Abstract
An interdisciplinary group of scholars from communication, business, and public administration examined strategic communication and public relations (PR) from a variety of methodologies. The second volume in Emerald’s series titled “Advances in Public Relations and Communication Management” follows the first volume about The Management Game of Communication.
These nine chapters from scholars in the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Singapore were selected from 45 papers presented at a 2016 European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) conference in the Netherlands. The focus was response to technological, economic, political, and social change.
The nine studies tell us more about change rather than value and innovation, as suggested in the book’s sweeping title. Readers also would have benefited from introduction and conclusion chapters that make clear explicit theoretic and methodological connections between the concepts and data presented in the studies.
Adrian Crookes, director of the Communications and Media Programme at London College of Communication, opens the book with a chapter about educating PR practitioners. There is an interest here in “pedagogies of ambiguity” and “preparedness for practice” among students: . . . the extent to which their PR education inculcated a habitus-field match that assisted their deliberation in the anxiety of uncertainty. In other words, if we can understand what was done well to prepare our students for practice, we might do more of it.
The exploratory research suggested that there is a need to move “beyond skills and knowledge into the relational aspects of dispositional matching to a field.”
Other chapters focus on change within public sector organizations (“culture,” “employees,” and “change management”), and on reputation management during political scandal.
A comparative content analysis of social media communication by British, French, and German national governments provides insights into dialogic social media communication: “Social media offers the potential for interaction between users but this two-way communication does not necessarily result in dialogue.”
Also, there are chapters on change in the field of Communication Studies, as an academic department may try to become an “adaptive organization,” as well as public affairs “transparency and secrecy” in Norway.
I found most valuable “Social Media: The Dialogue Myth? How Organizations Use Social Media for Stakeholder Dialogue.” Authors Wim J. L. Elving and Rosa May Postma of the University of Amsterdam utilize stakeholder models and theory to interview ten professionals from a disparate list of job titles. Social media strategy includes an interest in “dialogue” and “interaction,” as well as measurement of key performance indicators (KPIs). The trust challenge for organizations may be “because of fearing to lose control” of content. That said, the chapter is blind to Quesenberry’s Social Media Strategy (2016) and other social media marketing textbooks and journal articles. For example, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) marketing models go beyond a “myth” of dialog.
The research in this book then turns back to “skills,” “competencies,” and “personal attributes.” A study explores these three dimensions through content creation, web and social media use, planning, brainstorming, consulting (including tech understanding). Basic communication skills, oral communication, mediation, information processing, and language skills: “PR professionals need to develop a perspective on what makes their contribution valuable.”
The final chapter in this edited volume, “Reputation: A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Key Concepts in Public Relations, Business Administration, and Public Administration,” defines itself as a “conceptual content analysis” of “semantic structures in our way of understanding crisis, response, reputation, actor, and context.” Each of the three fields offers a distinct view of reputation. “The discipline of business administration has been the most dynamic and innovative field within most of the conceptual frameworks, but especially when it comes to reputation (management).” The concluding sentence in the chapter and book is a challenge to media researchers: “So far, most public relations scholars have either refrained from applying the concept of reputation or they have imported or applied the concept in a ‘soft’ version.” I am guessing that not all of our readers here would agree.
One obvious linkage missed between the chapters is the connection between personal branding, thought leadership on social media, and reputation management. Clearly, there are many others, if we are to apply these perspectives to curriculum decisions about journalism and media communication, communication studies, and other fields.
This collection of studies is primarily exploratory—using a range of methodologies with varying degrees of rigor. The book may be useful for sparking interdisciplinary and global discussion within a doctoral seminar, but it falls short in its promise of explaining how strategic communication shapes value and innovation. Much more could be developed, if the authors would draw from the developing literature on innovation and entrepreneurship.