Since Ferguson’s (1984) declaration of the value of understanding and researching organization-public relationships, much research has been dedicated to understanding the fucntions of relationships (see Broom, Casey, & Ritchey, 1997; Hon & Grunig, 1999; Huang, 2001; Ledingham & Brunig, 2000). Yet, in recent scholarship, there have been limited efforts to develop the concept of contemporary publics. Given the increasingly global, technological, and multicultural environment that public relations practitioners, researchers, and students must work to understand publics within, it is important to have an intellectual discourse about the status of contemporary publics and organizational approaches to segmenting publics for strategic purposes. This special call asks the question, what is the climate of publics-based research in public relations, and what are current challenges and approaches to the strategic segmentation of publics by organizations?

Vasquez and Taylor (2001) asserted, "the public is often understood as a means to an organization's end goal. Publics are, however, an integral part of public relations practice, and as a communicatively constructed social phenomenon, they deserve serious attention" (pp. 139-140). The common definition used to define a public stems from Dewey's (1927) understanding of the public: a group of individuals that organically emerge when impacted by a problem and who share a common interest in solving that common problem. However, although the public is the core concept of public relations, it is not well-defined or evolved to fit current media, political, and organizational climates.

Furthermore, public relations theorists and practitioners have few theories that address segmenting publics. For example, Vasquez and Taylor (2001) outlined four approaches--mass perspective (Price, 1992), situational theory (Grunig, 1983), agenda-building perspective (Cobb & Elder, 1983), and the homo narrans perspectives. Of those theories and directions, the situational theory of publics and the mass perspective have been the paramount theories used to explore and test the idea of publics. However, Sallot et al. (2003) noted that as of 2000, only 9 out of 148 theoretical articles in U.S. journals focused on situational theory, yet the situational theory is a mainstay in public relations textbooks. To exacerbate this theoretical stalemate, the situational theory of publics has been criticized as inflexible in addressing the shifting nature of publics and the social construction of issues in the minds of publics: "When a public is conceptualized as a state of consciousness or as a sum of aggregate variables, the nature, role and influence of communication are overlooked completely, or at a minimum are taken for granted” (Vasquez & Taylor, 2001, p. 150).

To address the criticisms, new work is being done in this area. Kim and Grunig (in press) have initiated a new wave of studies that elaborates on traditional information-seeking variables, such as information forwarding. Vardeman and Tindall (in press) have challenged the basic premise of aggregating identities through additive identity approaches that most practitioners and researchers have used to identify publics, and in their research on the health message construction for women of color, they found that multiplicative identities impact how women perceive messages and act on messages. Although the situational theory did apply to the publics, cultural and socioeconomic variables (which heavily impacted how women perceived the messages) were not addressed in the theory. This research echoes Sha’s work (2006) that used cultural identity theory to go beyond the typical and stagnant demographic approaches to segmenting publics.

The purpose of this special issue is to re-examine and question the basic set of assumptions and will serve as the natural extension of Vasquez and Taylor's (2001) call to explore publics in greater depth and through multiple prisms: "The challenge for public relations scholars and professionals is twofold: to demystify the ambiguity of a public and to link theory with practice for more effective relationships with publics" (p. 154). The purpose of this special issue is to explore recent developments within the current segmentation theories, to highlight other theories that communicators can use to segment and prioritize publics, to highlight how publics are dynamic and socially constructed phenomena that simple aggregative techniques cannot measure, and to demonstrate how these approaches have been used in practice. 

Potential Manuscript Topics: This call for papers invites research that explores new facets and approaches to conceputalizing and segmenting publics.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• Cultural identity factors in understanding and segmenting publics
• Intersectionality and the use of this theory in understanding publics
• Evaluation and measurement of segmentation
• Impact of culture, ethnicity, and globalization on the segmentation of publics
• Development of methods to segment publics
• Use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies to explore segmentation
• Application of segmentation approaches to reach publics
• The role that internal diversity of practitioners plays in the understanding of diverse publics
• Theories of public-specific communication (e.g., according to identities like race, gender, class, sexual orientation, role identity [e.g., as a parent, as a student, as a community activist], nationality, among other identities, as well as according to situations)

This issue will be prepared during 2011 for publication by the end of that year. 

Submission deadline: JANUARY 28, 2011

Queries: If you have questions about this CFP or would like to express interest in being part of this exciting project in 2011, please contact the guest editors Natalie Tindall (click here to email) and/or Jennifer Vardeman-Winter (click here to email).

Notes to contributors:

Papers submitted for the special issue must not have been published, accepted for publication, or presently be under consideration for publication elsewhere.  Manuscripts should follow APA style and be a maximum of 20 pages excluding tables and references.  Full submission guidelines are available on the PRism Web site at http://www.prismjournal.org/sub_guide.html .  Authors may submit manuscripts at any time prior to the set deadline. Manuscripts will undergo the peer review process. The estimated time for the review process is 8-10 weeks.

Natalie Tindall and Jennifer Vardeman-Winter (PRism Prize special issue editors).

References:

Broom, G. M., Casey, S., & Ritchey, J. (1997). Toward a concept and theory of organization-public relationships. Journal of Public Relations Research, 9, 83-98.

Cobb, R. W., & Elder, C. D. (1983). Participation in American politics: The dynamics of agenda-building. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

Ferguson, M. A. (1984, August). Building theory in public relations: Interorganizational relationships. Paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Gainesville, FL.

Grunig, J. E. (1983). Communication behaviors and attitudes of environmental publics: Two studies. Journalism Monographs, No. 81.

Hon, C. L., & Grunig, J. E. (1999). Guidelines for measuring relationships in public relations. Gainesville, FL: The Institute for Public Relations.

Huang, Y. (2001). OPRA: A cross-cultural, multiple-item scale for measuring organization-public relationships. Journal of Public Relations Research, 13(1), 61-90.

Kim, J.-N., & Grunig, J. E. (in press). Situational theory of problem solving. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Ledingham, J. A., & Brunig, S. D. (2000). Public relations as relationship management: A relational approach to the study of public relations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Price, V. (1992). Public opinion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Sallot, L., Lyon, L., Acosta-Alzuru, C., & Jones, K. O. (2003). From aardvark to zebra: A new millennium analysis of theory development in public relations academic journals. Journal of Public Relations Research, 52, 27-90.

Sha, B.-L. (2006). Cultural identity in the segmentation of publics: An emerging theory of intercultural public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research, 18, 45-65.

Vardeman-Winter, J., & Tindall, N. (in press). Toward an intersectional theory of public relations. In R. L. Heath (Ed.), Handbook of public relations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Vasquez, G. M., & Taylor, M. (2001). Research perspectives on “the public.” In R. L. Heath (Ed.),. Handbook of public relations (pp. 139–154). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.