scholarly journals Apprehending public relations as a promotional industry

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Aronczyk ◽  
Lee Edwards ◽  
Anu Kantola
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Essential Tool ◽  
Business Politics ◽  
Media Environments

This special issue examines the growing social and political importance of promotional activities and public relations. For decades, promotional tools have been deployed to foster the aims of various societal agencies, be they corporations, political actors, public institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or citizen movements. In today’s turbulent political and media environments, promotional practices have become more inventive, coordinated and ubiquitous, crossing transnational borders and circulating across business, politics and social institutions. Public relations is an essential tool in the promotional mix and is increasingly a stand-alone strategy for organisations of all kinds to manage their visibility, legitimacy and relationships with stakeholders. However, its influence and power in the context of an increasingly promotional culture are under-researched. In this introduction, we set out the landscape of promotional culture in which public relations activity takes place and consider how existing research on promotional work may illuminate our knowledge of contemporary public relations work.

Introduction: The Anthropocene as Context and Concept for the Study of Higher Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
RYAN EVELY GILDERSLEEVE ◽  
KATIE KLEINHESSELINK
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Analytic Tool ◽  
The Social ◽  
Geologic Condition

The Anthropocene has emerged in philosophy and social science as a geologic condition with radical consequence for humankind, and thus, for the social institutions that support it, such as higher education. This essay introduces the special issue by outlining some of the possibilities made available for social/philosophical research about higher education when the Anthropocene is taken seriously as an analytic tool. We provide a patchwork of discussions that attempt to sketch out different ways to consider the Anthropocene as both context and concept for the study of higher education. We conclude the essay with brief introductory remarks about the articles collected for this special issue dedicated to “The Anthropocene and Higher Education.”

Trust and Transitional Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Interpersonal Trust ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Trust In Government ◽  
Change Characteristic ◽  
Communist Countries

Chapter 1 provides a literature review upon which to build the theoretical scaffolding of this book and explicates the development of the lustration typology. The chapter reviews the trust literature, highlighting differences in the origins and effects of trust in public institutions, trust in government, interpersonal trust, and trust in social institutions. Chapter 1 also reviews the literature on lustration and transitional justice, highlighting the design and use of measures in the post-communist region. From this literature, Chapter 1 develops a transitional justice typology consisting of four different categories of lustration and public disclosure programs based on the scope and implementation of programs and the degree of bureaucratic and symbolic change characteristic of the different programs. This typology is then used to categorize post-communist countries in Chapter 2.

Concluding Thoughts and Challenges

2011 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Palenchar
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Strategic Communication ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Issues Management ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Organizational Rhetoric ◽  
Management Communication ◽  
Stakeholder Interests ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Socially Relevant

This special issue of Management Communication Quarterly mines the rhetorical heritage to explore the challenges facing those who engage in and critique external organizational rhetoric, setting its sights on helping organizations make society a better place to live. Toward this end, rhetoric focuses on strategic communication influences that at their best result from or foster collaborative decisions and cocreated meaning that align stakeholder interests. This special issue demonstrates the eclectic and complex theories, applied contexts, and ongoing arguments needed to weave the fabric of external organizational communication. Over the years, Robert Heath and others have been advocates for drawing judiciously on the rhetorical heritage as guiding foundation for issues management and public relations activities. Rather than merely acknowledge the pragmatic or utilitarian role of discourse, this analysis also aspires to understand and champion its application to socially relevant ends. In that quest, several themes stand out: (a) In theory and practice external organizational rhetoric weighs self-interest against others’ enlightened interests and choices; (b) organizations as modern rhetors engage in discourse that is context relevant and judged by the quality of engagement and the ends achieved thereby; and (c) in theory and practice external organizational rhetoric weighs relationship between language that is never neutral and the power advanced for narrow or shared interests.

Subverting Lineage Power

Tracing China ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen F. Siu
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Perceptions ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
State Culture ◽  
Agrarian Societies ◽  
General Concern

The analysis of lineage, community, and politics in this essay illustrates some general concern of historical anthropology: how do historical events take into account inequalities of power, and how are social institutions and cultural perceptions understood in the spatial context of an evolving, differentiating political economy? In state agrarian societies where hierarchies of power and diverse bases of authority exist and are often contested, stability rests on the ways local elites anchor themselves in the community as well as within the larger polity. The evolution of local legitimacy involves the percolation of a state culture, be it imperial or revolutionary. In numerous arenas, the locally powerful and those they dominated were engaged in shaping this process. As in other times, discourses on lineage and community in the 20th century were ways by which several generations of political actors created a new language by means of inherited words.

Resiliency or Resignation: Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Austro-Marxism, and the Psychology of Unemployment, 1919–1933

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Charles H. Clavey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Present State ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Unemployed

The Unemployed of Marienthal (1933) has long been esteemed as a classic of twentieth-century social science; its portrait of the effects of joblessness on individual minds and social institutions has inspired generations of researchers. But this reception has largely overlooked the political origins and implications of the study. This essay resituates Marienthal in the context of its creation and dissemination: the distinctive Marxism of interwar Austria. Specifically, it demonstrates that Marienthal introduced social-psychological methods and findings into Marxist debates about the present state and future prospects of the working class. Led by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, the Marienthal researchers adopted the Austro-Marxist goal of creating a model proletariat through a program of “anticipatory socialism.” But by finding that unemployment confounded efforts to reform the working class, Marienthal undermined the very program it aimed to support. In fact, the essay shows, Marienthal authorized arguments that the unemployed were unreliable political actors—“declassed” workers as likely to become reactionaries as revolutionaries. The essay concludes by considering whether Marienthal embodied a distinctively Austro-Marxist “style” of thinking and research.

scholarly journals Religion, Political Actors, and Democratization: The Turkish Case

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-612
Author(s):  
Luca Ozzano
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Turkish Case ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Religious Actors

AbstractThis article is part of a special issue on the five Muslim democracies. It aims at understanding the role played by religion, and particularly by religiously oriented actors, in Turkey's democratization processes. The first section analyzes the different theoretical approaches to the role of religion in democratization. The second section analyzes the different phases of Turkey's political history since the 1980 coup, taking into account both democratization processes and the role played by religious actors in the political system, and trying to understand the possible relations between the two phenomena.

Quantifying and analysing the stages of online information dissemination in different enterprise emergencies: The idea of system cybernetics

2020 ◽  
pp. 016555152094844
Author(s):  
Yongtian Yu ◽  
Guang Yu ◽  
Xiangbin Yan ◽  
Xiao Yu
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Information Dissemination ◽  
Simulation Analysis ◽  
Online Information ◽  
Accumulation Process ◽  
Time Points ◽  
Quantitative Calculation ◽  
Dissemination Process ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Information Accumulation

Previous research on information dissemination in emergencies focus on prediction of the volume via abundant models. However, most of these models did not specify different stages of emergencies, and hence making it difficult for public relations (PR) practitioner to make decisions based on needs of each stage in today’s rapid changing media environments. In this study, we introduce the idea of system cybernetics and the method of system identification into information dissemination perspective. Based on the proposed information accumulation probability distribution continuity (IAPDC) model, we provide a quantitative division of the information accumulation process. The durations of each stage and the time points that each stage begins are stated and defined with a quantitative calculation method. Using empirical data from 83 emergencies in 2016 and 2017 covering Weibo, WeChat Platforms and over 20,000 web media, we verify the effectiveness of this method. Next, we use simulation analysis to demonstrate what effects of parameters have on the dissemination process and how do changes on different stages affect the process. Moreover, we also demonstrate the effects of emergencies’ attributes on the information dissemination process and on each stage. Our study complements the gaps in existing communication discipline and provides insight for PR practitioner when dealing with enterprise emergencies.

scholarly journals Introduction to the Special Issue of Religions—“Religion and Family Life”

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 265
Author(s):  
Richard J. Petts
Keyword(s):  
Family Life ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Special Issue

Family and religion are inherently intertwined social institutions [...]

Trust in public institutions in Russia: The lowest in the world

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Shlapentokh
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The World

The article’s topic is the attitudes of the Russians toward their social institutions. As it will be shown, Russia is a country, much more than any other, that mistrusts its social institutions, political institutions in particular. There is no one institution that can garner more than 40 to 50 percent of the nation’s trust. Indeed, in terms of their lack of confidence in social institutions, the Russians are behind not only the most advanced countries in the world, but even countries known for their unstable political systems, such as Colombia or Nigeria.

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