Between tragedy, romance, comedy and satire: narratives of axiological progress in public relations

PurposeOver recent years, public relations (PR) research has diversified in themes and theories. As a result, PR presents itself today as a multi-paradigmatic discipline with competing ideas of progress that mainly circle around questions of ontology and epistemology, i.e. around defining appropriate object and knowledge in PR research.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article highlights a third crucial question underlying the debate drawing on a narrative approach: The question of axiology, hence, the normative question how PR research shall develop to contribute to societal progress.FindingsThe article presents a model, which describes how normative visions of progress in different PR paradigms – functional, co-creational, social-reflective and critical-cultural – manifest in each distinct combinations of four narrative plots – tragedy, romance, comedy and satire.Originality/valueThese findings complement the current debate on disciplinary progress in PR research by fostering reflection and debate on paradigm development and cross-paradigmatic tensions and exchange from an explicit axiological perspective.

Introduction

The introduction highlights the changes and transitions that accompanied the development of museums in the early nineteenth century. Tracing ideas about “useful knowledge” from cabinets and lyceums to museums and galleries, the introduction explores competing ideas about the scope and purpose of museum collections during this period. The discussions that surrounded museums in travel narratives, fiction, and periodicals reveal the unpredictable and imaginative reflections evoked by their collections, as writers and visitors frequently saw opportunities to consider how objects were preserved, classified, and displayed. Much like the books, specimens, and artifacts housed together in museum collections, these debates crossed fields and disciplines, raising broader questions about the role of museums in determining what counts as “useful knowledge” and who participates in the conversation.

Retrieval from software libraries for bug localization

This retrospective on our 2011 MSR publication starts with the research milieu that led to the work reported in our paper. We brie y review the competing ideas of a decade ago that could be applied to solving the problem of identifying the les in a software library related to a query. We were especially interested in nding out if the more complex text retrieval methods of that time would be e ective in the software context. A surprising conclusion of our paper was that the reality was exactly the opposite: the more traditional simpler methods outperformed the complex methods. In addition to this surprising result, our paper was also the rst to report what was considered at that time a large-scale quantitative evaluation of the IR-based approaches to automatic bug localization. Over the years, such quantitative evaluations have become the norm. We believe that these contributions were largely responsible for the popularity of this paper in the research literature.

Covid-19 and social care: Union strategies to reshape a dysfunctional sector

In volume 120 of Theory and Struggle (pp. 124-33), I described Unison North West’s Care Workers for Change campaign and how our multidimensional approach to organising in the care sector was informed by the work of John Kelly (Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and Long Waves, 1998) and Jane McAlevey (No Short Cuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, 2016). The Covid-19 pandemic has subsequently brought unprecedented catastrophe and human suffering to vulnerable people and workers in our dysfunctional social care system. This contribution first describes the impact of Covid-19 on social care and union responses to it. The focus then turns to competing ideas about how the social care system might be reshaped and the role of unions in pursuing meaningful structural and institutional change that could win lasting improvements for care workers.

Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) completed a learning phase consisting of a series of two-step trials. In step 1, one or more conditional statements (A → B) containing novel targets co-occurring with valenced adjectives (e.g., “if you see a blue square, Ibbonif is sincere”) were presented. In step 2, a disambiguating stimulus, e.g., blue square (A) or gray blob (¬A) was revealed. Co-occurrence information, disambiguating stimuli, or both were varied between conditions to enable investigating the unique and joint effects of each. Across studies, the combination of conditional statements and disambiguating stimuli licensed different normatively accurate inferences. In Study 1, participants were prompted to use modus ponens (inferring B from A → B and A). In Studies 2–4, the information did not license accurate inferences, but some participants made inferential errors: affirming the consequent (inferring A from A → B and B; Study 2) or denying the antecedent (inferring ¬B from A → B and ¬A; Studies 3A, 3B, and 4). Bayesian modeling using ordinal constraints on condition means yielded consistent evidence for the sensitivity of both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT and AMP) evaluations to the (correctly or erroneously) inferred truth value of propositions. Together, these data suggest that implicit evaluations, similar to their explicit counterparts, can reflect logical structure.

Sensitivity of implicit evaluations to accurate and erroneous propositional inferences

Explicit (directly measured) evaluations are widely assumed to be sensitive to logical structure. However, whether implicit (indirectly measured) evaluations are uniquely sensitive to co-occurrence information or can also reflect logical structure has been a matter of theoretical debate. To test these competing ideas, participants (N = 3,928) completed a learning phase consisting of a series of two-step trials. In step 1, one or more conditional statements (A → B) containing novel targets co-occurring with valenced adjectives (e.g., “if you see a blue square, Ibbonif is sincere”) were presented. In step 2, a disambiguating stimulus, e.g., blue square (A) or gray blob (¬A) was revealed. Co-occurrence information, disambiguating stimuli, or both were varied between conditions to enable investigating the unique and joint effects of each. Across studies, the combination of conditional statements and disambiguating stimuli licensed different normatively accurate inferences. In Study 1, participants were prompted to use modus ponens (inferring B from A → B and A). In Studies 2–4, the information did not license accurate inferences, but some participants made inferential errors: affirming the consequent (inferring A from A → B and B; Study 2) or denying the antecedent (inferring ¬B from A → B and ¬A; Studies 3A, 3B, and 4). Bayesian modeling using ordinal constraints on condition means yielded consistent evidence for the sensitivity of both explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT and AMP) evaluations to the (correctly or erroneously) inferred truth value of propositions. Together, these data suggest that implicit evaluations, similar to their explicit counterparts, can reflect logical structure.

Ancient Egyptian Urbanism in a Comparative, Global Context

For more than 50 years, archaeologists have debated whether or not Egypt was a “civilization without cities.” The publication of Nadine Moeller’s book, The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt: From the Predynastic Period to the End of the Middle Kingdom, provides the opportunity to reconsider this issue, using a more complete record of the relevant archaeological finds. I present a new, flexible approach to urban definition, and then I examine the ways in which ancient Egyptian urbanism resembled and differed from other early urban traditions. I conclude that Egypt was indeed an urban society, and that Egyptian urban patterns were highly distinctive within the canon of ancient urban systems. I place these points within the context of competing ideas about the nature of global history.

Public Narratives of Constituent Power in the European Union

This chapter provides a mapping of public narratives of constituent power in the EU. In this way, it seeks to identify adequate starting points for an endeavour of practice-oriented theory construction. Citizens have started to challenge the role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. Drawing on a vocabulary of popular sovereignty and self-government, they demand that the EU should be shaped by ‘the people’. Focusing on the voices of actors such as protest movements and public intellectuals, the chapter traces four public narratives that articulate competing ideas as to who should be in control of European integration, how the respective subject came to find itself in that position, and how it should take action in the future. Based on these stories, the chapter turns to the emerging normative debate about the EU’s constituent subject in order to determine which proposals in political theory are worth pursuing and which are not—given their anchoring in public discourse or lack thereof. In this way, it sets the stage for the construction and evaluation of models of constituent power in the EU in subsequent chapters.