of communication between an organization and its members to inform, motivate, engage, and cocreate meanings to make organizations more effective. The book presents key concepts defining the successful implementation and execution of internal communication: internal communication satisfaction, employee engagement, employer branding, organizational support, and psychological contract fulfillment. Including an extensive literature review and informed by in-depth interviews conducted with corporate communication directors and human resource management directors in 25 Croatian organizations, the book uses original research to give practical guidance on internal communication best practices. The book is an ideal resource for researchers and advanced students of public relations and corporate communication broadly and internal and employee communication specifically.

This book proposes a model of internal communication based on empirical research to demonstrate how contemporary organizations strategize, organize, perform, and measure it. Internal communication is the management of communication between an organization and its members to inform, motivate, engage, and cocreate meanings to make organizations more effective. The book presents key concepts defining the successful implementation and execution of internal communication: internal communication satisfaction, employee engagement, employer branding, organizational support, and psychological contract fulfillment. Including an extensive literature review and informed by in-depth interviews conducted with corporate communication directors and human resource management directors in 25 Croatian organizations, the book uses original research to give practical guidance on internal communication best practices. The book is an ideal resource for researchers and advanced students of public relations and corporate communication broadly and internal and employee communication specifically.

Embracing listening as a useful tool for strengthening organization-publics and organization-employee relationships, this book offers theoretical and practical insights for listening across myriad strategic communication contexts. Chapters authored by a diverse global collective of communication scholars and professionals present original research and case examples of listening for strategic communication in corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. They explore topics such as utilizing artificial intelligence and social media; activism, social justice, and ethics; and fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within and outside organizations. Each chapter concludes with recommendations for strategic communication practice. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in public relations and strategic communication, organizational communication, and listening.

Embracing listening as a useful tool for strengthening organization-publics and organization-employee relationships, this book offers theoretical and practical insights for listening across myriad strategic communication contexts. Chapters authored by a diverse global collective of communication scholars and professionals present original research and case examples of listening for strategic communication in corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. They explore topics such as utilizing artificial intelligence and social media; activism, social justice, and ethics; and fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within and outside organizations. Each chapter concludes with recommendations for strategic communication practice. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in public relations and strategic communication, organizational communication, and listening.

Through interviews with members of the Public Relations Society of America College of Fellows, this book provides lessons on public relations leadership for the next generation.Often, our focus on high profile leaders is centered on success stories, but so much can be learned from the trials, or “crucibles,” they have faced and how leaders overcame and were shaped by these challenges. The Fellows interviewed represent a diverse group of accomplished professionals with specializations ranging from military public affairs and government, corporate, education, agency, and nonprofit organizations. A focus on ethical values, virtues, and ethical leadership will inspire readers to themselves confidently lead.This book will be of interest to advanced students in public relations programs or young professionals looking to forge their careers in public relations leadership.

Public Relations and Corporate Racial Responsibility introduces corporate racial responsibility (CRR) theory. CRR responds to the persistent problem of racism by showing how communication from corporations can advance racial justice, support racial equality, and foster inclusivity, even in polarizing times.Many people may wonder why corporations have racial responsibilities. The author lays out several examples that describe precisely why corporations have earned racial responsibilities – from the days of chattel slavery to today’s AI era. The book describes how corporations have directly or indirectly participated in and benefited from racial oppression, as well as how they can use communication to help right historical wrongs. Communications and campaigns from Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, Nike, P&G, Pepsi, Starbucks, and others are discussed and demonstrate how corporations have sought to communicate about matters of race, justice, and equality. CRR theory emerges from the nexus of corporate social responsibility thinking in public relations to offer scholars a new theoretical avenue they can use to identify, understand, contextualize, theorize, and analyze corporate discourse about race and its societal implications. It also provides communication practitioners guidance on how their organizations can approach communicating about race.As the book advances the development of CRR theory, it provides readers with a fresh and dynamic take on the corporation and the societal import of its communications. Scholars and practitioners in public relations, corporate communication, corporate social responsibility, corporate social advocacy, business ethics, advertising, branding, marketing, race, and social justice will find this book of interest.

This book explores the benefits and challenges of employees communicating on internal social media (ISM) and how employee communication can develop and construct an organisation.Drawing from the latest research, the book identifies ISM's potential uses, such as sharing knowledge and viewpoints and connecting across departments, hierarchical levels and geographical distances. It argues that ISM can pave the way to create participatory and multivocal communication that can involve and engage employees in a different way than other internal communication channels. Further themes include strategic internal listening, the importance of open communication, and communicative leadership and coworkership. It features cases, examples and practical instructions to tie research into practice.This title is relevant to academics and practitioners in the fields of strategic communication and organisational communication.

Centred around the case of Botswana, this book explores organisational crisis communication from the Global South, providing insights and empirical evidence from the region to challenge Western-centric views on crisis communication.Emphasising the importance of integrating indigenous practices by highlighting the significance of the kgotla system, the book explores the potential for public relations practitioners in Botswana to harness the power of the kgotla system by integrating it with digital platforms, creating a holistic and culturally relevant crisis communication approach that can be adopted globally. The author examines the crisis response tactics that public relations professionals in Botswana use to safeguard corporate reputation and reveals how they use language to influence and manipulate social media users, particularly on Facebook, to prevent them from questioning organisations in crises, and shares insights on the relationship between social media and cultural platforms. He develops a new Cross Cloverleaf Relationship Model to offer clear applications for crisis communication across the globe.The book provides fresh insights on crisis communication, digital technology, and culture from non-Western contexts, making it appealing to scholars across public relations and various disciplines, such as public health, risk studies, climate change, psychology, and cultural studies.

This volume explicates the role of sociopolitical advocacy and other related constructs as forms of prosocial communication.Bringing together a diverse group of scholars, this volume provides comprehensive conceptualizations and discussions of key constructs related to prosocial communication—including corporate social advocacy (CSA), corporate political advocacy (CPA), corporate racial responsibility (CRR), corporate social responsibility (CSR), and CEO activism—through perspectives grounded in public relations, marketing, and communication theory. The chapters examine theoretical underpinnings of sociopolitical advocacy to offer understanding of both normative and instrumental drivers of advocacy, relationship building, effective and ethical advocacy messaging, and how advocacy intersects with subdisciplines of public relations. With attention to current issues, the book also examines principles and concepts of advocacy and explains how they have been applied in research and practice in various organizational contexts to address how societal changes will impact sociopolitical advocacy research and practices in the future.Offering both a strong introduction to topics for novices as well as a more advanced interrogation of sociopolitical advocacy for more knowledgeable readers, this book will appeal to advanced students and researchers in public relations, strategic communication, organizational communication, and allied fields.Chapters 1, 6, 9, and 13 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This innovative study considers one of the most important art and design movements of the 20th century, the Bauhaus, in conjunction with current research in public relations and organizational communication, elaborating on the mechanisms of internal and external communication available to influence the stakeholders in politics, society, industry, and the art world. In a movement where a substantial share of productivity ran in measures to highlight the public value of the institution funded by the taxpayer, the directors, and other persons in charge, the Bauhaus developed comprehensive strategies to communicate their messages to a variety of target groups such as politicians and economic leaders, intellectuals and other artists, current and prospective students, and the general public. To achieve this goal, the Bauhaus anticipated many instruments of modern public relations and corporate communications, including press releases, staging of events, media publications, community building, lobbying, and the creation of nationwide public presence. Rössler argues that as an organization, the Bauhaus cultivated corporate behavior and, most prominently, a corporate design which unfolded revolutionary power. The basic achievements of new typography (a label coined at the Bauhaus) determine visual communication to this day, while the Bauhaus moved from an institutional organization to a community. Beginning with an overview of the Bauhaus’ corporate identity and a close examination of the respective directors’ roles for internal and external communication, this book visits exhibitions, events, and the media attention they evoked in newspapers and contemporary periodicals, along with media products designed at the Bauhaus such as magazines, books, and bank notes.

The civic and moral responsibilities of public relations are hotly contested topics. While many researchers call for focusing on ethics in public relations, they concentrate on ethics in relation to how people do their jobs. In actuality, emphasis should move beyond professional codes of ethics to include general morality and citizenship. Currently, as the profession receives greater scrutiny, it is important to be aware of the value of public relations in the community. This book centers on four areas of public relations’ conscience in order to examine its role in morality and citizenship: civic professionalism, corporate social responsibility, ethics, and public communication. This approach will help to answer the question of what is public relations’ responsibility to the public good.

This book aims to provide an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the importance of relationships in public relations, delving not only into the organization-public relationships but also into interpersonal relationships within the industry in order to offer new, empirical insights into the impact and formation of such relationships. Theunissen and Sissons theorize that public relations cannot exist without interpersonal relationships and the ability to create and maintain such relationships. Taking a critical stance, the book will move beyond mere rhetoric and conjecture by providing solid evidence-based research results to inform their theories about the impact of relationships and dialogue on public relations thinking. Rather than following contemporary thinking, it aims to embrace current changes, look ahead and prepare a new generation for the challenges of 21st century public relations practice.

This book expands the theoretical foundations of modern public relations, a growing young profession that lacked even a name until the twentieth century. As the discipline seeks guiding theories and paradigms, rhetorics both ancient and modern have proven to be fruitful fields of exploration. Charles Marsh presents Isocratean rhetoric as an instructive antecedent. Isocrates was praised by Cicero and Quintilian as "the master of all rhetoricians," favored over Plato and Aristotle. By delineating the strategic value of Isocratean rhetoric to modern public relations, Marsh addresses the call for research into the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical origins of the field. He also addresses the call among scholars of classical rhetoric for modern relevance. Because Isocrates maintained that stable relationships must solicit and honor dissent, Marsh analyzes both historic and contemporary challenges to Isocratean rhetoric. He then moves forward to establish the modern applications of Isocrates in persuasion, education, strategic planning, new media, postmodern practices, and paradigms such as excellence theory, communitarianism, fully functioning society theory, and reflection.

Given the high rate of social media use by the public, organizations are compelled to engage with key audiences through these outlets. Social media engagement requires organizations to actively participate with public groups, and this highly-interactive exchange raises a new set of ethical concerns for communicators. In this rapidly changing communications environment, the long-term implications of social media are uncertain, and this book provides the much needed research to understand its impact on audiences and organizations.Through an examination of a broad range of ethics concepts including transparency and online identities, policies, corporate responsibility, and measurement, this book explores a variety of topics important to public relations such as diversity, non-profit communication, health communication, financial communication, public affairs, entertainment communication, environmental communication, crisis communication, and non-profit communication. The chapter authors, expert scholars within their fields of public relations, offer insights drawn from original research and case study examples of ethical dilemmas raised by social media communication.

Nonprofit organizations are managing to carry out sophisticated public relations programming that cultivates relationships with their key audiences. Their public relations challenges, however, have routinely been understudied. Budgetary and staffing restraints often limit how these organizations carry out their fundraising, public awareness and activism efforts, and client outreach. This volume explores a range of public relations theories and topics important to the management of nonprofit organizations, including crisis management, communicating to strengthen engagement online and offline, and recruiting and retaining volunteer and donor support.

Winner of The American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Award, 2015This study of American public relations history traces evangelicalism to corporate public relations via reform and the church-based temperance movement. It encompasses a leading evangelical of the Second Great Awakening, Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, and some of his predecessors; early reformers at Oberlin College, where Finney spent the second half of his life; leaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America; and twentieth-century public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee, whose work reflecting religious and business evangelism has not yet been examined. Observations about American public relations history icon P. T. Barnum, whose life and work touched on many of the themes presented here, also are included as thematic bookends. As such, this study cuts a narrow channel through a wide swath of literature and a broad sweep of historical time, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, to examine the deeper and deliberate strategies for effecting change, for persuading a community of adherents or opponents, or even a single soul to embrace that which an advocate intentionally presented in a particular way for a specific outcome—prescriptions, as it turned out, not only for religious conversion but also for public relations initiatives.

Nonprofit organizations are managing to carry out sophisticated public relations programming that cultivates relationships with their key audiences. Their public relations challenges, however, have routinely been understudied. Budgetary and staffing restraints often limit how these organizations carry out their fundraising, public awareness and activism efforts, and client outreach. This volume explores a range of public relations theories and topics important to the management of nonprofit organizations, including crisis management, communicating to strengthen engagement online and offline, and recruiting and retaining volunteer and donor support.

In this book, Johnston seeks to put the public interest onto the public relations ‘radar’, arguing the need for its clear articulation into mainstream public relations discourse. This book examines literature from a range of fields and disciplines to develop a clearer understanding of the concept, and then considers this within the theory and practice of public relations. The book’s themes include the role of language and discourse in establishing successful public interest PR and in perpetuating power imbalances; intersections between CSR, governance, law and the public interest; and how activism and social media have invigorated community control of the public interest. Chapters explore the role of the public interest, including cross-cultural and multicultural challenges, community and internal consultation, communication choices and listening to minorities and subaltern publics.