Communication

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.public relations

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    "We band of brothers"? A social-identity-based study of military public affairs professional identity, organizational socialization, and collaboration
    (2019) Bermejo, Julio Javier; Liu, Brooke F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Today, military public relations, or military public affairs (Levenshus, 2013), is drawing attention for the lessons it might have to offer to organizations more broadly. Yet, military public affairs has been neglected within the public relations scholarly field (Toledano, 2010). In the present study, I applied the “social identity approach” (Hornsey, 2008, pp. 204-205) as my conceptual framework to explore the development of military public affairs professional identity through socialization of public affairs managers in joint entry-level military public affairs training. Along with professional identity and organizational socialization, I explored the development and practice of collaboration as a public affairs competency. To complete the study, I conducted semi-structured interviews (27 initial interviews, three follow-up interviews) with 27 students, practitioners (i.e., former students), instructors, and administrators of the U.S. Defense Department’s entry-level Public Affairs Qualification Course. Findings supported the scholarly understanding that public relations practice is a boundary spanning function, with internal boundary spanning an important aspect of the public affairs manager’s work (Neill, 2014). Findings helped to extend understanding of organizational socialization by suggesting that the public affairs manager, as a nonprototypical member of the organization, must be accepted by the commanding officer and other leaders, often representing combat arms fields, to achieve inclusion in the organization (Wenzel, Mummendey, & Waldzus, 2007). Findings further helped to broaden understanding of public relations collaboration by drawing attention to vital collaboration partners that have been obscured through their agglomeration in the concept of the “dominant coalition” (Grunig, 2006, p. 160). Findings suggested the new insight that public affairs managers are socialized for proactivity, an unexpected outcome given the priorities of military organizations as “high-reliability organizations” (Myers, 2005, p. 345). Additionally, findings suggested that ambiguity attends the public affairs function and that this ambiguity can constrain public affairs, but also create opportunities for collaboration, especially under conditions of contextual uncertainty (L. A. Grunig, 1992; Rast, Gaffney, Hogg, & Crisp, 2012). Findings additionally suggested that collaboration opportunities may increase for public affairs when those efforts are more visible to the organization and are seen to benefit it (Platow & van Knippenberg, 2001).
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    EXPLORIGN PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTITIONERS’ ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING AT WORK: A WHOLE-PERSON, PROCESSUAL, AND CONTEXTUAL LENS
    (2019) Guo, Jiankun; Anderson, Lindsey B.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The topic of ethics is gaining importance and urgency, particularly for public relations, a field responsible for communicating and building relationships between organizations and publics. While normative ethical theories abound in this discipline, tensions exist between traditional theories privileging rationality, autonomy, universality, and professional ethics, and emerging theories that value emotions, relationships, contexts, and personal ethics. Furthermore, practitioners’ ethical decision making process in their embedded organizational, industry, and sociopolitical environments has not been fully addressed. This dissertation fills in these research gaps by exploring public relations practitioners’ meaning making of ethics and thereby reconciliating tensions between traditional and emerging ethical theories (RQ1), detailing practitioners’ ethical decision making (EDM) process from a whole-person perspective (RQ2), and assessing how micro, meso, and macro level ethicality interact from a participants’ point of view (RQ3). 37 semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with current or past U.S. public relations practitioners who represent a variety of work settings, industries, specializations, and sectors. Interviews were transcribed and data were coded thematically and analyzed abductively. Findings suggested that practitioners constructed the meaning of ethics primarily via their concerns for work and organizational-public relationships, contextual particulars, and an alignment of personal and professional ethics. They utilized a variety of cognitive, emotional, intuitive, imaginative, and discursive skills during their ethical decision making (EDM) process exhibiting a whole-person based approach to EDM. Additionally, practitioners’ ethicality was both a result of contextual influences as well as a contributor to higher levels of ethical standards for their environment—on organizational, industry, and societal levels. Theoretical and methodological implications were drawn from the findings, so were practical implications provided in terms of ethics training programs.
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    MEASURING A WORLD IN CRISIS: A NEW MODEL OF REPUTATION REPAIR
    (2018) Page, Tyler Grant; Liu, Brooke F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Reputation repair is a paradigm within public relations and crisis communication. The reputation repair paradigm is currently focused on the symbolic strategies organizations use to repair their reputations in the aftermath of a crisis. This dissertation proposes significant revisions to the reputation repair paradigm and builds a series of scale measures and a revised model of reputation repair to achieve this goal. Using moral foundations theory, situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), image repair theory, and input from 20 participants with expertise in public relations, this dissertation designs new measures for instructing information, adjusting information, reputation management messages, offensiveness of a crisis, and perceived virtuousness that buffers against reputational harms posed by crisis. This dissertation then refines and validates these measures with a pilot test with 797 participants recruited from mTurk. Finally, it concludes with an experiment testing these measures in a crisis situation operationalized as a potentially deadly fire in a building. The experiment used 1,000 participants recruited from mTurk in a 2 (crisis types: rumor or organizational misdeed) x 2 (offensiveness: high or low) x 2 (instructing information: yes or no) x 2 (adjusting information: yes or no) x 2 (crisis response: denial or rebuilding) factorial design to test the effect of SCCT’s matching construct of response strategies and the proposed revised model of reputation repair that explains how messages, offensiveness of a crisis, and perceived virtuousness impact post-crisis reputation. This dissertation finds that matching strategies according to SCCT have a very small effect (ή2 = .005) on post crisis reputation while reputation management messages overall have a very strong structural effect on post crisis reputation (.814). Further, it finds that the revised model of reputation repair explains how messages, perceived offensiveness, virtuousness, and post-crisis reputation interrelate and that the revised model changes slightly under different situations. Implications for theory and practitioners are discussed.
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    CULTIVATING #CUPFUSION: AN EXPLORATION OF THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF COMMUNICATION IN A PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGN
    (2018) Penn, Timothy Shaw; Toth, Elizabeth L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is an exploration into the application of Merton’s (1936) typology of the unanticipated consequences of purposeful social actions, to a public relations campaign. Merton gave consideration to using scientific analysis to understand factors leading to the unanticipated consequences of purposive actions, rather than attributing them to chance or fate. Four of his five factors, including lack of foreknowledge, habit, myopia, and values, have proved applicable to the public relations campaign examined in this case study. The case involves the 2016 Reese’s #Cupfusion campaign. When news of a new Reese’s product, Peanut Butter Cups stuffed with Reese’s Pieces, was leaked on Facebook, the brand manager at Reese’s and a small public relations team at Ketchum decided to “tease” the truth about the release of the product, rather than reveal the existence of the candy. Using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, organization-provided document analysis, and content analysis of the Reese’s brand Facebook page, this researcher found that by using innovative public relations strategies, combined with a proactive relationship management technique which used social media to cultivate an existing relationship with Reese’s fans on Facebook, the #Cupfusion team was able to cultivate an unintended “viral” outcome for their product roll-out. Merton’s typology of unintended consequences has application for public relations theory and practice. The concept of lack of foreknowledge has implications for both chaos and complexity theory, and how they can be applied to the digital environment and social media, including how organizations can respond to unintended consequences and crisis. This research also supports and adds to social media and strategic campaign planning practice, by providing a lens for the analysis and execution of both pre-implementation and evaluation of public relations campaigns.
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    An Identity-Based Approach to Organization-Public Relationships and Interactions
    (2018) Xu, Sifan; Sommerfeldt, Erich; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Public relations research has vigorous agendas on theorizing publics and organization-public relationships, but the conceptualization of publics is mostly separated from the theorization of organization-public relationships. This is reflected in organization-public relationship research, where the matter of who is a public is usually ill-defined. Research involving organization-public relationships and interactions also assumes that relationships are inherently mutually beneficial, without fully investigating the utilities of a relationship for publics. An identity approach to organization-public relationships and publics' interactions with an organization is proposed in this study. This identity approach is grounded in the identity perspective based on social identity theory and self-categorization theory, and is able to connect the research areas involving issues, publics' communicative behaviors, and organization-public relationships. A 3 X 2 X 2 experiment is conducted, where participants (N = 483) are randomly assigned to one of the three issues related to diversity, politics, and environment. In each issue, a nonprofit organization or a for-profit organization (two types of organizations) either fully discloses its position on the issue (affirmation) or does not have any clear stance (non-affirmation). Results of this experiment show that issues affect salience on certain identities, and individuals' overall identity salience and an organization's affirmation on a particular issue significantly affect individuals' identity expression and perception of the organization as an ingroup, which in turn impact individuals' communication and relationships towards the organization. Such results indicate that publics' interactions and relationships with an organization are used to reinforce their identity and essentially related to their identity building. This project builds a foundation to theorize publics as identity-activated individuals based on issues, and their communicative behaviors and relationships as identity expression and identity connections. The significant moderating role of organizational type in these processes indicates that an individual's overall perception of a specific type of organization matters for public relations research.
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    When Love Becomes Hate(?): The Interplay Between Consumer-Brand Relationships and Crisis Situations
    (2016) Ma, Liang; Toth, Elizabeth L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study had three purposes. First, it aimed to re-conceptualize organization-public relationships (OPRs) in public relations and crisis communication. This OPR re-conceptualization helps find out when the OPR buffering effect or the OPR love-becomes-hate effect happens. Second, it aimed to examine how consumer emotions are influenced by OPRs and influence consumer behavioral intentions. Third, it aimed to address the current problematic operationalization of the concept of consumer. Three pilot studies and one main study were conducted. Apple and Whole Foods were the two brands examined. One crisis that undermined the self-defining attributes shared between the brand and its consumers and another crisis that did not were examined for each brand. Almost 500 Apple consumers and 400 Whole Foods consumers provided usable questionnaires. This study had several major findings. First, non-identifying relationship and identifying relationship were different constructs. Moreover, trust, satisfaction, and commitment were not conceptually separate dimensions of OPRs. Second, the non-identifying relationships offered buffering effects by increasing positive attitudes and tempering anger and disappointment. The identifying relationships primarily offered the love-becomes-hate effects by increasing anger and disappointment. Third, if the crisis was relevant to consumers’ daily lives, brand response strategies were less effective at mitigating consumer negative reactions. Moreover, apology-compensation-reminder strategy was more effective compared to no-comment strategy. However, the apology-compensation-reminder strategy was no more effective than other strategies as long as brands compensate to the victims. Identifying relationships increased the effectiveness of response strategies. If the crisis did not undermine the self-defining attributes shared between consumers and brands, the response strategies worked even better. This study contributes to crisis communication research in multiple ways. First, it advances the OPR conceptualization by demonstrating that non-identifying relationship and identifying relationship are different concepts. More importantly, it advances the theory building of OPRs’ influences on crises by finding out when the buffering effect and the love-becomes-hate effect happen. Second, it adds to emotion research by demonstrating that strong OPRs can lead to negative emotions and positive emotions can have negative behavioral consequences on organizations. Third, the precise operationalization of the concept of consumer gives more insights about consumer reactions to crises.
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    Flooded with Information from Social Media: Effects of Disaster Information Source and Visuals on Viewers' Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Responses
    (2016) Fraustino, Julia Daisy; Liu, Brooke F.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    While a variety of crisis types loom as real risks for organizations and communities, and the media landscape continues to evolve, research is needed to help explain and predict how people respond to various kinds of crisis and disaster information. For example, despite the rising prevalence of digital and mobile media centered on still and moving visuals, and stark increases in Americans’ use of visual-based platforms for seeking and sharing disaster information, relatively little is known about how the presence or absence of disaster visuals online might prompt or deter resilience-related feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors. Yet, with such insights, governmental and other organizational entities as well as communities themselves may best help individuals and communities prepare for, cope with, and recover from adverse events. Thus, this work uses the theoretical lens of the social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC) coupled with the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP) to explore effects of disaster information source and visuals on viewers’ resilience-related responses to an extreme flooding scenario. Results from two experiments are reported. First a preliminary 2 (disaster information source: organization/US National Weather Service vs. news media/USA Today) x 2 (disaster visuals: no visual podcast vs. moving visual video) factorial between-subjects online experiment with a convenience sample of university students probes effects of crisis source and visuals on a variety of cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. A second between-subjects online experiment manipulating still and moving visual pace in online videos (no visual vs. still, slow-pace visual vs. still, medium-pace visual vs. still, fast-pace visual vs. moving, slow-pace visual vs. moving, medium-pace visual vs. moving, fast-pace visual) with a convenience sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk) similarly probes a variety of potentially resilience-related cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. The role of biological sex as a quasi-experimental variable is also investigated in both studies. Various implications for community resilience and recommendations for risk and disaster communicators are explored. Implications for theory building and future research are also examined. Resulting modifications of the SMCC model (i.e., removing “message strategy” and adding the new category of “message content elements” under organizational considerations) are proposed.
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    A Feminist Affective Turn for Public Relations: Mothers, Passionate Publics, and the Childhood Vaccine Debate
    (2016) Kennedy, Amanda Kae; Toth, Elizabeth L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project proposes a feminist intervention in how affect and publics are theorized in public relations research. Drawing from extant literature, I argue that public relations theories of affect and publics have been apolitical and lack depth and context (Leitch & Motion, 2010a). Using the context of the online childhood vaccine debate, I illustrate several theories and concepts of the new feminist affective turn, as well as postmodern theories of affect, relevant to public relations research: (a) Public Feelings, “ugly” feelings, agency, and community (Cvetkovich, 2012; Ngai, 2007); (b) passionate politics (Mouffe, 2014); (c) postmodern assemblages, biopower, and body politics (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; Foucault, 1984); (d) affective facts and logics of future threats (Massumi, 2010); and (e) affective ethics (Bertleson & Murphie, 2010). Scholarship in the areas of public relations, risk, feminist and postmodern affect theory, and the vaccine debate provided theoretical grounding for this project. My research questions asked: How is feminist affect theory embodied by mothers in the vaccine debate? How do mothers understand risks as affective facts in the vaccine debate (if at all)? What affective logics are used by mothers in the vaccine debate (if any)? And, What are sources of knowledge for mothers in the vaccine debate? Multi-sited online ethnographic methods were used to explore how feminist affect theory contributes to public relations research, including 29 one-on-one in-depth interviews with mothers of young children and participant observation of 15 online discussions about vaccines on parenting websites BabyCenter.com, TheBump.com, and WhatToExpect.com. I used snowball sampling to recruit interview participants and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to analyze interview and online data. Results show that feminist affect theory contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge in public relations by politicizing and contextualizing understandings of publics and elucidating how affective facts and logics inform publics’ knowledge and choices, specifically in the context of risk. I also found evidence of suppression of dissent (Martin, 2015) and academic bias in vaccine debate research, which resulted in cultures of silence. Further areas of study included how specific contexts such as motherhood and issues of privilege and access affect publics’ experiences, knowledges, and choices.
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    Putting Out Fires: How Communication Professionals Understand and Practice Conflict Resolution
    (2014) Allen, Susan D.; Toth, Elizabeth L; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    ABSTRACT Do communication professionals fill the role of negotiators and conflict resolvers within their organizations? Some scholars (Dozier, Grunig, & Grunig, 1995; Plowman, 2007) have claimed this role theoretically, but little research evidence has verified the negotiator role in practice. To gather empirical evidence, I conducted a qualitative research study (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) using in-depth interviews and critical incident technique with thirty-one public relations professionals who had an average of 18 years of experience in a variety of organizations across the United States and overseas. Data analysis included open and axial coding and integration with prior research. Validity and reliability were enhanced through member checking, triangulation of data, and peer review of findings. Researcher bias was minimized through bracketing and audit trails. Findings showed that practitioners experienced most conflict within teams and other internal audiences, practiced conflict avoidance rather than conflict engagement, understood individual level factors as major contributors to conflict, and avoided digital channels in conflict resolution. A model of practitioners as transformers of organizational conflict is proposed. This exploratory study leaves an important question unanswered: Can communication practitioners play a recognized role in transforming organizational conflicts rather than negotiating solutions? A quantitative survey with random sampling could be a next step in verifying the extent of conflict resolution in communication practice and how practitioners can engage workplace conflict more effectively. However, communication practitioners in my sample strongly recommended conflict training and activism to promote conflict transformation as an official role for public relations professionals. Keywords: negotiation, public relations, communication professionals, conflict management, conflict transformation, grounded theory, digital conflict resolution
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    Building online communities after crises: Two case studies
    (2014) Janoske, Melissa; Liu, Brooke F; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Building community in a crisis situation offers individuals a chance to not just survive, but potentially thrive through a disaster. Communities offer a unique benefit in a crisis by expanding beyond the geographic to include virtual spaces, particularly when other media are not available for survivors. This project applies theoretical frameworks from both complexity theory and the community of practice model to explore how individuals form online communities after crises, how those communities impact crisis recovery, and how the model can be used to understand communities' crisis communication. This project used a qualitative case study method, including content analysis of two communities that formed online after two crises, and interviews with nine members, including the founder, of one of the communities. The first case is the Jersey Shore Hurricane News Facebook page, formed during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The second case looks at a hashtag-based (#batman and #shooting) community on Twitter after the shooting at a Colorado movie theater in July 2012. The results show that instead of a typical one-to-many communication model and organizational focus, utilizing a community of practice allows for both a one-to-one model and a consequent focus on affected individuals. The community of practice model accommodates findings which suggest that location is important in building community, a need for adapting information needs to the community, and the acceptance of multiple relationship types. A new, alternate final dimension of communities of practice, continuation, is suggested and exemplified. This project argues for developing these online communities prior to a crisis. There are also specific suggestions for tools within technology that would be most useful to crisis-based communities of practice, and both benefits and drawbacks to the platforms studied. Practically, social media platform designers need to spend time thinking through how people connect during a crisis, and to make it easier for them to get the information they need quickly. In showcasing how to integrate social media, crisis communication, and a community-based model, this dissertation offers theoretical and practical suggestions for altering and improving current understandings of the best way to aid individual crisis response and recovery.