Browsing by Subject "public relations"
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Item A dialogic model for analyzing crisis communication: an alternative approach to understanding the roman catholic clergy sex abuse crisis(2009-05-15) Boys, Suzanne ElizabethIn the winter of 2002, The Boston Globe published an expos? on clergy sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese which quickly sparked a global Church crisis. Following the expos?, there was a swell of media attention, a growing public outcry, increasing litigation over alleged abuse and cover-ups, and the emergence of issue-driven grassroots organizations. Despite the vocal involvement of numerous stakeholders in the crisis, the hierarchy?s communicative response to the situation followed relatively traditional crisis management strategies which sought to deny, minimize, remediate, and retain exclusive jurisdiction over the crisis. This strategy contrasts with other stakeholders? attempts to defer closure, draw out underlying issues, amplify nondominant voices, contest dominant interpretations, and collaborate on possible solutions. What has emerged is an on-going situation in which an organization?s attempts at strategic communicative crisis management are being contested publicly by key stakeholders. Arguing that existing models for understanding public relations discourse are insufficient for tracing the polyvocality of crisis communication, this study crafts an alternative (i.e., dialogic) model for analyzing crisis communication. This model decenters the source organization by tracing the contextual (macro) and interactive (micro) aspects of public relations texts created by three organizations central to the crisis (the United States Council of Catholic Bishops, Voice of the Faithful, and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests). By viewing crisis communication through the lens of a particular notion of dialogue (i.e., a sustained, symbol-based, contextualized, collaborative-agonistic process of interactive social inquiry which creates meaning and a potential for change), this study traces how organizations use Public Relations (PR) to co-construct an organizational crisis. Discursive reconciliation, the central process of the proposed model, allows the researcher to sift the discourses of stakeholder organizations against one another, using each as a standard for evaluating the others. This allows for an evaluation of how stakeholder organizations manage the potential for communicative interactivity. The proposed model offers an expanded capacity to understand how crises are constructed discursively. It also illuminates the continuing clergy sex abuse crisis.Item How New Media is Used for Issues Management(2012-01-10) Steel, Melanie; Vardeman-Winter, Jennifer; Heath, Robert; Ni, Lan; Liu, YoumeiThis study expands on strategic issues management literature by examining how new communication technologies, especially social networking, are used for the purpose of managing organizational issues. An Issues Typology is also presented in this study in the attempt to categorize overarching types of issues as well as recognize what types of issues are important to organizations. Guided by relevant literature in Internet communication, public relations and issues management, a grounded theory analysis of in-depth interviews with 20 communicators and public relations practitioners revealed the overall relationship between the utilization of new media and the practice of issues management. These results provide rich insight into to public relations practitioners’ utilization of new media, actual issues management practices within organizations, the relationship between new media and issues management, and organizational definitions of an issue. Additionally, this study provides insight into the challenges that communicators face when utilizing new communication technologies. Overall, these results show that although practitioners have significant limitations in employing issues management through new media, they believe there are a number of outlets for issues management through these channels and have a strong desire to implement them.Item Proactive public relations policies by law enforcement(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2016) Shackleford, KeithItem PUBLIC RELATIONS IN HEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE: AN APPLICATION OF THE SITUATIONAL THEORY OF PUBLICS FOR LEUKEMIA AND LYMPHOMA SOCIETY’S TEAM IN TRAINING PROGRAM(2012-04-19) Hernandez, Vanessa; Xiao, Zhiwen; Ni, Lan; Shoemaker, StoweThe purpose of this study was to explore a relationship between the public relations practice and the health promotion practice based on the assumption that one compliments the other. Grunig’s situational theory of publics was be applied as segmenting strategy to identify publics in order to determine a target audience for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program, a non-profit organization dedicated to blood cancer research. Surveys were distributed among a sample of 134 University of Houston’s undergrad students. After data analysis, the sample surveyed was divided into four different publics (active, aware, latent, and nonpublic) according to the theory’s assumptions. Demographic characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity/race, and education level) and media preferences were identified for each of the four public types. Additionally, no significant differences of age, gender, and ethnicity were found on types of public. Results from this study are expected to be beneficial for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program by providing useful information about potential publics with the purpose of increasing participants and ultimately improving fundraising efforts.