Gatekeeping is one of the media’s central roles in public life: people rely on mediators to transform information about billions of events into a manageable number of media messages. This process determines not only which information is selected, but also what the content and nature of messages, such as news, will be. Gatekeeping Theory describes the powerful process through which events are covered by the mass media, explaining how and why certain information either passes throug...

Public Relations and Communication Management serves as a festschrift honoring the work of public relations scholars James E. Gruning and Larissa A. Grunig. Between them, the Grunigs have published 12 books and more than 330 articles, book chapters, and various academic and professional publications, and have supervised 34 doctoral dissertations and 105 master’s theses. This volume recognizes the Grunig‘s contributions to public relations scholarship over the past four decades.

This is a practical, bold, no-holds barred look at challenges facing educational leaders and the university programs that prepare them through mid-century. It examines key continuities and discontinuities of current times for school, education, and society. Both practice and preparation occur in contested social space, the implications of which are explored in a post industrial, digital age.The stark warning signs of the conflict roiling educational leadership includes the re-segregation a...

This book is the initial volume coming out of the "excellence project"--a comprehensive research effort commissioned by the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) Research Foundation. The purpose of this project was to answer two fundamental questions about public relations: What are the characteristics of an excellent communication department? How does excellent public relations make an organization more effective, and how much is that contribution worth economically? ...

Although there has been a great deal of rhetoric about learner empowerment in educational and community development circles, this book is the first to offer detailed examples of successful participatory practices in adult education spanning a wide range of program settings, such as schools, institutions, communities, and the workplace. The editors join with practitioner colleagues in the United States and Canada to document successes; to network about ideas from active projects, past and p...

The Future of Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management brings together an outstanding group of public relations scholars and practitioners to consider the indelible theory building in public relations of James E. Grunig and Larissa A. Grunig, who with David M. Dozier, produced the 1992 IABC Excellence Study, a benchmark body of work examining best practices in the public relations field. In this assembled collection, editor Elizabeth L. Toth and the contributors...

Public services touch the majority of people in advanced and developing economies on a daily basis: children require schooling, the elderly need personal care and assistance, rubbish needs collecting, water must be safe to drink and the streets need policing. In short, there is practically no area of our lives that isn't touched in some way by public services. As such, knowledge about strategies to improve their performance is central to the good of society. In this book, a group of leadin...

This volume highlights the integration of qualitative research methods into traditional journalism, offering new ways of expanding and enhancing news coverage. Designed for readers without prior experience in social science research, this collection presents a wide variety of qualitative techniques and their applications in journalistic practice. The work brings together contributions from professional journalists and journalism scholars who are highly experienced in conducting qualitative...

The current fashion for rolling back the state has seen the nonprofit or third sector playing an increasing role in what were previously the heartlands of the public sphere. The growing significance of the sector and its increasing reliance on public funds mean it has also attracted increased scrutiny. From outside the sector concerns have been raised about the accountability and performance of nonprofit organizations. From within the sector there has been considerable debate about whether...

The public relations landscape has changed dramatically from what it was in 1989, when the original Public Relations Theory volume was published. Reflecting the substantial shifts in the intervening years, Public Relations Theory II, while related to the first volume, is more a new work than a revision. Editors Carl H. Botan and Vincent Hazleton have brought together key theorists and scholars in public relations to articulate the current state of public relations theory,...

Based upon classical and contemporary theory and empirical research, this text forms a sociological analysis of organizations, focusing on the impacts that organizations have upon individuals and society.

The Introduction to Sociology course is usually the first contact that students have with the discipline of sociology. This course can determine whether students take other sociology courses or learn to use sociology in their lives as adults and citizens.First Contact identifies important issues facing instructors in introducing students to the sociological imagination. Drawing on the literature of teaching and learning in sociology and higher education more broadly, F...