The civility of social capital: Public relations in the public sphere, civil society, and democracy

Sommerfeldt, Erich J.

doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2012.12.004

Cited by 126 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In regards to applying social capital frameworks, Sommerfeldt (2013) has usefully argued the value of exploring the contributions made when practitioners build coalitions and collaborations between groups of citizens outside of their potentially rather homogenous everyday social networks. Alliances and coalitions are a core strategy for many public affairs campaigns, including those organised by activist groups who wish to challenge corporate influence, and stronger empirical data on how this impacts on indicators of social capital would assist in testing theory in this area.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everywhere and nowhere: Theorising and researching public affairs and lobbying within public relations scholarship

Davidson

2015

Public Relations Review

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Public affairs and lobbying is a high status and strategically vital public relations specialism. It is a field of PR practice that generates high levels of both scholarly and public concern in regard to its perceived role in supporting corporate power and the associated impact on the functional legitimacy of democratic institutions. For this paper a content analysis was conducted of academic journals (between 2000-2013) to provide insights into how public affairs and lobbying have been theorised and researched within public relations scholarship and to ascertain to what degree wider public concerns have been addressed. Findings include an empirical confirmation of the low level of research activity on public affairs; that stakeholder and rhetorical theories have been the most widely used theories, but are far from constituting dominant paradigms; that scholarship has privileged functional objectives over civic concerns; and that published work originates almost entirely from institutions in Europe and the US with the Global South invisible. The paper also discusses future directions for research in public affairs and advocates the placing of discourse into definitions of public affairs, and that academic public relations should assert responsibility for this field, but in a manner that more equitably balances organisational and societal concerns. BackgroundThe centrality of the public affairs function within public relations in combination with the ongoing concerns regarding impacts on democratic decision-making, as well as popular assumptions of routinely low ethical standards present a strong normative case for this field to be a priority for theorising and research. While definitions of public affairs may still be in a state of flux, scholars who have explored this function have tended to agree on its significance as a specialism. Zetter mischievously nominated public affairs as constituting "PR for grown-ups" because of the "huge rewards for getting it right -and major consequences for getting it wrong" (2008: p. :xiii). Public affairs has been observed as higher status strategic work (L'Etang, 2008), and that specialists are more than "mere technicians" but professionals who wield influence in Part of the difficulty in defining and conceptualising public affairs as a specialism of public relations is that a considerable proportion of public affairs practice is indistinguishable from public relations activity (Somerville and Ramsey, 2012). By way of example, in written evidence to a committee of the UK parliament that was investigating the regulation of lobbying, Ed Williams then CEO of Edelman UK argued that for large agencies such as his "…public affairs is just one of many public relations services we provide to clients. The boundaries between, for example, activity which influences the political environment and activity which influences a broader media and stakeholder environment is increasingly blurred." (Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, 2012: p. 67).In most definitions public a...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everywhere and nowhere: Theorising and researching public affairs and lobbying within public relations scholarship

Davidson

2015

Public Relations Review

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“…Accordingly, Erich J. Sommerfeldt (2013) draws our attention to the importance of the relationships between the groups for fostering a 1 Fraser defines an equalitarian multicultural society as a multicultural society that is nonstratified; a society without structural divisions based on class, racial or gender divisions of labor (Fraser, 2010, pp. 137-138 However, porousness between the publics takes on a different significance or role depending upon the type of public.…”

Section: The Public Sphere In Multicultural Societiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting immigrants’ political integration through discussion and debate in public libraries

Johnston

Audunson

2017

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

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Using Habermas' theory of the public sphere, this article examines the potential of conversation-based programming (e.g. conversation groups and language cafes) in public libraries to bring immigrant voices into the public sphere and thereby, to facilitate their political integration. To both support and illustrate the theoretical explorations of the article, research findings are presented from a study on language cafes and integration at Oslo and Akershus University College, Norway. Four ways in which the language cafes can support immigrants' political integration and the formation of a comprehensive public sphere include the fostering of linguistic competence, expansion of social networks, promotion of information exchange relevant to political integration, and facilitation of 'messy conversation'.

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“…News coverage training is additionally confronting challenges related to new media. One review demonstrated that in spite of the fact that news coverage undergraduates detailed getting their news on the web, regardless they anticipated that would work in conventional territories of print and communicate news-casting with just a couple reckoning working in online news coverage [29] . The circumstance for news-casting scholastics have been likened with resembling Alice in Wonderland down a gap attempting to settle on choices and produce programs in a liquid situation and that 'it appears like the innovation, alternatives, and openings change speedier than a solitary course can wind its way through the college endorsement organization' [30] .…”

Section: Effect Public Relation On Ed Ucationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Technology Complexity on Public Relations

Karim¹,

Ghareb²

2017

RAJAR

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The civility of social capital: Public relations in the public sphere, civil society, and democracy

Cited by 126 publications

References 47 publications

Everywhere and nowhere: Theorising and researching public affairs and lobbying within public relations scholarship

Everywhere and nowhere: Theorising and researching public affairs and lobbying within public relations scholarship

Supporting immigrants’ political integration through discussion and debate in public libraries

The Impact of Technology Complexity on Public Relations

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