Priscilla Murphy

Chaos theory as a model for managing issues and crises

Abstract This article uses chaos theory to model public relations situations whose salient feature is the volatility of public perceptions. After discussing the central premises of the theory itself, it applies chaos theory to issues management, the evolution of interest groups, crises, and rumors. It concludes that chaos theory is most useful as an analogy to structure persistent image problems and to raise questions about organizational control of public perceptions. Because it emphasizes uncertainty, open-endedness, plurality, and change, chaos theory sets limits on the purposeful management of volatile issues.

The Intractability of Reputation: Media Coverage as a Complex System in the Case of Martha Stewart

This study examines media reputation—the representation of a person or organization in the media—from the standpoint of complex systems. It analyzes news releases and print media coverage about Martha Stewart from 1982 through 2007 using computer-assisted semantic network analysis. The study concludes that Stewarts media reputation showed characteristics of a complex system, including the gradual emergence of patterns of representation, the buildup of internal dissonance, a crisis point followed by the emergence of new patterns, and resistance to outside influences. These characteristics constrain efforts to shape reputation but can also provide warnings about a changing reputation long before it becomes obvious in media coverage.

Symmetry, Contingency, Complexity: Accommodating Uncertainty in Public Relations Theory.

Abstract This article explores the potential of complexity theory as a unifying theory in public relations, where scholars have recently raised problems involving flux, uncertainty, adaptiveness, and loss of control. Complexity theory refers to the study of many individual actors who interact locally in an effort to adapt to their immediate situation, thereby forming large-scale patterns that affect an entire society, often unpredictably and uncontrollably. Five characteristics of complexity theory render it particularly useful to explore central questions in public relations, such as power and accommodation, shifting perceptions and images, and problems with public relations models’ predictiveness. These five characteristics are adaptivity, nonlinearity, coevolution, punctuated equilibrium, and self-organization. The article describes specific complexity-based methodologies and their potential for public relations studies, focusing on data- and agent-based modeling. Priscilla Murphy is associate dean for Research and Graduate Programs at the School of Communications and Theater, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.

Framing the Genetic Testing Issue Discourse and Cultural Clashes among Policy Communities

This study examined ways in which the congressional testimony of public policy factions used interpretive frames to lend advantage to their own views of genetic testing. The authors applied semantic network analysis to four sessions of congressional testimony. Using the cultural theory of risk, they divided testifiers into bureaucratic, entrepreneurial, and egalitarian cultures. The authors then cluster-analyzed testimony of each policy camp to expose word patterns that delineated each groups policy frame. Within a shared frame about privacy and fairness, the entrepreneurs emphasized rules for appropriate access; the egalitarians, personal concerns for family and self; and the bureaucrats, safety through government programs.

Success or Chaos? Framing and Ideology in News Coverage of the Iraqi National Elections

/ This study used computer-assisted textual analysis of frames as ideological cues in news coverage of the Iraqi 2005 elections by CNN.com and Aljazeera.net. CNN’s reporting revealed an ideology of a cultural conquest, framing the elections with sentimental patriotism toward western-style democracy. Al Jazeera’s texts revealed distrust and suspicion toward the US, framing the elections with skepticism, a lack of legitimacy and chaos. Despite claims of journalistic objectivity, the analysis found a divisive ideology expressed by both news organizations. The study bears out the importance of ‘global objectivity’ to provide critical, cross-cultural perspectives in an age of expanding media globalization.

Using games as a model for crisis communications

This paper proposes the theory of games as a model for public relations decisionmaking during crisis, where the release of sensitive information must be negotiated between the practitioner and the media. It is proposed that the models and methods of game theory are useful in testing assumptions, establishing norms, and analyzing outcomes of crisis communications. News statement timing is analyzed in terms of a noncooperative zero-sum game, the duel; the process of releasing or witholding information from a reporter is modeled as a cooperative non-zero-sum game. In addition to hypothetical cases, certain real-life crises are set in a game theory framework.

Framing the nicotine debate: a cultural approach to risk.

This study examined Congressional testimony concerning regulation of tobacco advertising by 3 policy factions representing industry, government, and lay activists. On the basis of the cultural theory of risk, policy disputants were divided into entrepreneurial, bureaucratic, and egalitarian communities, each with a distinct cosmology that impedes discourse among the groups. The authors examined ways in which the 3 policy factions framed the tobacco advertising issues to see the extent to which such unique cosmologies were expressed or whether mutual frames might signal opportunities for negotiation among the interest groups. Major themes in the testimony were identified through semantic network analysis and clustering of associated words that revealed discourse patterns peculiar to each group and reflective of their cultural biases toward health risk. Semantic network analysis can be a tool to clarify these presuppositions and unmask relations among factions, thereby bridging policy solutions across interest groups.

Using judgment analysis to improve consultant/client understanding: An advertising application

Abstract This study uses regression‐based judgment analysis to develop decision profiles for a matched group of 22 clients and their advertising agency representatives. We compared agencies and clients according to five criteria for a successful advertising campaign: market research, media planning, message and creativity, budget, and agency/client working relationship. Considered in the aggregate, agencies and clients showed solid cognitive consensus. However, the 22 individual working partnerships revealed striking cognitive handicaps: agency/client partners agreed only moderately about campaign criteria, had little insight into each others’ decision values, and did not self‐report their own values accurately. We analyzed several agency/client partnerships in detail to show the implications of such cognitive misunderstandings, and to support our overall recommendation that judgment analysis form a central part of agency performance audits.

Official Chinese media representations of US business, 1979–2011: A text mining approach

How have three decades of change in Chinese society, business, and politics influenced its official media coverage of emerging partnerships and interactions with US business? This question was explored through text mining and semantic network analysis of 929 articles in China Daily and Xinhua News Service, from 1979 through 2011. The articles were examined via cluster analysis (grouping news stories with similar coverage) and factor analysis (revealing themes for each cluster). Four clusters of stories emerged, suggesting phases in Sino-American trade relations: 1979–1983 (emergence of basic principles), 1984–1987 (delicate balance between trade and politics), 1988–2002 (maturation of relations with American business), and 2003–2011 (tensions following China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization). Factor analysis revealed 17 themes throughout the period. A sense of historical inevitability surrounded China’s progress from the periphery to the core of globalization, while the US moved from sole player to one of many partners for China.

On using text analytics for event studies

Event studies seek convincing evidence connecting behavior with a known or conjectured event. Originating in finance, event studies have spread to and become established in many other fields, including law. Multiple regression modeling, the standard methodology for doing event studies, may not be ideally suited for event studies based on data derived from bodies of text, since the required distributional assumptions may be problematic. This paper reports on an exploratory study that uses text analytic methods to discern events. The study draws upon and extends a previously published study of the speeches made by the CEO of a tobacco company in the years surrounding the tobacco settlement in 1998. Examining SEC filings from three major tobacco companies, the study reported in this paper finds cause for optimism in the use of text analytics to discern and investigate events of interest in law.