Lee Edwards

Abstract: This issue of Public Relations Inquiry could almost have been a special issue on the topic of the competitive relationship between organisations and activists. All the papers address the topic of how the promotional work of organisations and activists unfolds in a social context where public expectations are high, but attention is scarce and audiences can be fickle. In line with the journal’s mission, each one delivers an interdisciplinary critique of public relations work at points of societal change and transformation. The authors draw on different theoretical traditions – political science, activist communication, promotional scholarship and rhetoric – to construct analyses of some of the most contested contemporary societal debates in which organisations are implicated: gun control, animal rights, rape culture and the ethics of the pharmaceutical industries. Anderson (this issue) focuses our attention on an important research topic that crosses the scholarly domains of public relations, media studies and political science: the influence of framing and, in particular, counter-framing on audience perceptions of an issue. Taking the highly contested gun control debate in the United States as the empirical case, the author argues for the need to extend analyses in ways that take into account the dynamic and temporal context in which framing is constructed and its effects unfold. This includes the fact that message creation takes place in a competitive space, where action and reaction are enacted over time and across multiple platforms. Correspondingly, audience reactions to framing have to be assessed longitudinally, in order to accurately identify the impact it has on perceptions of an issue. As the author notes, audiences may or may not take notice of any particular frame, the effects of framing effects may decay over time or they may be transformed by the interactions between frame and counter-frame at different points. The dominance of any single frame over others is dependent, then, on organisations making continuous efforts to generate their own frames and counter-frames in response to other voices. The second article in this issue, by Sarah van den Bogaert and her colleagues, examines a different kind of context for competitive messaging between organisations and activists: the pharmaceutical industry. Focusing on the ways in which reputation is

TL;DR: In this article, the authors adopt a dialectical approach to analyze the connections between consistency and inconsistency in organizational communication, and highlight the ways relational thinking might prompt new research directions, in terms of recognizing the coexistence of inconsistency and consistency in discourse and practice, and the power dynamics that characterize their interactions.

TL;DR: In this article , a carboxylate-targeting reactive fragment screening platform using 2-aryl-5-carboxytetrazole (ACT) as the photoreactive functionality was proposed.