Journal of Public Relations Research

Gallicano, Tiffany D.; Lawless, Olivia; Higgins, Abagail M.; Shaikh, Samira; Levens, Sara

2023 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2022.2164004

The combination of a global pandemic and an ignited social justice movement created a digital environment in which people turned to social media to navigate a concentric firestorm fueled by both the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews with 25 supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, we used the circuit of culture to build theory about the production and consumption of messages. Specifically, we examined the ways in which meaning was produced, interpreted, and contested in the context of a social movement occurring inside of a global pandemic. We engaged in theoretical bricolage by demonstrating how perspective by incongruity, appropriation, and the referent criterion can shape meaning within the context of the circuit of culture. This study concludes with a foundational conceptualization of concentric firestorms, and we relate this conceptualization to two concepts we propose based on our data: virtual density and virtual saturation.

Zhan, Mengqi Monica; Zhao, Xinyan

2023 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2022.2160335

The accumulating literature regarding antecedents of organization-public relationships (OPRs) has been mixed. This study employed a meta-analytic method to synthesize the roles of organizational openness and publics’ engagement behaviors quantitatively and systematically in studies of OPRs. The results showed that the corrected mean correlations ( ) between organizational openness and OPRs ranged from .52 to .72, and those between publics’ engagement behaviors and OPRs ranged from .30 ‘to .42. Overall, the relationships between engagement and elements of OPRs differed for (1) for-profit organizations versus others (e.g. nonprofits, government); (2) samples collected from the eastern versus western cultures; and (3) different types of populations (i.e. students, survey panels, and target populations). Similar patterns also emerged for the moderating effects of organization and population type on the associations between openness and OPRs. Synthesizing existing empirical results on openness, engagement, and OPRs meta-analytically helps build consensus on those relationships and inspires new directions for OPRs theory building.

Ma, Liang

2023 Journal of Public Relations Research

doi: 10.1080/1062726X.2023.2166940

Social identity theory (SIT) suggests that organizations fulfill stakeholders’ psychological needs by meeting their self-definitional needs. Different crises may undermine such psychological fulfillment to varying degrees and lead stakeholders to react differently to the crises. This study examined the intersection of SIT and crisis communication in the context of social-cause-related nonprofit organizations (NPOs). It used the concept of identity threat to investigate whether a crisis is more detrimental when it directly compromises an NPO’s organizational identity and whether this effect varies depending on the stakeholders’ levels of social-cause involvement. Data were collected from 630 participants in an online between-subject experiment. As the study found, a crisis that directly compromises an NPO’s identity does more damage to stakeholders’ identification, attribution of responsibility, attitudes, and intentions of negative word-of-mouth than a crisis that does not. However, this effect of crisis types disappears among stakeholders with low social-cause involvement. Additionally, stakeholder-NPO identification mediates the interaction effects of crisis types and social-cause involvement on the attitudinal and intentional outcomes.