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 Kevin Hora
April 21, 2017
This book examines the origins of Ireland in its first independent incarnation, the Irish Free State (1922-1937). It explores how contemporary public relations and propaganda techniques were used to construct an identity for this new state – a state which after enduring seven years of ...
By Charles Marsh
April 17, 2017
Modern approaches to public relations cluster into three camps along a continuum: conflict-oriented egoism, e.g. forms of contingency theory that focus almost exclusively on the wellbeing of an entity; redressed egoism, e.g. subsidies to redress PR’s egoistic nature; and forms of ...
By Donnalyn Pompper
April 13, 2017
This book probes if it is possible for PR practitioners to ethically navigate organizations toward CSR even when outcomes may be inconsistent with organizational self-interest. Importantly, how might PR practitioners recommend against doing something that may be consistent with organizational goals...
By Clea Bourne
December 02, 2016
The public relations profession positions itself as expert in building trust throughout global markets, particularly after crisis strikes. Successive crises have tainted financial markets in recent years. Calls to restore trust in finance have been particularly pressing, given trust’s crucial role ...
Edited
By Ian Somerville, Owen Hargie, Maureen Taylor, Margalit Toledano
September 01, 2016
International Public Relations: Perspectives from deeply divided societies is positioned at the intersection of public relations (PR) practice with socio-political environments in divided, conflict and post-conflict societies. While most studies of PR focus on the activity as it is practiced within...
By Pawel Surowiec
August 16, 2016
Nation Branding, Public Relations and Soft Power: Corporatizing Poland provides an empirically grounded analysis of changes in the way in which various actors seek to manage Poland’s national image in world opinion. It explores how and why changes in political economy have shaped these actors and ...
Edited
By Christine Daymon, Kristin Demetrious
August 03, 2016
Although there is a small body of feminist scholarship that problematizes gender in public relations, gender is a relatively undefined area of thinking in the field and there have been few serious studies of the socially constructed roles defining women and men in public relations. This book is ...
Edited
By Amber Hutchins, Natalie Tindall
March 23, 2016
While public relations practitioners have long focused on the relationship between organizations and their stakeholders, there has never been a time when that relationship was so dominated by public participation. The new model of multiple messages originating from multiple publics at varying ...
By Judy Motion, Robert L. Heath, Shirley Leitch
November 24, 2015
Social media is having a profound, but not yet fully understood impact on public relations. In the 24/7 world of perpetually connected publics, will public relations function as a dark art that spins (or tweets) self-interested variations of the truth for credulous audiences? Or does the full glare...
By Jessalynn R. Strauss
May 11, 2015
The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly widespread, as businesses seek to incorporate socially responsible behaviors while still being accountable to shareholders. Indeed some research has suggested that CSR in itself can form the basis of good PR by promoting ...
By Christian Schnee
December 10, 2014
It is widely assumed that a competitive political environment of public distrust and critical media forces political parties to manage communications and reputations strategically, but is this really true? Comprehensive control of communications in a fast-moving political and media setting isoften ...
By Robert E. Brown
November 17, 2014
The public relations of "everything" takes the radical position that public relations is a profoundly different creature than a generation of its scholars and teachers have portrayed it. Today, it is clearly no longer limited, if it ever has been, to the management of communication in and between ...