Prioritizing relationships: The investment model and relationship maintenance strategies in organizational crises

Crisis communication and crisis management are dominated by research in image repair and restoration, but much has to be done to address the lack of research that engages relational perspectives in these fields. Adopting the investment model (Rusbult, 1980) as a theoretical framework and using structural equation modeling, the study develops a crisis relational maintenance model to explain how organizations can (re)build relationships with publics. Survey results show that publics’ commitment and publics’ trust are two significant mediators that influence publics’ relational behaviors post-crisis. The investment model provides a suitable framework to explain publics’ commitment to an organization, with explained variance more than 90 percent, and an organization’s relationship maintenance strategies during and post-crisis significantly affect publics’ trust. Whether an organization’s relationships with the publics can be maintained or repaired depends on whether an organization engages in these relationship maintenance strategies that prioritize publics’ need, which can be reciprocated from publics as publics reorient themselves along with the long-term goals and well-being of the relationships. Results of this study call for further attention on relationship maintenance approaches in crisis communication and management research.     

Types and dimensions of organization–public relationships in greater China

Public relations are the major force in the establishment of organization–public relationships (OPRs) in the United States and other countries. This study is a metaresearch that reports a meta-analysis of three studies on relationship management with publics in the greater China area, including mainland China and Hong Kong. A metaresearch is used to gain general and theoretical conclusions on a specific topic by synthesizing research results from similar studies [Grunig, J. E., Grunig, L. A., Sriramesh, K., Huang, Y. H., & Lyra, A. (1995). Models of public relations in an international setting. Journal of Public Relations Research, 7, 163–186]. The purpose of this study is to extend the concepts of relationship management to the Chinese context by investigating the types of relationships between organizations and the Chinese publics and other possible factors that affect the outcomes of the relationships. This article first provides a brief literature review on relationship management of public relations. It is followed by a report of the result analysis of the three studies in relation to OPR types and cultivation strategies. Finally, the research results, their implications, and future research directions will be discussed.     

Relationship building and the use of Web sites: How Fortune 500 corporations use their Web sites to build relationships

This study examines the dialogic features of corporate Web sites in order to determine the Web site practices of the corporations for building relationships with their publics. Content analysis of 100 Fortune 500 companies’ Web sites revealed that the corporations designed their Web sites to serve important publics and foster dialogic communication. The corporate Web sites appear to promote control mutuality, trust, satisfaction, openness, and intimacy. However, the corporations need to maintain repetitive interactions with their publics to enhance trust, commitment, and exchange relationship.     

A social capital approach to improving public relations’ efficacy: Diagnosing internal constraints on external communication

This article extends Heath's (2006) concept of fully functioning society theory (FFS) and argues that public relations can be used as a force to enhance collective social capital in communities. To serve this purpose, however, the effectiveness of an organization to serve its external publics is often dependent on the status and relationships the public relations function has developed within the organization. This paper provides a network analysis of a government agency in Jordan that illustrates the relationship between internal organizational social capital and the potential problems for establishing external relationships with publics. Implications for public relations research methods and theory are also discussed.     

The social-mediated crisis communication research: Revisiting dialogue between organizations and publics in crises of China

The rapid diffusion of social media is ushering in a new era of crisis communication. To enhance our understanding of the social-mediated dialogue between organizations and their publics in crises of China, this study conducts a content analysis of 61 relevant journal articles published in 2006–2018. Results of this research present an overview of ongoing research trends such as theoretical frameworks and methodological preferences. This research also explores how the unique Chinese social media characteristics affect the dialogue between types of organizations and their publics. Contextual factors such as face and favor, relationship (Guanxi) and sentiment (Renqing), and the centralized political system that may facilitate/inhibit dialogue in crises of China are identified as well. Finally, this study suggests promising new directions such as a scholarly assessment tool for the social-mediated crisis communication research in China.     

OPR and its corruption of “publics”: A critique

This paper advances existing critiques of the organization-public relationship (OPR) research tradition by explicating the poor ontological conceptualization of publics in OPR research as well as related methodological concerns. The authors critically analyze the publics and OPR literature, furthering past criticisms and raising new questions about the heuristic value of OPR research. The paper points out three major weaknesses of the OPR tradition in its use of publics: (1) serious vacillation in terms resulting in conceptual inconsistencies, (2) inappropriate operationalization of variables and the use of probability sampling, and (3) a lack of insightful context and inclusion of relationship factors in OPR studies, to which publics are inextricably bound. The critique cautions scholars engaged in OPR research to improve their literature reviews and to enlarge their methodologies beyond a narrow scope of relational variables, which are theoretically fragile if not devoid of research value. Finally, the critique suggests the importance of conceptualizing publics in ways that acknowledge their agency.     

Grounding Twenty-first-Century Public Relations Praxis in Aristotelian Ethos

ABSTRACT

By grounding public relations praxis in Aristotelian ethos, practitioners can function as liaison officers with balanced perspectives, capable of co-creating meaning with both client organizations and their publics between whom experts are hired to facilitate mutually beneficial relationships. This approach locates persuasion at the nexus of speaker ethos in the public relations process. It allows practitioners to balance their commitment to the ethics of their profession with loyalty to clients, while empowering audiences (organizations and their publics) to function as the final arbiters of any courses of action proposed to them. Moreover, because the approach enables practitioners, based on their credible ethos, to participate in organizational decision-making, it has the potential to transfer their ethical worldview to client organizations. Ultimately, the central theoretical contribution of this essay is an alternative approach to public relations praxis founded on an analysis of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, arête, and eunoia.     

Crisis collective memory making on social media: A case study of three Chinese crises on Weibo

Social media users collectively (re)construct narratives to create memories surrounding past crises. In this study, we connect the concept of collective memory with a public-oriented approach to crisis communication to examine how crisis response frames and collective memory narratives were displayed by different social actors (government, organizations, and publics) on one of China’s social media platforms, Weibo. Findings from a content analysis of 9238 unique posts on three national crises (the 2010 Yushu Earthquake, the 2015 Tianjin Explosions, and the 2018 Vaccine Scandal) reveal that Chinese publics tended to adopt social issue and blaming frames, while the government and organizations were more prone to using informing and corrective action frames. When recalling and reconstructing crisis memories, Chinese publics used more power and contestation narrative, while the government frequently adopted the nationalism narrative; with trauma being the predominant narrative displayed across the three crises and social actors. Crisis response frames of blaming, crediting, and corrective action were significantly associated with narratives of power and contestation, heroism, and nationalism, respectively. Theoretical implications for future research on crisis collective memory making on social media and suggestions for governmental crisis communication are discussed.     

Resident and Family Perspectives on Assisted Living

Abstract

This research describes and compares the relative importance residents and family members place on attributes of the environment, the programs, and the policies of assisted living; describes their satisfaction with these features; and identifies factors associated with congruence between residents' and family members' ratings of importance and satisfaction. Both residents and their family members had high importance and satisfaction ratings. Family members gave the assisted living setting lower satisfaction ratings on all features than did residents. Congruence ranged from 34% to 71% for importance items and from 29% to 63% for satisfaction. Female residents, affectionate family relationships, and residing in an AL owned by a chain were positively associated with congruence on importance items, while resident and family education, resident income, and family involvement were negatively associated with congruence on importance items. For congruence on satisfaction items, having an affectionate relationship was positively associated and higher ADL dependency, more family involvement at the facility, and family members who viewed the facility as a safe place were negatively associated with congruence. This study makes a major stride forward because cognitively intact residents' perspectives are compared and contrasted with their own family members' perspectives, thus showing that residents and family members are two distinct groups, each with a unique set of preferences.     

Discrepancy Between Korean Government and Corporate Practitioners Regarding Professional Standards in Public Relations: A Co-Orientation Approach

This study examines the perceptional accuracy and the extent of the discrepancy between the professional standards of government and corporate public relations practitioners. Using a co-orientation approach in a national survey of randomly selected public relations professionals in Korea, it also measured practitioners' own attitudes as well as responses to questions about the attitudes of their peers concerning professional standards.

The results of this study suggest the influence of cultural perspectives. First, gender inequality in the relationship hierarchy has been largely eliminated but there is still no social and occupational consensus in the Korean public relations field. Second, the personal influence model and the behavior of gao guanxi (personal relations) still operate in the public relations of government systems, which have paternal authoritarian cultures. Government practitioners, nevertheless, feel strongly about the importance of social scientific research in their field and desire closer relationships with their communities and publics.     

Exploring Types of Organization–Public Relationships and Their Implications for Relationship Management in Public Relations

The purpose of this study is to explore the antecedent of organization–public relationships that affects relationship outcomes. Organizations, realizing the interdependence with their publics, developed different types of relationships, such as communal and exchange relationships. Therefore, there should be other types of relationships influencing the quality of the relationships. In this study, 40 qualitative interviews with 36 multinational companies (from Fortune 500 and Taiwan's Commonwealth 1000) in 9 cities in China and Taiwan were conducted to explore more types of relationships. This study discovered mutual communal, covenantal, contractual, symbiotic, manipulative, and exploitive relationships multinational companies have developed with their Chinese publics. The findings also indicate that covenantal relationships help reach a win–win ground, and mutual communal relationships benefit multinational companies the most in achieving effectiveness. A continuum of types of relationships is provided in this study.     

Organizational listening: Addressing a major gap in public relations theory and practice

An extensive body of literature theorizes public relations as two-way communication, dialogue, and relationships between organizations and their publics. Although there are alternative views, including public relations as advocacy, most theories emphasize dialogue, co-orientation, and relationships incorporating satisfaction, trust, and control mutuality—even to the extent of symmetry. Critical perspectives propose a sociocultural turn that further emphasizes stakeholders’ and societal interests. This analysis draws on a three-country study that reveals a major theory-practice gap and proposes a significant expansion of public relations theory in relation to listening to realize normative notions of public relations and give effect to claims of dialogue and engagement.     

The influences of relationship quality with external partners and required levels of approval of messaging on crisis preparedness

As funding for public health promotion is increasingly limited in the U.S., public relations research informing management of crises that threaten public health is especially critical. Crisis planning models such as Reynolds and Seeger’s (2005, 2014) crisis and emergency risk communication model offer comprehensive directives for crisis managers and present opportunities to extend the utility of best practice recommendations. A survey of public information officers (PIOs) (n=208) at local public health departments across the U.S. examines the quality of their relationships with partners in public health crisis management, including first responders, media, law enforcement, and hospitals, and reveals that relationships with key publics in crisis management are lacking. Further, PIOs at state governed health departments may face critical delays in releasing crisis messages, as their messages are required to clear more levels of approval than locally (city/county) governed departments. Implications and future research for these key variables extending public relations crisis communication research with a focus on inter-organizational relationships are discussed.     

Discourse of renewal: Developing multiple-item measurement and analyzing effects on relationships

Emphasis on protecting an organization’s image and reputation has dominated crisis communication research. A crisis is assumed to only bring negative impacts because it tarnishes an organization’s reputation. Priority is placed upon whether an organization can come up with response strategies that mitigate this harm, rather than on rebuilding relationships. Challenging these untested assumptions, discourse of renewal is complementary to the image- and reputation-centered perspectives and theorizes crises as opportunities to reflect, grow, and therefore renew to a better state. To further discourse of renewal, the current study first establishes a valid and reliable measure of discourse of renewal, and investigates how discourse of renewal influences publics’ relationship with an organization. Results of the study indicate that engagement, prospective foci, communication efficiency, and emphasis on organizational culture and core values are four dimensions of discourse of renewal, and that discourse of renewal positively influences publics’ relationship with an organization.     

How publics react to situational and renewing organizational responses across crises: Examining SCCT and DOR in social-mediated crises

The prevalence of social media among networked publics calls for more research regarding how organizations can conduct effective crisis communication on social networking sites. Based on the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) and the discourse of renewal (DOR) theory, this study examined how social media publics’ sentiments were affected by situational and renewing organizational responses in various clusters of crises. Twitter data of six crises representing three crisis clusters varying in the responsibility attribution (i.e., ambiguous, accidental, and preventable) were collected. We conducted a content analysis on organizations’ official tweets during crises (N = 59) and sentiment analysis on publics’ replies on Twitter (N = 4,340). The results showed that publics’ positive sentiments toward organizations were affected by organizational crisis responses that included instructing information, sympathy, systemic organizational learning, and effective organizational rhetoric. We recommend that crisis managers express sympathy toward publics as well as organizational learning that prevents a crisis from happening again.     

Creating shared value (CSV) and mutually beneficial relationships to address societal issues and develop corporate competitive advantage: A case study of Yuhan-Kimberly and an aging population

Through creating shared value (CSV) initiatives, companies have attempted to contribute to solving social problems that the public sector cannot address alone, such as migration, health, climate change, and job losses due to automation. Companies are also using CSV as business opportunities to develop their competitiveness. Only a few studies, however, have examined how organizations can develop and implement CSV programs, and the outcomes of those programs. We conducted a case study on how a multinational company, Yuhan-Kimberly, a joint venture of Kimberly-Clark and Yuhan, developed and implemented its CSV program, and created win-win, mutually beneficial impacts, in response to an increasingly aging society in Korea. South Korea is the world’s most rapidly aging society with the highest poverty and suicide rates among older adults. Yuhan-Kimberly’s CSV initiative includes fostering small-sized senior care businesses, creating jobs for older adults, changing the negative perception of older adults, and ultimately creating a market ecosystem for the older adult care industry. We used triangulation through company documents, including annual sustainability reports (N = 10), news reports (N = 623), company-conducted survey results (N = 80), and in-depth interviews (N = 14) with employees and members of other organizations and publics. The results reveal how the company developed and implemented a CSV program to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships and shared value for the company, older adults, other organizations, and society. The results indicate that CSV programs can be powerful relationship cultivation strategies to create mutual benefits both for society, by providing sustainable and feasible solutions, and for organizations, by enhancing their competitive advantages.     

Bring publics back into networked public relations research: A dual-projection approach for network ecology

This essay critiques the absence of publics in networked public relations research, and proposes the dual-projection approach as a solution to simplify and analyze the multi-mode public relations network ecology (Yang & Taylor, 2015). Compared to most previous studies that employ organization-centric networks where ties stand for hyperlinks, collaborations, or coalitions, the new approach projects organization-public relationships and public-public relationships onto interorganizational ties. By doing so, it (1) brings publics back into networked public relations research; (2) presents organizations and publics—the two most important subjects of public relations research—equally in the same network, (3) drives literature further away from a dyadic view of relationship management, and (4) constitutes one of the first techniques that can analyze direct and timely consequences of organziation-public relationships in the network ecology. To demonstrate the new approach, the network of publics overlap is introduced and applied to US-based LGBTQ advocacy groups. The essay also discusses the theoretical inquiries needed to further dual-projection networks, and invites scholars to create novel ways to incorporate publics into their network studies using dual projection.     

Relationship management as antecedents to public communication behaviors: Examining empowerment and public health among Asian Americans

This study examined the effects of relationship management by community health organizations on the situational perceptions, and, in turn, on information behaviors about health issues among community members. Survey data with 222 Asian Americans indicated that trust and control mutuality played different but complementary roles on problem recognition, involvement recognition, and constraint recognition, which then differently impacted four information behaviors ranging from information attending, information forwarding, information sharing, and information seeking. This study proposed and tested a public-oriented model and contributed to two lines of research: examining public-centered consequences of relationship management and exploring antecedents to the formation of publics. It has practical implications on fostering relationships and empowering community members.     

Distinguishing among publics,audiences, and stakeholders in the social media era of unanticipated publics

Public relations is failing to distinguish among publics, audiences, and stakeholders in today’s social media era, even though the business and marketing literature has begun discussing “brand publics.” This article clarifies the terms and explains the practical value in the definitions and distinctions. It also introduces a new term, “unanticipated publics” and provides a way to conceptualize those publics’ impact from the social network perspective.     

Resident and family perspectives on assisted living

This research describes and compares the relative importance residents and family members place on attributes of the environment, the programs, and the policies of assisted living; describes their satisfaction with these features; and identifies factors associated with congruence between residents' and family members' ratings of importance and satisfaction. Both residents and their family members had high importance and satisfaction ratings. Family members gave the assisted living setting lower satisfaction ratings on all features than did residents. Congruence ranged from 34% to 71% for importance items and from 29% to 63% for satisfaction. Female residents, affectionate family relationships, and residing in an AL owned by a chain were positively associated with congruence on importance items, while resident and family education, resident income, and family involvement were negatively associated with congruence on importance items. For congruence on satisfaction items, having an affectionate relationship was positively associated and higher ADL dependency, more family involvement at the facility, and family members who viewed the facility as a safe place were negatively associated with congruence. This study makes a major stride forward because cognitively intact residents' perspectives are compared and contrasted with their own family members' perspectives, thus showing that residents and family members are two distinct groups, each with a unique set of preferences.