An extension of systems public relations: A structurationist approach to an organization's public relations communication and communicative role

Zoraida Rosario Cozier, Purdue University

Abstract

This investigation extends normative conceptions of an organizations public relations roles and communication through an examination of the communicative aspects of boundary spanning processes. The study reconceptualizes the organizational environmental interfaces to identify the public relations processes at the interactional and institutional levels. The research objective aims to develop a structurationist perspective of public relations by employing Giddens' (1979, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1993) structuration framework and a political orientation (Deetz, 1992, 1995; Mumby, 1987, 1989). A structurationist perspective of public relations illuminates how members negotiate ideological frames in back regions which, in turn, influence an organization's public communication efforts, more specifically, an organization's communicative role. Thus, the communicative role evolves from the dominant and resistant ideologies that sustain dominance relations in organizations. Three multi-site case studies that utilized ethnographic methods investigated how local affiliates of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) enacted the national organizations campaign to legitimate a brain disorder paradigm of mental illnesses. The study consisted of seven months of participant observation and four months of follow-up interviews. A structurationist analysis reveals that representational practices enacted the communicative role. Affiliate's communicative roles became political as they concealed the contestation of ideologies and sustained a collective identity or identities to serve particular interests. The structurationist approach redirects our focus to the structuring processes in organizational settings and away from the periphery of the organization. The locus of analysis permits an analysis of an organization's communicative role and corresponding public participation status. The communicative role is the means and product of the organizations public relations communication and its public-institutional interactions. The communicative role acts a reproduction circuit that perpetuates and transforms an organizations dominant ideology and concomitant collective identities. Public participation can be identified through the penetration of alternative ideologies into a system. Publics can be segmented through their institutions, ideologies and attendant collective identities, and degree of ideological penetration into other systems. Thus, a communicative role contradicts typifications of public relations roles that are located in specific organizational positions and tied to specific actions identified with the management-technician dichotomy sustained in the roles literature.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Witmer, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Marketing|Mental health|Ethics

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