Browsing by Person "Pieczka, Magda"

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Action Research and Public Relations: Dialogue, Peer Learning, and the Issue of Alcohol
(Sage, 2013-05-14) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma
This paper presents an action research project, which transformed dialogic techniques used policy making and community development into an innovative approach to education about alcohol. The project was developed by a group of teenage volunteers, the AlcoLOLs, and two public relations researchers, tested in a local school, presented at the Scottish Parliament to policy stakeholders concerned with alcohol, and subsequently extended to a number of schools across the city of Edinburgh (Scotland). The paper makes a contribution to public relations by offering a detailed analytical account of dialogue as a method of inquiry and a mechanism for change. The paper also introduces the concept of extended epistemology as a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of relationship and on relationship management. Finally, the paper argues that action research has the transformative potential for the development of academic knowledge in the field and as an approach to education and training of practitioners.
AlcoLOLs Project: Final report, March 2016
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2016-03-31) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma; Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
This report evaluates the AlcoLOLs project, funded by the Robertson Trust and conducted in Edinburgh 2013-2015. The project was designed to tackle the issues alcohol presents for young people and worked by combining insights from dialogue, peer education, and a harm reduction approach. The intervention was co-designed by young people and implemented by them in six secondary schools in the North East of Edinburgh, eventually reaching over 3000 young people. The AlcoLOLs, a name they chose for themselves, were volunteers who experienced dialogue at Queen Margaret University where they received training in facilitation and education about alcohol. Subsequently, the AlcoLOLs ran their own dialogue groups in schools, meeting each group of approximately 15 pupils twice and reaching on average 1000 pupils a year. School dialogue groups were designed to problematize alcohol, question participants’ attitudes and behaviours, offer useful knowledge, develop new communication skills to support learning, resilience, and, where appropriate, aspire to change behaviours. Our approach was: to treat alcohol consumption as a social, cultural practice; to acknowledge that persuasion and information-giving were insufficient communication methods to tackle the issue: and to adopt a harm reduction — pragmatic and non-judgmental — way of working. The AlcoLOLs project, consequently, was designed around dialogue and peer-learning and it demonstrably delivered a range of beneficial outcomes for participants: new skills and knowledge, change of attitudes and behaviours (effective self-regulation), and the promise of a potentially larger-scale cultural transformation.
AlcoLOLs, Re-thinking Drinking: Developing a shared leadership approach for alcohol education
(SAGE, 2019-11-13) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo; Pieczka, Magda
Objective: The aim of this article is to extend and elaborate ways of conceptualising, enabling and practising peer leadership in whole-school alcohol education programmes.
Case studies as narrative accounts of public relations professional practice
(Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2007-08) Pieczka, Magda
This article offers a narrative analysis of competition case studies, a genre of public relations discourse. The aim is to examine the representation of public relations expertise produced by practitioners in cooperation with a professional association. Using narrative concepts such as character, narrative function, plot, point of view, and time, the analysis identifies ways in which the actual experience of practice is narratively transformed, and reflects on the reasons behind this transformation. Findings are presented under 3 main headings: professional work, narrative transformations, and professional legitimacy; and they highlight the interplay of individual experience and professional group aims.
Communication and action: Re-reading Habermas in the age of activism
(Lodz University Press, 2020-02-15) Pieczka, Magda
The combined effects of digital communication technologies, political upheavals around the world, waves of powerful activism and protests have injected a new urgency into communication research. How communication theory is able to respond to this challenge is a matter of discussion, including the question of the adequacy of older theories to the new circumstances. This paper, aims to add to this discussion by returning to Habermas’s pragmatics, one of the 20th century communication classics, to reflect on how communication and other forms of action interact in campaigns for social change in the context of growing reach of strategic communication and the growing role of social media in activism. This article starts by posing theoretical disjuncture as a problem shared by a number of communication subfields, such as public communication, public relations, communication for social change, and my particular example, development communication. The more recent scholarship, however, has moved away from this state of knowledge. Instead, scholars highlight the need to embrace non-linear models, of communication for social change and appear to embrace hybridity to deal with the theoretical confusion in the field. The analysis presented in this article aims to demonstrate that Habermas’s communication pragmatics works well to explicate complex campaigning practices in a consistent and yet theoretically expansive way. Re-reading Habermas makes it possible also to respond to the call articulated by social movement scholars to move beyond the limits of strategy and to recognize the importance of larger cultural conversations and scripts. Conceptualizing public campaigning as chains of speech acts, defined here as both linguistic and nonlinguistic acts, offers an analytical tool that works across different levels, spaces, and actors involved in social change efforts and that privileges communication as the explanatory mechanism for the contemporary social change praxis. Finally, returning to Habermas’s work underscores the importance a valid position, rather than of desirable identity, from which to engage with others in the social world. This invites a clear and consistent focus on action and its basis (moral position) rather than on attributions ascribed to organizations and campaigners (identity). The key question thus shifts from ‘Do you like me/trust me sufficiently follow me?’ to a more substantial, ‘Is this a good thing to do?’
Communication and action: towards a conceptual framework for communication management
(2014-11) Pieczka, Magda
Critical perspectives of engagement
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2018-04-27) Pieczka, Magda; Johnston, Kim A.; Taylor, Maureen
The idea that it is imperative for organizations, be they governments, businesses, scientific or arts institutions, to relate to the world in a new way has gathered momentum since the 1990s. Labeled as participation, involvement, partnership, collaboration, co-production, co-creation, or engagement, it has increasingly been institutionalized across a range of fields. This chapter deals specifically with the discourse of engagement in its three contextually shaped variants of public, employee, and stakeholder engagement as they appear in texts produced by expert practitioners. This discussion takes a critical perspective and investigates engagement by problematizing the phenomenon in a Foucauldian fashion. The chapter aims to show how engagement is constructed in discursive practices shared by engagement experts. It is, therefore, concerned with texts that combine instruction and prescription and thus constitute and regulate engagement. This discussion is developed in three steps, presented in three subsequent chapter sections: Discourse and Critique explains the approach, The Meanings of Engagement presents the analysis of the three discourses, and Problematizing Engagement offers concluding remarks.
Dialogue and critical public relations
(Routledge, 2015-08-22) Pieczka, Magda; L'Etang, Jacquie; McKie, David; Snow, Nancy; Xifra, Jordi
Dialogue and science: Innovation in policy-making and the discourse of public engagement in the UK
(Oxford Journals, 2012-09) Pieczka, Magda; Escobar, Oliver
This paper examines the way in which innovation in science policy in the UK over the last 25 years has been built around a discourse of changing preferences for modes of communication with citizens. The discussion, framed in debates and developments that deal with deliberative democracy and public engagement, draws on discourse analysis of key policy documents, statements made by members of the science policy network, and on interviews with public engagement practitioners. The relationship between science and society emerges as a 25-year old project of crisis management organised into three distinct models: public understanding of science,public engagement, and public dialogue. The analysis questions the existing narrative of progress and evolution constructed around key switch points, highlights the overwhelming influence of public understanding of science approaches, and attends to the question of the viability of public dialogue as the mainstream activity in science communication and policy-making.
Dialogue in Scotland?: A forum with communication practitioners.
(Centre for Dialogue, Queen Margaret University, 2010) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma; Escobar, Oliver
On the 2nd of June 2009 a group of 30 communication practitioners, organisational leaders, academics and policy makers met at Queen Margaret University (Edinburgh) to explore the role of dialogue in Scotland. What follows is a review and commentary of the practical and theoretical issues that emerged during the Forum.
Editorial
(Sage, 2017-01-17) Pieczka, Magda
The first issue of 2016, our sixth volume, opens with an essay on the public interest, a topic that is more than ever urgent not only for us as public relations and communication specialists but also for us as citizens living in the world that has rapidly grown more turbulent, uncertain and divided. Johnston's essay, 'The public interest: a new way of thinking for public relations?' calls for a renewed and substantive engagement with this idea in the field of public relations. The article offers a review of what could be described as episodic and modest efforts to connect public interest with public relations, as well as an overview of the way in which the concept has been developed in a range of disciplines and related practices such as law, journalism, policy and planning. This provides a platform from which to argue that public relations may benefit in two ways from incorporating existing bodies of knowledge about public interest: this may facilitate the development of interdisciplinary capabilities, both theoretically and across applied contexts where practitioners work, and contribute to the professional project through learning from how others navigate the tensions between conflicting interests, a problem fundamental to public relations practice.
(Editorial) Cultures and places: Ethnography in public relations spaces
(2012-11) L'Etang, Jacquie; Hodges, C.; Pieczka, Magda
Governance through communication
(Wiley, 2015-05-21) Pieczka, Magda; Roper, Juliet
Involving communities in deliberation: A study of three citizens' juries on onshore wind farms in Scotland
(The University of Edinburgh on behalf of ClimateXChange, 2015-05-01) Roberts, Jennifer; Escobar, Oliver; Pamphilis, Niccole; Thompson, Andrew; Elstub, Stephen; Lightbody, Ruth; Mabon, Leslie; Aitken, Mhairi; Pieczka, Magda; Hagget, Claire
Looking back and going forward: The concept of the public in public relations theory
(SAGE, 2019-09-10) Pieczka, Magda
This article examines the development of the public as a foundational concept in public relations theory. It provides an overview of the way in which public relations has understood the term as referring to two distinct phenomena of a public and the public. The article approaches public relations theory unfolding of a narrative identity of public relations. The discussion subsequently reaches to the work of Michael Warner and Judith Butler to consider the limitations and implications of the Situational Theory of Publics (STP) and the deliberativist approach to the public derived from the work of John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas. In its final sections, it redefines the public as a family of three distinct but at times overlapping terms: an audience as a public of shared spaces; a self-organized public of shared attention, and the public as a political and social imaginary. This article argues for adopting the performative approach to the public to tackle some of the biases in public relations theory. It also suggest the PESO model of communication as a useful starting point to create a more complex understanding of the formation of the public (in all three senses) in relation to processes of co-creation and circulation of a wide range of text.
Mediating the contributions of Facebook to political participation in Italy and the UK: The role of media and political landscapes
(Palgrave, 2018-05-15) Pieczka, Magda; Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
Over the last decade, an increasing number of academic studies have examined how digital technologies can contribute to political participation, with numerous publications focusing on social networking websites. This article adds to this strand of research by tackling the scarcity of cross-national comparative studies in the field. Drawing from an original dataset acquired by combining a cross-national comparative approach and a mixed-methods methodology, this paper explores how media and political landscapes mediate the contributions of Facebook to citizens’ political participation in Italy and the United Kingdom. A participatory gap between Italian and British participants, with Italians displaying higher levels of political participation through Facebook, is found and explained with reference to three contextual factors: the greater diffusion and relevance of other online platforms such as Twitter in the UK; Italian participants’ more negative perception of traditional media linked to the high level of political parallelism typical of the Italian media system; and the presence in Italy of a political party such as the Five Stars Movement making full use of the communicative and organizational affordances of Facebook. The findings indicate that the contributions of Facebook, and digital technologies in general, to political participation must be analysed in context, within the larger patterns they fit into, and cannot be examined in isolation. Such contributions are better understood if considered within the hybrid media system in which different digital platforms interact, merge and compete. Similarly, the political scenarios in which citizens and political parties operate need to be accounted for when looking at the links between the Internet and politics.
On Bauman: Power, ethics and social hermeneutics
(Routledge, 2018-04-17) Pieczka, Magda; Ihlen, Øyvind; Fredriksson, Magnus
With the concept of liquid modernity - Bauman offers an understanding of postmodern society as a continuation of modernity. His idea of adiaphorization could inspire the pursuit of a sociological explanation of the problem of ethics in public relations practice. Responding to Bauman in research terms directs us towards hermeneutic phenomenology as an approach to illuminate public relations practice by exploring tensions and structures within the experience of the individual consciousness of practitioners. A number of specific points are offered in relation to the potential of Bauman's work to contribute to research, pedagogy, and practice in public relations. These could be summarized under terms drawn from the sphere of Bauman's thought such as: nomadism, disobedience, social hermeneutics, a commitment to the emancipatory goals of knowledge together with a commitment to humanity as the foundation for action. The discussion concludes with the importance of approaching public relations phenomenologically through the prism of the individual's experience of professional life in the liquid organization.
Public engagement: concept, practice and jurisdictional implications for public relations
(2014-09) Pieczka, Magda
Public interest communication: A framework for systemic inquiry
(Routledge, 2018-07-18) Johnston, Jane; Pieczka, Magda; Johnston, Jane; Pieczka, Magda
This chapter confronts the public interest showing it to be challenging both conceptually and practically. It discusses an overview of political theories of public interest and approaches which have emerged since the 1920s, bringing the public interest literature into dialogue with research in communication and public relations (PR). The chapter pursues the idea of the public interest by discussing the key themes and arguments in the debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, described as 'a staple of American political thought' and, given its specific historical and political place, also a staple of modern democratic thought. It turns to communication theory, drawing on the work of Habermas, on some of the critiques of the public sphere, on the deliberative democracy literature, and on the work of Castells, thus placing the public interest in the context of communication networks and the network society.
Public relations and 'its' media: Exploring the role of trade media in the enactment of public relations' professional project
(Sage, 2013-01) Edwards, Lee; Pieczka, Magda
This paper explores the relationship between trade media and the construction of occupational legitimacy in the context of professional projects, using the example of public relations. We suggest that the practices of trade journalism result in such media playing the role of an institutional sub-system within occupational fields such as public relations, helping to construction occupational archetypes that have disciplinary effects on practitioners and provide the basis for public claims to legitimacy. We illustrate our argument by presenting the results of a critical discourse analysis of PRWeek, the main trade publication for public relations in the UK, to demonstrate how jurisdiction, practice and practitioners are constructed through media discourses in ways that serve the professional project articulated by the powerful actors in the field .