Institute for Public Relations

“High performance and high integrity are good for the bottom line.” In a new section of the Essential Knowledge Project, Robert L. Heath, Ph.D., and Lan Ni, Ph.D. make the case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) based on existing research. While social responsibility may be a timeless concern, the topic began receiving serious management policy discussion during the 1950s. One way or another, all such discussions recall Milton Friedman’s famous claim that publicly held companies are responsible only for increasing profits by efficiently doing whatever they are in business to do. But critics believe that Friedman missed the impact of CSR ...

I want to thank the Institute for Public Relations and EUPRERA for the opportunity to share my research. This blog post describes the potential applications of the research I conducted. In a recent discussion, Shel Holtz wrote, “People listen to each other these days more than organizations.” In addition, I conducted a study and found that cultivating strong personal relationships can help an organization achieve its goals by Fostering an emotional connection with the organization Building social capital Enhancing recruitment and retention I have outlined below the strategies that the ...

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, argues that case in the inaugural event of the University of Maryland’s Grunig Lecture Series, sponsored by the Institute for Public Relations. Edelman believes that communications strategy and programming must be fundamentally reassessed today, in light of forces such as: the collapse of trust in financial institutions, a global rise in government intervention, the growing rich/poor divide, dispersion of authority/influence, and the morphing of mainstream and new media. Public relations traditionally has been relegated to the communications realm while management consulting and research are positioned in the strategy realm. But Edelman posits that public relations ...