Purpose – The PR industry has become an important actor in society and in the democratic process. The purpose of this article is to examine the opinion state of this phenomenon. More precisely the question is: what trust do people have in the PR industry and PR professionals?...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend the image repair theory by focusing on the largely ignored context of the face‐to‐face communication. The paper offers an exploratory study of how image repair work is carried out in interviews with politicians in the context of press...

This paper reviews organisational culture research and explores how it can aid the understanding of regional television organisations' practice of public relations. A comprehensive review of the organisational culture literature is made and frameworks based upon this understanding are argued by...

The emergence of public relations as an academic and practitioner discipline has benefited from input from many sources: social science, behavioural science, engineering, philosophy, business and management. One of the main theoretical underpinnings is systems theory, with parallels being drawn...

The paper reports on the European Public Relations Body of Knowledge project (coordinated by the author for the European Association for Public Relations Research and Education, CERP Education & Research) that investigates the present state of public relations knowledge in Europe. The project...

Managing the adverse visibility associated with a high‐profile legal crisis is a challenge faced by an increasing number of public relations professionals. This paper offers guidelines for effectively managing a legal crisis outside the courtroom while the case is pending before a court of law.

In order to test effects of motives, communication style and licensing on the reputations of sponsors of public relations, a 4 × 2 × 2 factorial design experiment was conducted by the author with 585 non‐student adults and undergraduate university students in the USA. Perceived motives to...

Communicating effectively with youth is tantamount to walking the plank on a snakeboard — even if you can manoeuvre the snakeboard down the plank, you are bound to fall off the end before you can ride it back to the mother ship. Weaving in and out of the increasing advertising and promotional...

This paper describes the author's views on current and future trends in the relationship between public relations consultancies and their clients. A number of such trends are identified including longer‐term contracts, the growth of international assignments, more demanding clients and...