Current academic thinking about public relations (PR) and related communication is a lively, expanding marketplace of ideas and many scholars believe that it’s time for its radical approach to be deepened. Routledge New Directions in PR & Communication Research is the forum of choice for this new thinking. Its key strength is its remit, publishing critical and challenging responses to continuities and fractures in contemporary PR thinking and practice, tracking its spread into new geographies and political economies. It questions its contested role in market-orientated, capitalist, liberal democracies around the world, and examines its invasion of all media spaces, old, new, and as yet unenvisaged.
The New Directions series has already published and commissioned diverse original work on topics such as:
We actively invite new contributions and offer academics a welcoming place for the publication of their analyses of a universal, persuasive mindset that lives comfortably in old and new media around the world.
By Amy Thurlow
October 17, 2018
Public relations has been swift to grasp social media, yet its impact on public relations practice remains relatively unexplored. This book focusses on a way of understanding organizational identity construction in a virtual context, developing scholarship on the importance of a virtual presence in...
Edited
By Tomoki Kunieda, Koichi Yamamura, Junichiro Miyabe
September 17, 2018
Despite its rapid economic development, Japan lacks a large public relations industry and its role is viewed very differently from its Western counterparts. PR functions are handled predominantly in-house and a degree in a PR field is not a hiring requirement for those agencies which do operate. ...
By Marianne Sison, Zeny Sarabia-Panol
August 22, 2018
Diverse in economic development, political and mass media systems, the countries in Southeast Asia cast a unique light on the parallels between development-cum-participative communication and corporate social responsibility. In our globalized environments, knowledge of power, culture and the ...
Edited
By Jane Johnston, Magda Pieczka
July 19, 2018
Communication has become the technology of public interest, demanding a re-examination of the key concept of public in both public relations and communication theory. This book defines a new concept of public interest communication, combining the conflict, negotiation and adaptation inherent in ...
By Simon Moore
April 30, 2018
Our individuality is partly shaped by encounters with the external world so it is inconceivable that we are unaffected by the planned management of public communications which manages much of our external experience. Exploring one of the most important mediators between organizations and individual...
Edited
By Simon Collister, Sarah Roberts-Bowman
April 06, 2018
This book brings together a broad and diverse range of new and radical approaches to public relations focussing on the increasingly vital role that visual, sensory and physical elements factors play in shaping communication. Engaging with recent developments in critical and cultural theories, it ...
By Melanie James
March 29, 2018
In public relations, people talk about positioning an idea, a persona, a political ideal, an ideology – but what are they talking about? Why do some positions taken by organizations crystallize in the minds of audiences, while others fail? Whilst positioning is not something new in public ...
Edited
By W. Timothy Coombs, Jesper Falkheimer, Mats Heide, Philip Young
March 29, 2018
Today almost everyone in the developed world spends time online and anyone involved in strategic communication must think digitally. The magnitude of change may be up for debate but the trend is unstoppable, dramatically reconfiguring business models, organisational structures and even the practice...
Edited
By Burton St. John III, Margot Opdycke Lamme, Jacquie L'Etang
January 22, 2018
Over the centuries, scholars have studied how individuals, institutions and groups have used various rhetorical stances to persuade others to pay attention to, believe in, and adopt a course of action. The emergence of public relations as an identifiable and discrete occupation in the early 20th ...
By Roumen Dimitrov
September 22, 2017
Mainstream public relations overvalues noise, sound and voice in public communication. But how can we explain that while practitioners use silence on a daily basis, academics have widely remained quiet on the subject? Why is silence habitually famed as inherently bad and unethical? Silence is ...
By Burton Saint John III
July 20, 2017
For much of the last century, large, predominantly US corporations used public relations to demonstrate that their missions resonated with dominant societal values. Through the construction and conveyance of the "corporate persona", they aimed to convince citizens that they share common aspirations...
By Johanna Fawkes
May 24, 2017
Do professions really place duty to society above clients' or their own interests? If not, how can they be trusted? While some public relations (PR) scholars claim that PR serves society and enhances the democratic process, others suggest that it is little more than propaganda, serving the ...