This study extends Excellence Theory by examining how five of its core principles are enacted by public relations professionals in Kenya's county governments and, for comparison, in corporate and agency sectors. Drawing on 38 in-depth interviews, findings reveal sectoral contrasts shaped by political and economic contexts. County practitioners reported exclusion from strategy, limited support, and politicized hiring, while private-sector counterparts aligned strongly with Excellence principles. The study's inductive design allowed principles to emerge organically, reinforcing their empirical relevance. Findings call for a more pluralistic, context-sensitive understanding of excellence and offer insights for strengthening public relations in Kenya and similar systems.
This study expands the triadic appraisal framework of situational crisis communication theory (SCCT) with a 3 (crisis type: human-error vs. management misconduct vs. scansis) & times; 2 (organizational information-giving strategy type: instructing vs. adjusting) between-subjects online experiment among U.S. adults (N = 482). Moral outrage and empathetic anger were found to be distinct forms of third-party anger, driven by different triggers. The adjusting strategy led to significantly lower organizational reputation damage than the instructing strategy in the management misconduct crisis, but not in the human error or scansis crisis. Punishment intentions were found to vary as a function of crisis type and organizational response strategy.
Cultural entrepreneurship, defined as the creation and management of businesses rooted in cultural heritages, strives for economic growth while preserving heritage, strengthening communities, and promoting diversity. Despite its strong relational ontology, cultural startups remain underexplored from a public relations perspective. This study examines its role through 35 consecutive in-depth interviews with cultural entrepreneurs in ethnic Tibetan regions in Southwest China. Grounded in entrepreneurial public relations scholarship and relationship management paradigm, we introduce a Sentience-Oriented Approach of relationship cultivation informed by Tibetan language and relational practices. Through this approach, Tibetan entrepreneurs cultivate relationships with various stakeholders through three key relational practices, emotional consciousness, aspiration, and compassion, which serve as foundational mechanisms for their public relations practices. This study elevates non-Western public relations scholarship by extending the current relationship management paradigm and highlights the significance of human-centered and care-driven relationship cultivation in cultural entrepreneurship. It also further aligns with recent calls for care-based public relations by emphasizing emotional consciousness and compassion as central to stakeholder relationship management.
The purpose of this study is to explain the process of negative spillover effects of organizational crisis within the same industry. Previous research explains the spillover effects of organizational crises primarily through the lens of organizational similarity, yet it overlooks how similarity can lead to both positive and negative spillover effects, failing to account for a specific directional impact. Addressing this gap, the current research proposes systemic attribution as a driving factor of negative spillover and investigates its effects through two experiments, each conducted in integrity and capability crisis context. Additionally, drawing on two elements of attribution theory, consistency and consensus, this study examined the effects of prior crisis history of the crisis-stricken organization and crisis prevalence within the industry on systemic attribution and subsequent negative spillover. The findings indicate that systemic attribution indeed drives negative spillover effects. Furthermore, prior crisis history weakens spillover by lowering systemic attribution, whereas crisis prevalence strengthens spillover by enhancing systemic attribution. The findings were consistent across both integrity-related and capability-related crisis contexts.
We develop and test a process model of internal communication in which digital communication acceptance, perceived organizational support, and psychological contract fulfillment predict internal communication satisfaction, which in turn relates to employee engagement and life satisfaction. Using three-wave survey data from employees in Croatia, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Italy (N = 1,458), the model shows consistent structural patterns across countries while controlling for personality and cultural orientation. Results show that acceptance of digital tools, perceived organizational support, and fulfilled obligations are strongly associated with higher satisfaction. The findings advance internal communication theory by positioning communication satisfaction as a central mechanism linking organizational and technological factors to engagement and life satisfaction.
This research utilizes computational and network analysis methods to examine strategic management scholarship in public relations from 2012 to 2022, revealing how research within this paradigm has evolved with an increased focus over the past decade on non-traditional organizational contexts as well as internal communication and organizational listening. Although criticism of the strategic management paradigm has sought to expose its limitations, this research found a robust, inclusive, and expanding body of knowledge regarding strategic public relations management and a greater understanding of the evolving middle-range theories that constitute its perspective. This research reinforces the centrality and importance of the strategic management paradigm to broader public relations scholarship, and presents an expanded conception of its influence across traditionally disparate epistemologies of public relations research.
This study quantifies the agenda-building impact of social bots via algorithmic amplification. Through an automated content analysis, the data suggest that social bots significantly transferred object, attribute, and network salience to campaign communications during Ohio's 2022 midterm election, and to a lesser degree, to press and public discourse. Social bots were the strongest influencer of attribute saliency, driving primarily negative sentiment. They were also mild influencers of object salience, leading five issue categories. This contributes to public relations by addressing how agenda-building theory evolves under artificial amplification, empirically illustrating how machines interfere with organizational news and strategic issues management efforts.
This study aims to test solidarity cue messaging as a message strategy to facilitate cross-minority group solidarity in the context of the Black - Asian relationship based on the literature on solidarity and the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS). The results from two experiments provide causal links between solidarity cues and communication behavior for activism in support of another minority group after witnessing that group's support for their own community, through situational variables, as well as demonstrating the direct effects of solidarity cues on solidarity-based activism. Practically, the results imply that even a few individuals' participation in another minority group's movement can contribute to building solidarity among minority groups.
This paper examines the growing importance of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) communication as a key function of excellent public relations. Facing the increased need to react to stakeholder demands regarding sustainability practices and lingering accusations of ESG greenwashing, corporations need to develop excellence in ESG communication as part of their public relations function, including effective issue monitoring and crisis communication practices. Building upon Excellence Theory in public relations and using a mixed-methods approach, combining a survey and qualitative interviews with communication and sustainability professionals at financial institutions in Germany and Switzerland, the study identified eight key factors that characterize excellent ESG communication. However, whereas survey findings indicate a high level of self-reported excellence among practitioners, the interview insights reveal variability in institutional preparedness and underscore the ongoing need for integrated, organization-wide ESG strategies. This research contributes to the professionalization of ESG communication as part of the public relations function, offering a foundational ESG Communication Excellence Framework that supports public relations theory and the practical advancement of sustainable corporate communication practices.
Despite organizational emphasis in the United States to recruit, promote and retain women, women executives are still a relative rarity. This challenge is exacerbated by the lack of understanding as to how women in leadership roles see themselves as both employees of the organization and as underrepresented but highly visible leaders in the workplace. This study centers women in highly influential and visible leadership positions to better understand how they perceive themselves and their relational indicators to their employer as well as how they enact their leadership communication to their followers in consideration of their role as an underrepresented leader. Through a public relations lens, women executives are seen as a highly valued internal stakeholder group, and their followers as recipients of their influence, ultimately influencing organizational outcomes. Through in-depth interviews of 24 women executives, employee-organization relationship theory as well as motivating language theory provides a framework to glean insight as to how women executives navigate gendered perceptions, see themselves as leaders and amongst fellow executives, and enact their experiences into the communication they use to lead others. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed in the context of internal public relations and leadership communication and provide insights to understand how women lead through language, navigate career opportunities and pitfalls, and what that means for organizational dynamics.
This research uses primary and secondary sources to examine the public relations activities of the International Peace Movement in the 19th century. This review finds that the International Peace Movement expanded its media relations operations to Europe through a system of paid messages designed to look like editorial content that reached millions each month across the continent. The movement created local societies to raise funds for these efforts. Further, the movement created publications with target audiences and disseminated them using network methods that became increasingly popular through the 20th century and continue today with modern social media promotion. The movement also created Peace Congresses that brought together advocates internationally to discuss and reaffirm their ideas. We conclude with two implications for public relations history. First, we argue that these findings and those of other archival research document how public relations existed with modern-like practices in the 19th century. Second, our findings support Bentele's notion of layered growth of public relations alongside society, but we find the occupation approach is overly restrictive.
This conceptual paper delineates an audience-centric understanding of what we call organizational crisis confidence (OCC). Based on public relations and communication management literature on organizational ability and integrity and public perceptions and appraisals thereof, this new framework provides a conceptual delineation of OCC, including key components (confidence vs. doubt), dimensions of each component, and a set of propositions for further empirical examination. We view OCC as a subset and specific application of trust that occurs during a specific time and context amid a crisis. This novel framework holds implications for the advancement of public relations and crisis communication practice.
In this article, we argue that crisis communication studies can be developed by considering the self-categories speakers use in response to their behavior being scrutinized. The use of such categories in response to reputational threat enables individuals and organizations to draw on associations and meanings to reframe actions that audiences perceived to be offensive. Analyzing statements from sporting personalities accused of complicity in sportswashing by Western Media outlets, we use discursive social psychology to animate how crisis communication rhetoric can draw on specific identities; an approach we label categorical reframing. Specifically, speakers articulated distance from diminished categories (e.g. sportswashers) to reduce responsibility and accentuate closeness to other categories (e.g. parent) to reduce offensiveness complementing distinct crisis communication strategies. Based on our analysis, we provide propositions relating to the congruence between identity and rhetoric for observational and experimental analysis to better understand when and why social categories might be deployed during crisis communication to enhance their effectiveness.
This study examined elements of New Zealand's Unite Against COVID-19 campaign contributing to citizen compliance in limiting spread of COVID-19 during 2020-2022. Seventeen interviews with government officials, policy advisors, public relations consultants, journalists, and ethnic communities involved in the campaign were analyzed to evaluate the campaign in terms of the IDEA model and best-practice principles of crisis and risk-reduction communication. Thematic analysis identified nine themes impacting the campaign's ability to gain citizen compliance with vaccination, mask use, social distancing, and travel limitations. Interviewees identified campaign shortcomings in communicating and forming partnerships with marginal communities including M & amacr;ori and Pasifika peoples.
