Managing perceived intractable problems—seemingly irrevocable, difficult-to-solve, often values-driven conflicts—is a regular occurrence for public relations practitioners. Yet, understanding and ...managing such problems is often outside of the bounds of public relations theories aimed primarily at building consensus. This paper builds on existing conflict-centered literature by carving out a place for dissensus-oriented or agonistic public relations theories and practices. Through interviews with 41 public relations practitioners facing perceived intractable scenarios and the integration of dissensual and agonistic perspectives of Lyotard (1984), Rancière (2010), and others, the paper provides evidence of these approaches in everyday practice. Finally, it offers a framework for social issue engagement that orients agonistic and dissensus-minded professional practices alongside consensus approaches.
•The study builds theory around managing contentious issues in public relations.•The research proposes a new framework for social issue engagement, integrating dissensus, agonism, and contingency theory.•The project connects conflict and postmodernism with practitioner input to provide guidance for intractable situations.•Methodologically, the qualitative study utilizes 41 in-depth practitioner interviews to ground findings in professional practice.
Activists and the organizations established to pursue their goals have been influential in shaping public relations theory and practice, including issues management. However, scholars only recently ...increased efforts to develop a more robust understanding of activist organizations and their communication efforts, including how they can serve as issue managers to incite change at multiple levels. As activist organizations shift a portion of their pursuits away from public policy and into the private sector, this study details how these strategic communicators enact their roles as issue managers within a corporate campaign context. Specifically, this study explores the intersection of activism and issues management, thereby advancing our understanding of issues management from the activist perspective and proposing the issue campaign model, which outlines the process employed by activist organizations to identify, develop, and press their issues toward resolution.
The concept of brandstanding has been embraced by leading public relations firms and practitioners, but is virtually absent from scholarship. This conceptual essay defines brandstanding as an ...organization (corporation, nonprofit, or government agency) taking a public stance on a contentious issue (generally, outside of its industry or core purpose) while articulating its corresponding values and maintaining authenticity. It further describes the phenomenon in four components: (1) organizational and stakeholder values, (2) authenticity, (3) engagement, and (4) measurement. Understanding the role of each can help PR practitioners guide organizations toward informed participation in civic discourse. While some have encouraged an approach that minimizes contention (i.e. Argenti, 2020), this essay uses moral decoupling theory to argue that reducing the distance between what they say and how they act (Dowell & Jackson, 2020; Weiner, 2021) and striving for authenticity—the continuity, credibility, integrity, and symbolism of an organization’s stance (Morhart et al., 2015)—should be the most crucial factors in engagement decisions.
•This paper develops a theory of brandstanding—organizational engagement on contentious issues not tied to the organization’s core purpose.•Brandstanding connects corporate social advocacy (CSA) and recent scholarship on general publics, with moral decoupling theory (MDP) and articulations of brand authenticity.•The paper presents facets of ethical brandstanding, an actionable and generative framework for understanding contentious issue engagement.•This research asserts that any type of organization can play a role in contentious issue engagement, and that it may be less risk-laden for organizations than it appears.
Corporate social advocacy (CSA) scholarship has helped public relations scholars and practitioners better understand business engagement in multiple contentious issue contexts (e.g., Dodd & Supa, ...2014; Rim et al., 2020; Waymer & Logan, 2021). Nonprofit organizations, while often having similarly public platforms, significant resources, and the will to engage in polarizing issues outside of their core purpose or purview, have, to date, not been a part of this theoretical framework. This paper serves to theoretically link nonprofit organizations to polarizing issue discourse—while maintaining their distinct facets and relational/stakeholder needs—by developing Polarizing Issue Stewardship. This new construct shifts the perspective of nonprofit stewardship strategies, originally developed by Kelly (1998) to a contentious issue context. The new construct provides insights for both theory and praxis of nonprofit communication.
•This paper develops a theory of polarizing issue stewardship for nonprofit organizations.•Putting nonprofit stewardship literature into conversation with CSA extends the latter theory to encompass nonprofit public relations.•This research develops five strategies for polarizing issue stewardship: (1) reporting amid contention, (2) contingent recognition, (3) harmonizing values, (4) financial resilience, and (5) genuine engagement.•The paper includes two brief nonprofit case examples: a partnership/vendor relationship and a donor relationship.
Fringe stakeholders with limited resources, such as grassroots organizations (GROs), are often ignored in business and society literature. We develop a conceptual framework and a set of propositions ...detailing how GROs strategically gain legitimacy and influence over time. We argue that GROs encounter specific paradoxes over the emergence, development, and resolution of an issue, and they address these paradoxes using cognitive, moral, and pragmatic legitimacy strategies. While cognitive and moral strategies tend to be used consistently, the flexible and paradoxical use of pragmatic strategies has important consequences, both for GROs’ legitimacy and for their potential influence over powerful organizations associated with them. We enrich our framework with the help of two illustrative cases and discuss the implications of the framework for GROs’ legitimacy strategies in business and society literature.
The way organizations communicate about socio-political issues, such as racism and diversity, has become increasingly visible following the racial reckoning of 2020. This study examines the diversity ...discourse presented in the strategic plans from 37 of universities that comprise three major academic conferences (BIG10, Southeastern Conference (SEC), and PAC-12) in order to understand how they crafted an ethos that serves as the foundation these institutions use when later communicating about socio-political issues. To do so, we draw on social issues management, neoliberalism, whiteness, and ventriloquism to underscore the complexity of crafting an organizational ethos that features a stated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We argue that these organizations' ethos were simultaneously ventriloquized by larger socio-political discourses while also ventriloquizing diversity in ways that made their discourse about diversity speak in ways that forwarded neoliberal and whiteness ideologies that operated to maintain the status quo.
This paper addresses the gap between crisis communication scholarship and the growing research on intractable issues and wicked problems in public relations. By synthesizing these literatures, the ...concept of intractability more clearly connects issues, risks, and crises within a community-oriented mindset. The literature review organizes crisis communication scholarship into rhetorical, perceptual, risk-oriented, and conflict-oriented categories, then introduces intractable issues and wicked problems as supplementary and beneficial frameworks. There are similarities and differences among crises and intractable issues, with distinctions mainly arising in terms of urgency and perceived proximity to organizations. Issues, risks, and crises can be mapped using the continua of immediacy/temporal urgency and organizational or societal issue centrality. This creates four quadrants: A zone of reputational crises, a zone of intractability, a zone of wicked problems, and a zone of organizational responsibility.
•The purpose of the paper is to integrate intractable and wicked problems with existing crisis communication theory.•We organize existing crisis theory into four categories: rhetorical, perceptual, risk manifested, issue engagement/conflict management.•A new category of crisis as acute intractability/wickedness is proposed.•Immediacy/temporality and organization-centrality are developed as key continua.•This creates four zones of crisis communication: reputational crises, acute intractability, wicked problems, and organizational responsibility.
Supplier development is a measure that contributes to improving economic and social performance along a supply chain, and it is a recent theoretical development warranting further empirical research. ...This paper on the dairy supply chain in India explores the role of supplier development strategies (SDS), related socially oriented capability development initiatives, and their impact on the performance of the supply chain. We conducted a multiple case study involving four cooperatives and eight private dairies wherein small and medium scale suppliers were a part of the supply chain. Results indicate that adopting SD is an established practice in dairy industry, which is used by the buyers as a strategy to manage social and societal issues. Findings indicate that such SD strategies result in developing the capabilities of suppliers to deal with related issues of social sustainability. Buying firms initiate indirect and direct SDS like supplier assessments, technical investments, financial assistance and logistic integration to ensure supply base continuity, which ultimately improves the economic and social performance. The findings offer insights into the role of SD as an effective strategy in building the capabilities and capacities and addressing social and societal issues and its impact on the performance of buyers and suppliers.
•SD as a measure of managing social and societal issues in supply chains.•SD practices in a local to local supply chain.•Capability development through SD leads to economic and social performance.•Strategic binding of financial and social issues improves the performance of buyers and suppliers.
Issues managers have power over defining issues and legitimizing their importance. While discussion has increased about organizations taking a stand on polarizing social issues, there remains a gap ...in the issues management literature on how to address stigmatized issues, particularly those with a gendered component. This article offers a revised set of issues motivators that better encompass the gendered and emotional components of issues and guiding questions to assist issues managers in ensuring that organizational policies and practices are more inclusive. Finally, the emotional underpinnings of all phases of the issue life cycle are considered.
•Examines what kinds of networks SMOs should pursue at different stages of an issue’s life cycle.•Weak and diverse ties likely most effective for early-stage issues.•Strong and homogenous ties likely ...more effective for later-stage issues.
Social movement organizations (SMO) are important actors in affecting issue-related policy changes. To successfully manage an issue to achieve favorable policy resolutions, SMOs, like many kinds of organizations, not only use traditional public relations techniques, but also build networks to accomplish their objectives. Yet, an examination of the relationship between issue development and SMO networks is absent from the literature. This article therefore concentrates on the question: what types of networks should SMOs seek to build at different stages of an issue’s development? Informed by public relations research on issues management as well as contemporary social movement scholarship and organizational network theories, the article proposes a framework of SMO network strategies that examines the kinds of relationship networks SMOs should maintain as they attempt to manage an issue through the stages of its life cycle.
PDF
