Conserving complexity: A complex systems paradigm and framework to study public relations’ contribution to grand challenges

Sustainable development poses a grand challenge for society, addressed by organisations through their public relations activities. Grand challenges are complex by nature and call for nontrivial solutions whose effects show at the level of society. That is why studying public relations’ contribution to grand challenges requires a macro perspective that accounts for the dynamic interaction between individual, organisational, and system levels in a digital communication environment. This paper offers a new paradigm to analyse organisations’ significant and at times undue impact on grand challenges through public relations. It develops a framework inspired by complex adaptive systems thinking and adopts its ten properties for public relations: emergence, adaptivity, heterogeneous actors, nonlinear effects, feedback mechanisms, self-organisation, phase transitions, networks, scaling, and cooperation. The paper applies the framework to the example of sustainable development. It shows why research on grand challenges requires a holistic perspective and how it can help study digitally born communication phenomena. The proposed complex systems paradigm provides space for critical, social scientific, and interpretative research lines in public relations. Inquiries start from the grand challenge and study the communicative interactions between organisations and other actors from existing theory while accounting for the ten properties of complex adaptive systems. The paper outlines how future research can enrich the study of public relations and discusses its limits.     

由“思颍诗”浅析欧阳修思隐情结

作为北宋文坛和政坛举重若轻的人物,欧阳修中晚年的归隐思想及最终为何选择归隐颍州一直是学界争论的焦点。欧阳修从皇祐二年离开南京到熙宁三年任职青州期间所做的30首“思颍诗”,具有独特的创作规律。对其进行梳理,有利于探求欧阳修长期以来思隐的内外原因,并从时间与空间的维度归纳颍州这一地点在欧阳修思隐情结中起到的作用。