Morality rules: Understanding the role of prior reputation in consequences of scansis

A favorable reputation casts positive influences over organizations’ short- and long-term development, which can be especially important when organizations grapple with unpredictable challenges such as organizational crises. Yet, keeping a good track record might also backfire to cause more reputational damages, which is often observed when organizations deal with value-oriented moral crises. Against this backdrop, drawing from the literature on crisis communication and moral psychology, we situated our study in the scansis context, a particular type of morality-focused negative situation featuring characteristics of both crisis and scandal, and explored effects of prior reputation on people’s responses to an organizational scansis. Through an online experiment (N = 293), we found severe backlash towards the scansis-stricken organization in both the control condition (i.e., no indication of reputation) and the good reputation condition, whereas such prominent difference was not observed in the bad reputation condition. The findings thus implicated the need to take the unique role of morality in scansis into account in both pertinent research and practice.     

Tornado warning: Understanding the National Weather Service’s communication strategies

This study explores the National Weather Service’s communication through a multi-sited rapid ethnography that extends the fully functioning society theory. National Weather Service field offices do not employ public information officers. Instead, forecasters predict the weather, craft messages, and build relationships with their publics. Scholars have called for public relations research that examines messages, including how crisis communication can help publics cope. Additionally, scholars have noted that all organizations need public relations, even if they do not employ formal public relations personnel. In our study, forecasters emphasized the need to build their publics’ tornado threat awareness and provided strategies to make weather science accessible. Forecasters discussed a variety of message strategies including avoiding fear appeals, humanizing the organization, and visualizing risks. Forecasters also built relationships with active publics through soliciting weather spotters and empowering them to prepare others for severe weather. Overall, findings expand knowledge about how organizations can employ strategic public relations to benefit society, thereby extending fully functioning society theory.     

Developing a multi-level organization-public dialogic communication framework to assess social media-mediated disaster communication and engagement outcomes

Dialogic communication has long been viewed as vital for effective organization-public relations. Yet, it is under-theorized whether and how organizations’ disaster communication messages may embody dialogic communication principles, and how various dialogic features are associated with different public engagement outcomes on social media. Extending the Organization-Public Dialogic Communication (OPDC) framework to the context of social media-mediated disaster communication, we propose a multi-level framework to assess the dialogic capacity of Facebook messages sent by disaster management organizations during a natural disaster. Three levels of dialogic communication characteristics (i.e., message structure-level, topic-level, and linguistic level) are examined using content analysis and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Results identified media richness, correcting, and confirming topics as three consistent predictors of public engagement of all types. Meanwhile, there exhibit greater variations regarding how other topical features and linguistic characteristics are related to public’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement during a disaster.     

Best practices for online Canadian prenatal health promotion: A public health approach

Background

Prenatal health promotion provides information regarding pregnancy risks, protective behaviours and clinical and community resources. Typically, women obtain prenatal health information from health care providers, prenatal classes, peers/family, media and increasingly, Internet sites and mobile apps. Barriers to prenatal health promotion and related services include language, rural/remote location, citizenship and disability. Online public health platforms represent the capacity to reach underserved women and can be customised to address the needs of a heterogeneous population of pregnant women.

Creating a positive emotional culture: Effect of internal communication and impact on employee supportive behaviors

The study surveyed 506 employees in the United States to test the effect of internal communication (i.e., corporate-level symmetrical and leadership-level responsive communications) on fostering a positive emotional culture characterized by companionate love, joy, pride, and gratitude. In addition, we tested the interplay between corporate internal communication and a positive emotional culture and its influence on supportive employee behaviors, specifically, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and employee advocacy. Results indicated that symmetrical communication and responsive leadership communication cultivated a positive emotional culture in organizations. Such culture also fostered employee OCB and advocacy. Moreover, corporate symmetrical communication directly and positively influenced employee OCB. Finally, this study found that employee OCB positively affected employee advocacy. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings for public relations scholars and practitioners were discussed.     

A Graphical Tool for Interpreting Regression Coefficients of Trinomial Logit Models

Multinomial logit (also termed multi-logit) models permit the analysis of the statistical relation between a categorical response variable and a set of explicative variables (called covariates or regressors). Although multinomial logit is widely used in both the social and economic sciences, the interpretation of regression coefficients may be tricky, as the effect of covariates on the probability distribution of the response variable is nonconstant and difficult to quantify. The ternary plots illustrated in this article aim at facilitating the interpretation of regression coefficients and permit the effect of covariates (either singularly or jointly considered) on the probability distribution of the dependent variable to be quantified. Ternary plots can be drawn both for ordered and for unordered categorical dependent variables, when the number of possible outcomes equals three (trinomial response variable); these plots allow not only to represent the covariate effects over the whole parameter space of the dependent variable but also to compare the covariate effects of any given individual profile. The method is illustrated and discussed through analysis of a dataset concerning the transition of master’s graduates of the University of Trento (Italy) from university to employment.     

The future of PR is ‘fantastic’, ‘friendly’ and ‘funny’: Occupational stereotypes and symbolic capital in entry-level job advertisements

Over the past decade, there has been a move towards examining public relations as a socio-cultural practice, acknowledging practitioners as influential communicators who produce and symbolise cultural values through public relations messages. Ideally, a diverse group of professionals would aide in representing a diverse society, but to date, the profession remains female dominated. In this article, it is proposed that practitioners’ own discourse do not only establish what is most valued in the occupation and which habitus suits the practice best, but that the discourse also opens and closes occupational entry for new practitioners thereby contributing to a lack of diversity.This article presents the findings of an indicative thematic content analysis of one of the most common, yet under-research sites of discourse, namely entry-level job advertisements in New Zealand and Australia. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the analysis found that the advertisements placed little to no emphasis on the nature of the work, instead focusing on elements of ‘fit’ whereby new entrants were expected to be charismatic, friendly, and willing to work in an environment that is ‘fun’ and ‘flexible’. In doing so, public relations practitioners tacitly created invisible barriers, a self-limiting occupational culture and furthered existing stereotypes of the ‘perfect’ practitioner.     

From “an open field” to established “waves”: Public relations scholarship through the lens of Public Relations Review

Public Relations Review is the oldest academic journal of public relations, celebrating its 45th year in 2020. This research analyzes the journal through a bibliometric census and co-citation analysis of every article in its history. Initial findings were shared with 17 senior scholars, who provided their insights on the history of the journal and its impact on the growth of the discipline. The interviews produced multiple themes regarding the impact of the journal and the evolution of research. Findings from the mixed-methods analysis include that research in the journal has grown exponentially and become more cohesive over time, that Public Relations Review has been a responsive vehicle for scholarly growth, that a wide variety of economic incentives have driven the agendas of the journal (and of researchers), and that fostering healthy disagreement among researchers is among the next steps forward for the discipline.     

Revisiting the relationship between public relations and marketing: Encroachment and social media

Although public relations and marketing trade presses regularly discuss the conflict between the functions (e.g., Ecker, 2013; Havartin, 2013), academic researchers focused on the issue primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. The drop in public relations and marketing encroachment research does not parallel a drop in encroachment in practice, especially in light of today’s social media environment. In fact, historic tension between public relations and marketing intensified with the incorporation of social media into communication efforts. This paper updates the study of encroachment by reviewing the historical views of the topic, proposes ways that social media use has intensified issues related to role encroachment between public relations and marketing professionals, and outlines questions to guide future study of these topics.     

Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy: Towards a “new” cult of personality

This study examined how Turkey uses social media as a tool for public diplomacy and how the state’s soft-power efforts have recently changed on the global stage. The researchers constructed a dataset of 2769 Twitter posts by the Turkish government’s most influential public diplomacy accounts. The analyses revealed that the focus of Turkey’s Twitter public diplomacy has become concentrated on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and is thematically focused on the political values embodied by the Turkish president. The findings suggest that public diplomacy remains to be the diplomacy of the government, not of the public, and social media is used as just another tool for propaganda, not as a means of engagement with foreign publics. Further, the findings indicate the emergence of a “new” cult of personality in public diplomacy and point out the instrumental role of social media in changing the dynamics of leader-follower relationship. The study contributes to public relations theory and practice by advancing the burgeoning public diplomacy scholarship at the intersection of social media and relational approaches.