Josef Pallas

Public Relations and Neo-institutional theory

The article introduces a special section on public relations and neo-institutional theory where we seek to enrich research on public relations by using neo-institutional theory to describe, explain and understand the activities, processes and dynamics of the practice. By this we open up for a wider understanding of public relations, its preconditions, its performances and its consequences for shaping the social. The article starts with a discussion on earlier work in the tradition of neo-institutional theory where a lot of attention was paid to the governing mechanisms of institutions and how they control the behavior of actors. A perspective leading to some fundamental challenges where the primary objection was the over-determinism neo-institutional researchers ascribed to institutions. Taking these objectives seriously we follow more recent developments and present three streams of research – institutional logics, translation and institutional work – where agency is given a more profound role. We argue for how an employment of the logic can help us gain a more insightful understanding of public relations and communication as an institutional practice; how public relations functions as a carrier and translator of institutions; and how public relations is used to challenge and re-shape the foundations on which social actors interact with each other. We argue that public relations could be analyzed as an institutionalized practice with certain set of governing mechanisms including taken-for-granted activities, rules, norms and ideas. One argument for a neo-institutional perspective is the importance it gives communication in the understanding of organizations, institutions and society. Another argument is recent developments where public relations and other forms of organizational communication have been examined as a major dimension of organizing in some of the more profound works among neo-institutional theorists.

Providing, promoting and co‐opting: Corporate media work in a mediatized society

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual framework for the institutionalpreconditions for media work and how organizations establish these conditions.Design/methodology/approa ...

Corporate Media Work and Micro-Dynamics of Mediatization

Recent analysis of interactions and relations between media, individuals and organizations is commonly based on the notion of mediatization. Research in journalism and media studies, political studies as well as business studies has explored mediatization as prevailing transformation influencing communication activities of individuals as well as organizations. In the field of organizational studies an increasing interest has been paid to the mediatized settings in which organizations conduct their activities. But despite the growing interest we still lack a sufficient understanding of the inner dynamics of these processes. Contemporary research often focuses on the effects of mediatization and, therefore, relatively little is known about how agents are involved in the creation, maintenance, reshaping and interruption of the institutional properties of mediatization. This article seeks to examine the dynamics of mediatization and how it is shaped, reproduced and reshaped through activities of individual corporations. The aim of the article is to show how mediatization evokes processes of skilful and purposeful activities of actors involved in the creation, maintenance and disturbance of the shared rules, norms and practices that guide organizations in their effort to deal with media-related issues. The article, therefore, goes beyond examining the media activities of individual organizations as a result of mediatization, and focuses on these activities as a constituent of the processes in which mediatization is reconstructed and enacted. The analysis is based on a study of 13 Swedish publicly listed corporations and their media activities. The material was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

Translating Institutional Logics: When the Media Logic Meets Professions

This article presents results from a case study of media activities in a Swedish governmental agency where we illustrate a) how the media logic is translated and become embedded in the studied agency, and b) how different professional groups inside the organization shape the translation process. Theoretically we do this by re-visiting the notion of translation. Translation theory focuses on the local enactment and embeddedness of institutional models, ideals and practices. Institutional logics literature, on the other hand, focuses on the creation and flow of field-level meaning systems. By combining these two theoretical perspectives we are able to form a framework for understanding the local embeddedness and enactment of field-level institutional logics. The result of our study suggests that institutional logics – once they become introduced in a given context – consist of four elements that are interpreted and enacted differently inside organizations. We identify three local, profession-based value systems that shape the translation of the media logics, and we use this finding to theorize the role of professional value systems in shaping local translation processes.

Beyond the news desk – the embeddedness of business news

The relations between the media and their corporate sources have become increasingly routinized and organized. In contrast to traditional perspectives on news making this article introduces an embeddedness perspective on business journalism and reports on the findings from a study of the way the major Swedish corporations and financial analysts contribute to and participate in the production of business news. Through a qualitative analysis of two cases we show that such production is organized and carried out in a stream of continuous and well-coordinated activities and structured interaction settings – that is, in a system of recursive mediation. Our analysis further illustrates how this system is maintained through the technological, relational and situational embeddedness of the activities and settings. Through our studies we show how news production has developed outside the journalistic domain. One implication of our findings is that the possibility of individual actors influencing the content of the news is likely to be limited. Instead, it is the actors’ ability to join the organizational and technological settings in which news material is generated that gives them the opportunity to actively participate in news production.

Characteristics of Public Sectors and Their Consequences for Strategic Communication

ABSTRACT Research on strategic communication often deals with a general idea of organizations without specifications of what type of organization it sets under investigation. However, it often focuses on markets and perceives “corporations” as its role model. This means that the certain conditions that applies to other sectors—such as the public sector- tends to be overseen. Even though these conditions have extensive consequences for how, when, where, and why organizations can or are expected to communicate. This special issue is an attempt to reduce some of this imbalance and in this short introduction, we point out some of the characteristics that are typical for public sector organizations (PSO) in general; including their political nature, their lack of autonomy, their mission to handle problems rather than take advantage of an opportunities, their inherent conflicts between general principles, professional groups and stakeholder interests as well as an extensive demand for transparency. The articles included in the special issue are also shortly introduced.

Diverging Principles for Strategic Communication in Government Agencies

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze how public agencies deal with strategic communication and how it gets redefined and reformulated in relation to rules, norms, and ideas permeating different contexts. Research on strategic communication tends to oversee such differences and what consequences they have for what it is that mobilizes the use of communication in various settings. Informed by an increasing literature on organizational institutionalism we seek to overcome these limitations. With a textual analysis of policies and strategy documents from 179 Swedish government agencies, we examine what multiple and contradictory institutional conditions mean for how strategic communication is conceptualized. The results show that there are four frequent principles for strategic communication mobilized by the agencies. The results also show that a vast majority of the agencies are trying to handle conflicting principles when they form frameworks and strategies for their communication activities. We use the results as a point of departure for a discussion whether complex and pluralistic conditions are to be defined as problematic and necessary to be resolved (as mainstream literature would suggest) or as unavoidable and something authorities must be able to handle.

Creativity caged in translation : a neo-institutional perspective on crisis communication

Crisis communication research has primarily focused on universal models guiding managers of various organisations in times of crisis. Even though this is about to change, a tendency remains for research in the field to overlook the impact of structural conditions on organisation’s crisis communication. In order to add to the emergent discussion on new theoretical and empirical venues within the field of crisis communication, this paper proposes a framework based on new institutional theory for analysing crisis communication practices as a societal phenomenon. New institutionalism is advocated due to its ability to shift the focus from agency to structure and in doing so emphasise the social preconditions for organisational activities. In line with this, this conceptual paper discusses crisis communication as an institution, i.e., as a set of more or less conscious ideas about formats (the organisational structures developed for crisis communication work), contents (the content of organisations’ communication in times of crisis) and contexts (the situations during which organisations are expected to perform crisis communication). Moreover, we discuss how these ideas become translated (i.e., modified) as they travel (i.e., become legitimate, popular and get widely spread) across organisational and institutional contexts. In order to illustrate the framework described above, the Swedish authorities’ communication in connection to the A/H1N1 outbreak is used as a case study.

Translated Inconsistency: Management Communication Under the Reign of Institutional Ambiguity

Translated Inconsistency : Management Communication Under the Reign of Institutional Ambiguity

The Localities of Mediatization: How Organizations Translate Mediatization into Everyday Practices

In this chapter, we suggest a perspective where mediatization is addressed as a set of rationalized ideas that are actively translated and transformed in and by organizations and their members. Through local translations, these ideas not only shape contemporary organizations but also are re-constructed in these. We argue that ideas are carried into and between organizations by different elements that are interpreted, made sense of and negotiated depending on the characteristics of the ideas at hand, and the characteristics of the context into which they are introduced. To unpack how mediatization unfolds inside organizations, we turn to a specific stream of Scandinavian institutionalism: translation theory. Thereby, we identify translation processes of mediatization as taking place in a context of competing and conflicting value systems—especially those represented by different professions.