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On the basis of balance theory, corporate sponsorship of a well-liked charitable event is hypothesized to result in significant enhancement of consumer-perceived corporate community relations. However, on the basis of attribution theory, it is proposed that subjects would employ negative attributions (i.e., corporate self-interest) to explain the sponsorship. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that a structural equation model of charitable event sponsorship will show a significant negative path leading from the negative attributions construct to the outcome construct. As predicted, event sponsorship resulted in a significant enhancement of corporate community relations. However, the hypothesized path was not significant. The effects of sponsorship linkage on the outcome variable were largely mediated through the positive attributions construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper applies theoretical ideas about how threatened systems regulate external disturbances in an organizational context. The pattern of events in the controversy surrounding smoking and health was examined over a thirty-year period to determine whether the cigarette industry effectively regulated environmental disturbances to protect itself from potential threats. Both the extended theory and the empirical analysis demonstrate that the presence of third-party actors and the positions they take are critical in determining the outcomes of controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the social representation theories, our paper proposes to identify some typologies of the leader in the current Romanian public space. The aim of this paper is to associate these typologies with the way citizens perceive and appreciate their leaders. According to Abric "representation is a guide for action, orienting facts and social relations, a pre-codified system of reality as it determines a set of anticipations and expectations" (Abric, 1994: 13). Viewed as forms of symbolization and interpretation, expression and construction, the social representations attributed to the leaders recompose and redefine the social reality determining changes at the level of public image so as to get closer to the social representations attributed to leaders. The purpose of this research is to make an inventory of the images that the leaders preserved during their political activity, and of the prototypes which suffered imagological changes at the level of public cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines public relations strategies of the gay and lesbian rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s when most homosexuals remained deeply closeted to avoid the social stigma associated with the same-sex lifestyle. The analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of public relations strategies and focuses on activists who spearheaded these efforts to gain recognition for this social minority. As this study shows, public relations played a vital role in the early stages of the gay rights movement. It concludes that though gay and lesbian activists of the 1950s and 1960 had no formal training in PR, they made a concerted effort to influence public opinion using fundamental public relations strategies more than a decade before the Stonewall riots that marked the beginning of the modern Gay Liberation Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Citizens' Council of Mississippi emerged from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to protest the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. More than half of white Mississippians were determined to protect the public schools' segregated classrooms and supported the organized resistance movement with enthusiasm and determination. The Council relied heavily on a deliberate and strategic PR initiative to gain support for its ideals and initiatives with leaders polishing the use of traditional public relations tools and becoming savvy users of developing media technologies. This article explores how the organization's use of PR during the anti-civil rights movement relates to James E. Grunig's and Todd Hunt's widely accepted historical model that represents the development of the public relations profession.

This comparative, contextualized research conducted between 2003 and 2004 summarizes and discusses the impact of the socioeconomic and political environments on the practice of public relations in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. Sixty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with top-level professionals in the capital and main commercial cities in these three countries where the profession thrives but is also challenged. The main conclusion is that public relations professionals have a role to play in the transformation of countries toward globalized economies and more ethical participative, political systems in which everyone has a public platform to voice their interests and achieve full social development.

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Relaciones Públicas is the property of Instituto de Investigacion en Relaciones Publicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Relaciones Públicas is the property of Instituto de Investigacion en Relaciones Publicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article focuses on a series of postcard calendars produced by the South African Railways (SAR) between 1961 and 1984. As a state-owned organisation, the SAR played a decisive role in conceptualising the metanarratives South Africa constructed of itself from 1910 onwards. This was achieved, for example, through an extensive visual archive of documentary photographs of South Africa, commissioned by the SAR. In addition to a range of ‘publicity propaganda’ material, from about the 1920s to 1984 the Publicity Department of the SAR intermittently produced postcards, calendars and postcard calendars as cheap and accessible promotional material. An analysis of the postcard calendars between 1961 and 1984 uncovers three thematic clusters: the natural world; the world of culture; and related to this, the world of technology, modernity and progress. In colonialist discourse, images of nature/‘primitivism’ were frequently offset by images that proclaimed the advantages of culture/modernity/technology, and this legacy manifests in the postcard calendars discussed in this article. The article suggests that the SAR had vested interests in how (white), middle-class South Africans imagined the country and how it was portrayed for international audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon the social media phenomena in both practical and academic arenas, this study explored patterns and trends of social media research over the past fourteen years across four disciplines. Findings exhibit a definite increasing number of social-media-related studies. This indicates that social media have gained incremental attention among scholars, and who have, in turn, been responding and keeping pace with the increased usage and impact of this new medium. The authors suggest that future scholarly endeavors emphasize prospective aspects of social media, foreseeing applications and technological progress and elaborating theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses anti-sweatshop movements that have developed from civic-minded consumers; many college activists have been successful at politicizing the production-consumption chain of marketing and sports industries at universities. The role of public relations professionals in defining and shaping the movement against sweatshops is addressed; the campaign against Nike is evaluated as an example of political activism employed by computer-skilled young people against transnational corporations in a global economy.

Copyright of Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition is the property of Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article applies Pierre Bourdieu's understandings of capital and symbolic power to the public relations environment, to establish a link between the practice of public relations and the social effects of the profession. A three-month case study in the corporate affairs team of a UK passenger transport operator revealed the manner in which the pursuit and maintenance of power is potentially present in all public relations activities. Bourdieu's framework connects individual practice with the social effects of public relations and gives practitioners and academics a new starting point for understanding the nature of power in public relations practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US press's assertions of credibility stem from the post-World War I decade. Disillusioned with its own earlier credulity regarding the Committee on Public Information's (CPI) wartime propaganda, the press gradually professionalized during the 1920s. During those years, it focused on developing fact-oriented work routines that allowed it to claim it was more accurately reporting the “truth.” During that same decade, PR pioneer Edward L. Bernays claimed that propaganda served as a pro-social mechanism, offering new minority viewpoints that the press may overlook. Bernays' advocacy of propaganda during that decade aggravated news worker concerns about post-war domestic propaganda; the press attacked propaganda as corrosive and his claims as elitist, disingenuous and irresponsible. Not surprisingly, journalism's professionalization movement gained further momentum, asserting a scientific approach that emphasized gathering facts contextualized by experts. However, this same technique for guarding against propaganda had the unintended effect of news workers turning to PR sources for the data and contacts needed to report stories. Journalistic claims of autonomous authenticity continue to exhibit a dissonance that has roots in these dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Citizens' Council of Mississippi emerged from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to protest the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. More than half of white Mississippians were determined to protect the public schools' segregated classrooms and supported the organized resistance movement with enthusiasm and determination. The Council relied heavily on a deliberate and strategic PR initiative to gain support for its ideals and initiatives with leaders polishing the use of traditional public relations tools and becoming savvy users of developing media technologies. This article explores how the organization's use of PR during the anti-civil rights movement relates to James E. Grunig's and Todd Hunt's widely accepted historical model that represents the development of the public relations profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Beryllium's Public Relations Problem: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level," by David Michaels and Celeste Monforton in the January/February issue.

A response by David Michaels and Celeste Monforton to a letter to the editor about their article "Beryllium's Public Relations Problem: Protecting Workers When There is No Safe Exposure Level" in the January/February issue is presented.

The paper explores a case of partnership between a large pharmaceutical company and a national charity in the United Kingdom, a partnership from which the drug company sought improved public relations, and the charity money. Neither side was able to accept this reality. Managers of the partnership insisted that its only purpose was to improve the lifestyle of teenagers. They were supported by a literature on partnership that also tends to ignore the distinction between the task the partnership is set and its fundamental purpose. While much is made of the benefits of partnership, there are likely to be costs, both private and social, associated with failure to admit the purpose of partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialized groups of public relations practitioners, such as lobbyists, have gone unstudied in extant public relations role research. This study takes an alternative methodological approach in this important research line by delving into the human aspect of public relations practice from an interpretive perspective rather than a functionalistic one. This study attempts to put a human face back on public relations practitioners by exploring what motivates them. Thirty-seven former and current lobbyists based in Austin, Texas, were interviewed. Fantasy themes embedded in the homo narrans, or stories, that lobbyists recounted about their jobs compose the data analyzed. Burke's 7 offices of human motivation supply the interpretive framework. How this interpretation dovetails into and informs classic research on practitioner role models also is examined. Lobbyists seem to enact all 5 of the Broom and Smith original role models while they are particularly inspired to serve and to teach their clients in the public policy-making process. Fundamentally, lobbyists personify both manager and technician and embody all 7 motivational dynamics in their public relations practitioner role performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The initial indifference of Intel Corporation to the claim of a mathematics professor that its Pentium chip was defective resulted to the company's loss of credibility to its customers and the general public for Intel failed to consider its ethical obligations to its customers. Intel later apologized and took steps to correct their error and improve on their products. Such move will help Intel regain its foothold in the business and shall serve as an ethical precedent for the semiconductor industry.

Discusses how lobbyists and public relations personnel have an important part in politics and why the press go along with them. Techniques employed by PR firms for the contested issues in Washington; Efficiency in manipulating the issues; Ethical questions in the practice of public relations. INSET: The rumor mill..

Following a hypo-deductive theoretical rationale, the relationship between physical attributes, personality development, and susceptibility to peer pressure was assessed. Male and female college students (N = 181) responded to several personality measures previously reported as characteristics attributed to physical attractiveness and a new measure designed to assess peer pressure influences (Dilemmas Test for College Students). Peer-ratings and self-perceptions of facial attractiveness, body form, and general appearance were gathered. Physically attractive persons, in comparison to their lesser attractive peers, were more likely to have internalized socially desirable personality characteristics and show resistance to peer pressure influences. Further, some evidence suggested that attractiveness was related to the internalization of cognitive-social characteristics for males and cognitive-evaluative characteristics for females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research sought to determine whether or not there is equivalence between the effects of nurturance and satiation with young children. Forty kindergarten and first grade girls participated. The children played with an adult who was either continuously nurturant or withdrew nurturance or with an adult who dispensed either four or 30 praise statements. Then, each child was tested in a discrimination task in which correct responses were reinforced by adult praise. The dependent measure was the number of trials required to reach a criterion of three consecutive correct responses. For children verbalizing at a high frequency during the session, those who received four reinforcers learned the task more rapidly than those who had received 30 reinforcers. The reverse results were obtained for children who verbalized infrequently. Although the direction of difference for children who verbalized frequently in the nurturance conditions was the same as that for children who verbalized frequently in the frequency of praise conditions, no significant differences between nurturance conditions were found. The possible similarity in the effects of these manipulations suggests that the essential difference between continuous nurturance and nurturance withdrawal may lie in the difference in frequency, and not the withdrawal, of adult attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The word 'emotion' has been used both for public expressions and for private feelings. The expressive force involves both intentionality (reference to something) and normativity conforming to conventions). We must assume that there is non-reflective cognition. The other culture for us may even be our own at an earlier historical moment. To study tile emotions of others we need both an analysis of emotion oriented language practices and a related classification of emotive displays. These show differing norms. But we must also study episodes of such displays and the stories people tell about them. Different cultures give different background priorities that appear in the ways emotions are displayed and construed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]