Looking Over, Looking Out, and Moving Forward: Positioning Public Relations in Theorizing Organizational Network Ecologies

Public relations research has benefitted from theory development in the field of Communication. Yet, the contributions of public relations theory building to the larger Communication discipline are less clear. This may be due to the fact that public relations theories have focused on dyadic relationships with an organization at the center. This type of research has pursued a narrow understanding of relationships and neglected a broader understanding of how discourse shapes meaning and relationships. This article explores the social network perspective that places an organization's relationships in a wider context, its network ecology. We propose a conceptual model of how to apply social network analysis to studying systems of relationships and identify six propositions that provide guidelines for future research.

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