Dangerous liaison or perfect match?: Public relations and social marketing

This paper considers a possible match between public relations and social marketing. It positions interchanges between the two as the strongest and most desirable partnership possibility for public relations with any aspect of the overall field of marketing. Working from definitions of social marketing as a profession and academic discipline, it reviews approaches, including textbooks, from the two disciplines in order to compare and contrast their strengths and weaknesses, to examine their perceptions of each other, and to identify the opportunities and challenges that social marketing represents for public relations. The paper also looks at what social marketing might learn from public relations. It concludes that public relations should look at improving the relationship as a matter of urgency in order to augment professional practices; to open up employment opportunities in an expanding market for social marketing expertise; and to improve the social reputation of public relations.     

Whose Heartland?: The politics of place in a rural–urban interface

This article advances a conceptualization of the rural–urban interface that is centred on a historically and spatially informed politics of place situated within local–global connections. The research is a case study of an inter-municipal development plan called Alberta's Industrial Heartland. Located near the City of Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada, the study area has been characterized by tremendous social, cultural, and economic shifts over the past century, from agriculture, to country residential in-migration, to intensive industrial development in response to the increasing importance of Alberta on the global energy market. A series of interviews conducted with residents, political officials, and other stakeholders documents how parallel, yet contested definitions of the ‘Heartland’ underpinned a ‘politics of place’ over land use change at the rural–urban interface.     

Reasons for low levels of interactivity: (Non-) interactive CSR communication in twitter

The interactivity levels of online CSR communication are typically low. This study explores the reasons for the low levels of interactivity in the popular social media tool Twitter. An analysis of 41,864 Twitter messages (tweets) from the thirty most central corporate accounts in a CSR Twitter network is conducted. Comparisons (t-test) between CSR tweets and general tweets and between specialized CSR Twitter accounts and general accounts reveal that the low levels of interactivity are due to a reactive interaction approach and a lack of specialization.     

Beyond excellence: Extending the generic approach to international public relations: The case of Bosnia

This article extends the generic approach to international public relations research. The current generic approach, based on the Excellence theory of public relations, suggests a normative framework to study and evaluate international public relations practices. This generic approach has great potential for focusing international research and clarifying infrastructure, geopolitical, legal, cultural, media, and other important variables. Unfortunately, this generic approach has been mainly used to confirm the Excellence model of public relations. Thus, it falls short of providing scholars and practitioners the tools they need to conduct and study global public relations. This paper seeks to clarify international public relations research by explicating rhetorical generic theory (RGT).     

European Communication Monitor: Current developments,issues and tendencies of the professional practice of public relations in Europe

The European Communication Monitor (ECM) research explores the current developments for communications disciplines, practices and instruments. It is an extensive research project to monitor trends in communication management, analyse the changing framework for the profession driven by European integration and evaluate specific topics of relevance to public relations practice. Specifically, the 2008 ECM edition is focused on aspects such as: strategy and control, interactive channels, corporate social responsibility, intercultural challenges, influence on management decision making, cooperation with agencies, and future budgets.     

Influentials,novelty, and social contagion : The viral power of average friends,close communities,and old news

What is the effect of (1) popular individuals, and (2) community structures on the retransmission of socially contagious behavior? We examine a community of Twitter users over a five month period, operationalizing social contagion as ‘retweeting’, and social structure as the count of subgraphs (small patterns of ties and nodes) between users in the follower/following network.     

Does familiarity breed contempt?: Analyses of the relationship among company familiarity,company reputation,company citizenship,and company personality on corporate equity

The effects of familiarity have received little attention in the areas of public relations. This study used structural equation modeling (SEM) to predict the influence of familiarity on corporate equity, which is measured by willingness to invest in a corporation or purchase its products or services using several mediating variables such as citizenship, reputation, and personality. The Roper Corporate Reputation Scorecard was used to study these variables using an online panel survey from NOP World of 1500 participants. Results found familiarity does have a positive relationship in each industry regarding citizenship, reputation, and personality. In addition, the latter three variables had a significant positive effect on corporate equity.     

Quiet please, there's a lady on stage: : Centering the person with dementia in life story narrative

This paper is drawn from a larger study based on traditional qualitative thematic methods, which explored the use of secondary biographical stories as a strategy in conversation with an older person who has dementia. The aim of this paper is to re-examine the data to facilitate further discussion in gerontology about the ways in which the ideals of Kitwood's (1997) personhood and narrative inquiry can be used keep life story of the person with dementia intact. By drawing upon narrative writers such as Mishler (1986), Gee (1991), Ramanathan (1995) and Riessman (2004, 2007), we describe a methodological approach utilising structural and thematic forms of narrative analysis to keep the person with dementia ‘centre stage’ in their own life story narrative. This paper demonstrates that by integrating a person-centred approach to interpretative and structural narrative analysis, people living with dementia can be the centre of their own story and communicate with their community what is important and why it is worth telling.     

Pratique sacrificielle et activité scientifique: Enquête ethnographique dans un laboratoire de physiologie

Experimental physiologists use the word “sacrifice” to describe the putting to death of laboratory specimens. Drawing on observations of laboratory practices and on religious sacrifices described by sociologists, the argument is made that, beyond being a mere metaphor, “sacrifice” refers to a practice that activates a specific set of meanings. In this way, experimentation can be conducted while, at the same time, treating laboratory animals with respect.     

Instruments for research on transition: Applied methods and approaches for exploring the transition of young care leavers to adulthood

Young people who have been in care show relatively poor outcomes in comparison to young people who have not been in care, and run a high risk of social exclusion. Therefore, the transition to adulthood of young people leaving care is an important topic for research. However, there is still little knowledge about the different research approaches and research instruments that are being used in studying this topic. The aim of the present study is to review the approaches and instruments that are used in empirical studies that focus on young care leavers' transitions to adulthood. The results show that the studies apply a diversity of topics and instruments, but that there is also considerable overlap. To make better comparisons on the transition from out-of-home care to adulthood between different countries, a common research framework and one or more research instruments should be developed that can assess this transition and the situation of young care leavers in diverse social contexts.     

Transforming the city: The potential for urban ethnographies of PR: The case of Latin America

Framed within García Canclini's concept of cultural hybridity, this paper will argue that “the city” and, consequently, the field of urban anthropology, offers great potential for the study of public relations and its audiences. Urbanisation will be one of the twenty-first century's biggest drivers of global economic growth (Dobbs et al., 2011) and public relations efforts will need to adapt to reflect the shifting urban environment. We will propose that cities provide opportunities for exploring the meanings, confines and possibilities of public relations as a socio-cultural practice. We will consider how ethnographically-inspired research can help us to further understand how public relations is understood and practised, both formally and informally, in large metropolitan cities and how public relations is influenced by, and can contribute to, urban cultural life. We will propose an ethnographic framework for research to explore the phenomenology of everyday lived experiences of public relations (PR) in relation to the complexity of the global processes which shape today's cities and the PR practices which take place within them. To contextualise our proposed research framework, we will draw on two particular cases from our own work: one of a project now completed in Mexico City, Mexico, and the other, a project in progress, in Lima, Peru.     

Divergence in aggressors' and victims' perceptions of bullying: A decisive factor for differential psychosocial intervention

The study of children' and adolescents' perceptions of bullying has become a topic of particular interest in the scientific community as it enables one to better understand the processes of aggression and victimization, and consequently the emergence of new perspectives that will allow anti-bullying programs to be better matched to their targets. This paper analyzes adolescents' perceptions of bullying and the forms in which it is manifest, finding a difference between the perceptions held by aggressors and victims. It also examines the influence of the factor 'frequency of aggression' on those perceptions. The data acquisition instrument was a questionnaire applied to a sample of 2295 teenagers (M = 13.8, SD = 1.4). The results show that the victims' sole criterion for their conceptualization and identification of bullying is the 'intent to cause harm'. The aggressors, however, stress the criterion of 'power imbalance' rather than 'intent to harm'. The results also show that, as the aggression committed or suffered decreases in frequency, both aggressors and victims tend to legitimize various modes of bullying as a form of peer interaction.     

Catégorisation des usagers et rhétorique professionnelle: Le cas des policiers sur la voie publique

Placing “users” or even “customers” at the center of concern has been the keystone in reforms in several French public services. As the example of police officers shows however, the idea of a user takes on quite specific meanings depending on the values and objectives defended by the occupational group in question. Placing those who commit offenses, their victims or mere citizens into categories is part of the process of constructing what the police officer's “real work” should be by disqualifying and stigmatizing those who “don't fit in”.     

Land-use planning and participation: The case of inuit public housing (Nunavik, Canada)

This article examines the role of participation in land-use planning. It discusses a concrete example of planning, related to the construction of social housing in Nunavik, the most northerly region of Québec, Canada, inhabited mainly by Inuit. It looks at how the responsibilities of the various parties involved in the planning process have changed over the past 30 years and strives to understand the exact nature of their responsibilities at the present time. In so doing, it focuses on the role of citizens. This study shows that citizen participation plays a relatively limited role in planning, even though existing legislation makes it an integral part of the process. It helps to fulfil basic land-use planning functions, namely, an economic rationalization function and a political legitimization function. From this perspective, discourse on the democratic virtues of participatory planning is misleading.