Conference Agenda

With earlier research revealing the advantages of heterophily and diversity in working teams, American scholars, theories, and universities still dominate the field of public relations (PR). That is surprising since there is growing awareness of the importance of a more diverse, equal, and inclusive research community that enables multiple voices to be heard.

This study explores the level of homophily/heterophily in co-authorships in PR scholarship. By using Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a primary research tool, this research analyzes co-authorship and relations between researchers, draws attention to research communities, and attempts to understand the status of international academic collaboration and how far it has changed in the past decade.

The data used for this study includes 575 articles about social media-related PR in nine leading PR journals over a decade (2010-2020). Using three levels of dynamic network analysis (Macro, Mezzo, and Micro), the findings reveal a very homophilic field, with most co-authored studies from American scholars at American universities and almost no co-authorship with non-American researchers. Theoretical and practical implications are further discussed.

In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world marked by pandemics, wars, political polarization, teeming social movements, and fractured and contentious online spaces, organizations must deal with a growing litany of tensions, contradictions, dialectics and paradoxes as they build and maintain relationships with their diverse publics and stakeholders. This essay argues that applying dualistic or monochromatic lenses, with their either-or focus (e.g., either open or closed; either satisfied or dissatisfied), to examine a complex construct such as relationships between organizations and publics in tension-filled contexts is reductionist in nature. Instead, a dialectical tension-based approach to relational theorizing can help to unearth a multitude of tensions and offer tension management strategies as organizations and publics engage in relationship building in VUCA contexts of practice. Accordingly, situated within relational theorizing in public relations, Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, relational dialectical theory from interpersonal communication, and literature on tension management strategies from organizational communication, this essay proposes a dialectical tension-based approach to relational theorizing in public relations research. The proposed approach enriches relationship theorizing in public relations with a dialectical tension-based lens steeped in dialogism, thus richly nuancing the study of organization-public relationship building. Further, a dialectical tension-based lens can deepen the insights of public relations practitioners who build organizational relationships, and encourage them to embrace an agile, dynamic, paradoxical mindset when managing organizational relationships in a VUCA world.

Purpose: Over recent years, the acronym VUCA has gained traction in strategic communication (SC) as an umbrella term that summarizes recurrent challenges (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) of digital communication environments. These challenges have given rise to new propositions on positioning, analysis, organization, and process design in SC. Still, an integrated reflection on how the VUCA dimensions facilitate a deeper understanding of specific digitalization challenges and how to handle these challenges in a sustainable way is lacking. This article aims to explore and substantiate the descriptive (how) and prescriptive (how to) potential of VUCA for SC under conditions of digitalization.

Design: We first provide a systematic discussion of the four VUCA dimensions based on general strategy literature. While their descriptive value is undisputed, prescriptive advice on how to respond to these challenges is contradictory. We substantiate this observation in a second, empirical step based on interviews with strategic communicators on the agency and corporate level.

Findings: Our findings reveal that VUCA indeed facilitates a systematical mapping of digitalization challenges consistently identified by professionals. Proposed strategic responses, however, are again contradictory.

Originality: Hence, we propose the VUCA radar as an integrated framework. It provides (a) a systematical overview of digitalization challenges to SC on the industry and practice level; (b) based on paradox literature, prescriptive advice to balance contradictory strategic responses as most sustainable way to engage with digitalization challenges on the level of positioning, analysis, organization, and process design.