Public relations and zones of engagement: Employees’ lived experiences and the fundamental nature of employee engagement

While employee engagement has been primarily explored within the business, human resources and management disciplines, public relations research has more recently taken an interest in furthering its understanding and acknowledging how public relations can serve an organization’s internal communication as a foundational component of the field. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how public relations can serve an organization’s internal communication by better understanding how employees perceive and experience engagement. Following a phenomenological methodology (n?=?32), this study utilized zones of meaning as a conceptual foundation (not a literal interpretation) to examine the process related to the complex, shifting and shared meaning of zones of engagement and how zones of meaning are products as well as drivers of engagement, which offer a new way to conceptualize employee engagement in public relations, shifting to a deeper comprehension and understanding. The findings show that employee experiences align more to Kahn’s (1990) initial personal engagement model than other public relations models. The psychological conditions of meaningfulness and safety from the original employee engagement model emerged as important factors in defining the employees’ shared-meaning lived experiences. In addition, this study offers a new definition of disengagement, which is similar but unique to the scholarship on negative engagement. The findings provide a framework for public relations scholars who work to further refine the understanding of employee engagement and for practitioners who develop public relations strategies for internal audiences, and advances the conceptual foundation of zones of meaning in public relations scholarship.     

European Muslims’ engagement in the public sphere soft counterpublics

This article addresses European Muslims’ public engagement in the arts by applying the concept of counterpublics. It examines two case studies of young German Muslims whose involvement in the public sphere can be described as soft counterpublics. The term soft counterpublics denotes publics that show some characteristics of counterpublics, but are at the same time not only about ‘countering’. They can be seen as ‘in between’ cases, neither strong counterpublics nor completely beyond counterpublics. Their art reflects a diversity of interests that are translated into public expressions and related back to their multiple identities. Motivations and themes are multi-layered. Occasionally, topics address stereotypes and negative identity representations of Muslims, which reflect important characteristics of counterpublics. However, themes can deal with a broad range of matters that go beyond this particular issue and that can be seen in isolation of counterpublics. On the one hand, there is a natural interest in the arts as a tool to express oneself, which is not a typical case of counterpublics. On the other hand, there is also the intention to speak to people through the arts. As well as wanting to reach the Muslim youth community in Germany, who can identify with their art, the case studies are also concerned about the non-Muslim German community and its perception of Muslim identity in Germany.     

Mobilisation through early activation and school engagement – the story from Scotland

This paper explores the experience of 16–17 year olds participating in the Scottish independence referendum and discusses whether it can be seen as positive or negative considering civic attitudes and participation. Using data from two comprehensive and representative surveys of 14–17 year olds, it engages empirically with claims about young people's alleged political (dis-)interest and provides qualifications for commonly believed stories of young people as mere recipients of information given to them by parents and teachers.

The paper develops a positive view of young people's engagement in the referendum process and suggests that inputs from parents and schools actually have distinguishable effects on young people, who do not simply ‘follow the lead’ of others uncritically. The analyses suggest that the discussion of political issues in the classroom (rather than the simple delivery of civics-style classes per se) may act as a positive factor in the political socialisation of young people, but suggests that further research is required to examine these effects beyond the specific context of the Scottish independence referendum in particular in relation to questions about whether reducing the voting age to 16 could be expected to generally lead to positive outcomes.     

Social media advocacy and gun violence: Applying the engagement model to nonprofit organizations’ communication efforts

Applying the model of engagement, this study tests the effectiveness of social media advocacy strategies, framing, and mobilizing information related to nonprofit organizations’ communication about the issue of gun violence. An online experiment revealed successful social media advocacy strategies within the engagement model. Two key components of social media advocacy were identified: (1) public relations practitioners’ roles in shaping messages and mobilizing publics; (2) the important role of marginalized groups and individuals in issue amplification.     

Is occupational stress associated with work engagement ?

The occupational stress is associated with dissatisfaction, excessive demand at work and personal factors. Those factors can reduce work performance and can predispose workers to various diseases. Workers' health may be protected if there is encouragement to face challenges, which may lessen the impact on psychological and somatic stress and thus have greater personal and professional satisfaction. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between occupational stress and work engagement. Participated in this study 457 male and female workers of a metallurgical industry. Subjects answered personal data, and the Job Stress Scale and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale were applied. Results showed an association between occupational stress and work engagement (P=0,001). The way the individual deals with his frustrations, or rather the work engagement, is associated with the occupational stress.     

Subjective well-being and school engagement before versus during the COVID-19 pandemic: What good are positive emotions?

The present study overcomes the limited empirical evidence on the association between well-being and school engagement in times of adversity by exploiting available data from two large and comparable samples of eighth graders; one obtained prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the second obtained during the pandemic. Results suggest that adolescents were less engaged with their learning context during the pandemic, as well as lower in positive and negative affect, but slightly more satisfied with life. Through SEM we found a stronger positive association between positive affect and school engagement in the COVID-19 group compared with the pre-COVID-19 group. This finding highlights the important role of positive affect in supporting better academic functioning in the aftermath of a global crisis.     

‘The outraged young’: young Europeans,civic engagement and the new media in a time of crisis

Public involvement in traditional political institutions has declined significantly over the past few decades, leading to what some have seen as a crisis in citizenship. This trend is most striking amongst young people, who have become increasingly alienated from mainstream electoral politics in Europe. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to show that younger citizens are not apathetic about ‘politics’ – they have their own views and engage in democracy in a wide variety of ways that seem relevant to their everyday lives. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, young Europeans have borne the brunt of austerity in public spending: from spiralling youth unemployment, to cuts in youth services, to increased university tuition fees. In this context, the rise and proliferation of youth protest in Europe is hardly surprising. Indeed, youth activism has become a major feature of the European political landscape: from mass demonstrations of the ‘outraged young’ against political corruption and youth unemployment, to the Occupy movement against the excesses of global capitalism, to the emergence of new political parties. This article examines the role that the new media has played in the development of these protest movements across the continent. It argues that ‘digitally networked action’ has enabled a ‘quickening’ of youth participation – an intensification of political participation amongst young, highly educated citizens in search of a mouthpiece for their ‘indignation’.     

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale: a unique social engagement

Abstract

Art as a social engagement in the West can be dated back to the history of avant-garde art starting from the end of nineteenth century. Rooted in his own cultural background, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s socially engaged art project “Fairytale is more complex than the avant-garde strategy. The work Fairytale established a structure – “1=1,001”. That means on the one hand, the participants can be easily regarded everywhere in Kassel as 1,001 mobile works of art. All of them contribute to an entire work. In other words, the 1,001 people consist of one work. On the other hand, everyone is dealing with their personal issues independent of art. In this sense, the entire work can be divided into 1,001 personal experiences. This structure is based on three principles of Chinese philosophy Taoism – the duality between Yin and Yang, the dynamism between Yin and Yang, and the concept of “uselessness”. Positioning Fairytale within both Western theoretical as well as Chinese philosophical contexts, this essay is to analyze how Chinese philosophy shaped Ai’s strategy of social engagement and his cultural identity – Chineseness.     

“Opening the door”: developing and pilot testing an adult protective services worker engagement training in New York city

About 10% of Americans over the age of 60 experience elder abuse (EA), but EA is frequently under detected. As the primary responders for alleged EA cases, Adult Protective Service (APS) caseworkers are ideally positioned to improve detection and intervention. The Opening the Door (OTD) training was developed in a multidisciplinary setting and designed in collaboration with APS workers to enhance their engagement skills in potential EA cases and thus maximize the possibility of disclosure. Rooted in a relational approach and utilizing adult learning theory, it is divided into three main topics: Preparing for Engagement, Engagement Practice, and Processing Engagement. The eight-hour training was piloted with three groups of urban APS caseworkers with a wide range of work experience. Pre- and post-tests and case reflections indicate a positive impact on caseworkers' sense of self-efficacy, while focus groups indicate the necessity for ongoing provision of trainings and development of additional supports for APS caseworkers. Future work could further explore the efficacy of the training and expand its reach.     

Conservative Catholicism versus social Catholicism? Contrasting patterns in the political engagement of highly religious young Catholics in France and Italy

Current academic literature has proposed contrasting interpretations of the developments of youth religiosity. While some scholars have claimed increasing secularization of younger generations, others have noted the growing importance of religious values in young people's lives. To go beyond this debate, this article explores the restructuring of youth religiosity in Western European countries, characterized by the resilience of religion in secularized societies. With this purpose in mind, the article investigates the under-researched topic of the political activism of highly religious young Catholics and compares the political engagement of two recently established youth organizations: Sens Commun (SC) (rebranded Mouvement Conservateur, MC) in France and the Comunità di Connessioni (CdC) in Italy. Although both SC and CdC were founded by young Catholics, their engagement has followed diverging trajectories. While SC/MC's ideas and politics bear the imprint of conservative Catholicism, CdC's initiatives and values are inspired by social Catholicism. This article claims that the diverging trajectories of SC/MC and CdC are influenced by the long-lasting socio-historical factors that regulated the relations between religion, politics and civil society and the emerging post-secular reconfiguration that can open the way for a renewal of the forms of political engagement of young Catholics.     

Does community and family engagement enhance permanency for children in foster care? Findings from an evaluation of the family-to-family initiative

There is limited research assessing the effectiveness of family engagement for improving permanency for children. An important challenge is that randomized designs are not feasible for evaluating these practices because effective implementation of family engagement requires systemic change. Findings from a national evaluation are presented to illustrate how preliminary evidence can be developed from comprehensive child welfare reform initiatives. The results show when and how family and community participation may facilitate permanency for children.     

Making use of qualitative tools: towards a fuller understanding of the voluntary sector’s engagement with public service delivery

Qualitative tools are potentially powerful to gain understandings of the voluntary sector’s (VS) engagement with public service delivery. This is because of the strengths associated with qualitative methods to gain specific information on an area as diverse as the VS and the ability to carry out comparative analyses. Despite this, research on the VS is dominated by work that uses quantitative tools. Using a case study of research conducted on VS’ engagement with the government’s welfare‐to‐work programme, the New Deal for Young People, I discuss three advantages commonly associated with qualitative tools. These are the flexibility of open‐endedness and the importance of understanding processes and staff’s perspectives. I conclude that if the government wants to keep the VS engaged in the delivery of public services, they need to understand what keeps the VS involved and that qualitative tools can make a substantial contribution towards understanding this.     

Engaged at work? An employee engagement model in public relations

ABSTRACT

Engagement has emerged as an important concept in public relations scholarship. Yet a theoretically informed model with a clear and coherent explication of the construct is still lacking. By situating our study in the internal organizational context, we provided an updated conceptualization and operationalization of employee engagement, proposing a strategy-engagement-behavior three-step employee engagement model. Results from an employee survey (n = 568) supported our conceptual model, showing that organizational engagement strategies positively predicted employee engagement, which in turn accounted for employees’ positive and negative messaging behavior, as well as their contextual performance behavior. After controlling for significant demographic variables such as gender, age, organizational size, number of subordinates, and level of management position, we identified a complete mediation effect of employee engagement in our two-step structural equation modeling analysis.     

Successful aging: how does physical activity influence engagement with life?

With the increasing number of individuals over the age of 65?years worldwide, it is critical for society to recognize the importance of helping seniors maintain their health, physical, and cognitive functioning as well as their engagement with life. These three dimensions provide the foundation for successful aging (SA). The positive role of engagement with life has been understated to date in the literature. This review highlights the components of SA with particular emphasis on engagement and how physical activity positively impacts engagement which in turn positively influences health and physical function.     

Students’ health engagement and affective relations in Danish upper secondary school

To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.     

Improving citizens’ online engagement via community managers: an explanatory study

The role of community manager is gaining importance as the proper usage of social media becomes a key factor for achieving more active involvement of citizens in social and political issues. Focused on Spanish local governments and in line with the literature of Excellence Theory, this paper aims to analyze whether some characteristics of the community manager function are determinant in their fostering of citizens’ online engagement via social media. In particular ‘independence’, ‘having access to the dominant coalition’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘continuous training’ and ‘culture of the organization’ are the characteristics considered in this paper. As to the main findings, this study confirms that community managers have not as yet achieved their goal of embedding the use of social media by citizens as a means of establishing more direct contact with their local governments. Moreover, in line with Excellence Theory, community managers of local governments should be aware of the importance of having direct access to key managers of the organization in order to better achieve the objectives of the organization and, more specifically, to increase citizens’ engagement. Furthermore, continuous training in issues related to social media truly helps develop the skills and potential of community managers. Likewise, an excellent communication department should rely on good professionals no matter their gender, and, in this sense, the gender of community managers is not a significant factor in their performance. However, the results of this study also reveal that in the case of public sector community managers, an authoritarian culture seems to be a determining factor for obtaining better results in enhancing citizens’ engagement.     

Young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement

Everyday political talk is an important democratic activity. Research on young people has focused on the role of talk in political socialization. The overall question in this study is: What encourages or impedes young people to participate in everyday political talk? Politics has been described as a potentially unsafe topic. The study investigates young people’s own experiences of conversations in families, peer groups, and social media. The study applies a social interactional approach and understands political talk as a social achievement, related to norms and the management of self-identities. It is based on a multimethod approach comprising individual interviews, group interviews, and diaries. The group consists of 23 high school students (aged 17–18). The results show that the engagement in political talk is sensitive to the social settings. Norms make political topics expected or best to avoid. The family and peer groups are potentially important context for friendly talk, argumentations, exploration of opinions, and identities. The participants are in general more reluctant to express opinions in social media. The fear of face-threatening responses is one important aspect. The study suggests that political talk is an activity in which young people express, reveal, and carefully manage political self-identities.     

What does learning by listening bring to citizen engagement? Lessons from a government program

In public relations research, the concept of engagement is often theorized but seldom observed in practice. This research focuses on what public leaders learn when they undertake actions centered on learning by listening to society to implement governmental citizen engagement programs. Taking an inductive grounded approach to data analysis which draws on tools and methods of grounded theory as well as including a review of key concepts from public relations literature, a reflexive analysis of an action learning intervention involving the members of a provincial government was conducted. Results show that, when reflecting on interaction with stakeholders of the program, government members: increase their knowledge about both sides of the public organization-society relationship; become more sensitive to what listening is and implies, and, hence, more supportive of two-way communication; are challenged about the authenticity of the motivations behind their listening; become more aware of ways in which they work to build social capital; and, subsequently, increase their willingness to act together with society. This paper shows that reflection on the real implementation of engagement programs gives policy makers a better understanding of normative assumptions, and hence it instantiates public relations theories and concepts about engagement. By identifying acting-by-listening as integral to citizen engagement, it presents implications for the study and practice of public relations in public sector organizations.     

Transformational leadership and job satisfaction of police officers (carabineros) in Chile: the mediating effects of group identification and work engagement / Liderazgo transformacional y satisfacción laboral en carabineros de Chile: los efectos mediadores de la identificación con el grupo y el work engagement

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction, as well as to analyse the mediating role of group identification and work engagement in a police training process at a Chilean professional military institution. The sample was made up of 985 candidates representing all the candidates that joined the units of the country in the different locations. Officers and non-commissioned officers acting as instructors were considered ‘leaders’, while their ‘followers’ were the young candidates in the training period. It was found that all the relevant variables were positively and significantly interrelated, and a model of structural equations revealed that both work engagement and group identification played a mediating role in the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction.     

In whose interests? When relational engagement to obtain a social license leads to paradoxical outcomes

Social license to operate (SLO) is typically associated with seemingly positive outcomes for both communities and organizations. Similarly, relational engagement is typically favored over more instrumental or episodic forms. This paper presents a case study, however, of an organization that undertook ostensibly dialogic and relational processes of engagement with its stakeholders to generate social capital and a SLO, yet also to obtain political power. While the organization arguably provided substantial benefit to the local community, paradoxically it also wielded significant power over the community. The findings from the case suggest that the evaluation of SLO – and by extension, normative engagement – should move beyond assessing positive outcomes, to critically asking whether or not the organization contributes to a fully functioning society.