Looking Over, Looking Out, and Moving Forward: Positioning Public Relations in Theorizing Organizational Network Ecologies

Abstract

Public relations research has benefitted from theory development in the field of Communication. Yet, the contributions of public relations theory building to the larger Communication discipline are less clear. This may be due to the fact that public relations theories have focused on dyadic relationships with an organization at the center. This type of research has pursued a narrow understanding of relationships and neglected a broader understanding of how discourse shapes meaning and relationships. This article explores the social network perspective that places an organization's relationships in a wider context, its network ecology. We propose a conceptual model of how to apply social network analysis to studying systems of relationships and identify six propositions that provide guidelines for future research.

Unleashing the Power of Networks: Shareholder Activism, Sustainable Development and Corporate Environmental Policy

“…However, in reality, stakeholders are often interconnected or interdependent. Relationships among stakeholders affect their levels of influence on corporations (Yang and Taylor, ).…”

Bring publics back into networked public relations research: A dual-projection approach for network ecology

“…Strategic management literature mostly takes an organization-centric worldview and studies how an organization's decision making may affect its relationship with one of its publics (Grunig, 2006;Toth, 2010). The network paradigm, instead, takes a network ecology approach and positions organizations as ordinary members of a complex ecology with diverse relationships (Yang & Taylor, 2015). Figure 1 visually demonstrates the two paradigms.…”

“…Therefore, the network ecology approach does not "relegate publics to a secondary role," and promises to "elevate publics to the status of communication equal with the organization," as Botan (1997, p. 196) argued about dialogues in public relations. According to Yang and Taylor (2015), this network ecology approach conceptualizes public relations as a management function that can affect two types of networks-the organizational-centric network and the network ecology network. As a result, the consequences of public relations interventions are beyond the four dimensions commonly measured by the organization-public relationship literature.…”

“…The number of modes is the number of different kinds of nodes in a network. Therefore, the network ecology with multiple modes shown in Figure 1 panel B, theoretically constructed by Yang and Taylor (2015), is empirically difficult to analyze as a whole, using current network analysis techniques. Some scholars have utilized bipartite graphs to analyze two-mode networks (e.g., Doreian, 1979), but most network research in communication and public relations literature was conducted on one-mode networks.…”

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This essay critiques the absence of publics in networked public relations research, and proposes the dual-projection approach as a solution to simplify and analyze the multi-mode public relations network ecology (Yang & Taylor, 2015). Compared to most previous studies that employ organization-centric networks where ties stand for hyperlinks, collaborations, or coalitions, the new approach projects organization-public relationships and public-public relationships onto interorganizational ties.

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