Organization and Communication: An Integrative Approach to Public Relations and Communication Management

Abstract

The following contribution outlines an approach to public relations in terms of the theory of organizations, placing at the centre of its argument the idea of organizations considered as social systems (the “meso-perspective”). Reputation and image, as qualities of public relations, constitute the social capital of an organization. This social capital finds expression in the degree of social trust, which an organization enjoys within its environment. Public relations operations serve, accordingly, to secure and to increase this “capital in the form of trust,” which goes in its turn to support the creation of real capital for the organization. On the communicative level, they do this by creating functional transparency. If we are to give an accurate picture of these inter-related circumstances, we must conduct our investigations in this area in a manner, which differentiates between three aspects or levels of public relations, namely (1) public relations as a network composed of the relations between an organization and its social environment, (2) public relations management as an organizational management function, and (3) public relations operations as specific activities having as their goals certain functional effects. Proceeding in this manner, we see emerge an integrated theoretical approach displaying a quality of connectivity vis-à-vis a large part of the existing theoretical approaches to public relations.KeywordsSocial CapitalReference GroupPublic RelationSocial TrustCommunication ManagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.