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This paper aims to provide insight into communication strategies that may enable service ecosystem actors to co-create economic, social and/or environmental value.

To achieve this end, the authors rely upon the literature on value propositions, which represent strategic tools for communicating about the value package (i.e. the benefits that actors can offer to one another along with its costs). This literature stream – in combination with the communication literature – allows the authors to unravel five dilemmas that service ecosystem actors face when communicating about the value package with one another.

To co-create value in service ecosystems with the help of value propositions, actors need to reflect upon (1) whether to involve third parties when sending messages about their value package (cf. sender), (2) what information to share about their value package (cf. message), (3) whether to invest resources in face-to-face communication when conveying messages about the value package (cf. channel), (4) whether to reach out to a broad audience with value package messages (cf. receiver) and (5) whether to engage in institutional work through communication in response to various interpretations of messages about the value package (cf. effect).

This research advances the literature on value co-creation in service ecosystems by relying upon communication theory to unravel the dilemmas that come along with using and/or creating value propositions as strategic tools for communication.

This study is motivated to investigate the ethical challenges facing public relations professionals in today's digital communication environment. Specifically, the authors focused the research on the new ethical challenges in digital practice, the resources relied on when encountering ethical challenges and public relations professionals' efforts in seeking trainings on communication ethics.

An international online survey was designed and conducted in Canada and the USA. The final sample includes 1,046 respondents working full time in the profession of public relations and communication. In addition, the authors prespecified several demographic quotas in sampling design in order to recruit a more representative sample.

The research found nearly 60% of surveyed professionals reported that they faced ethical challenges in their day-to-day work, and there is a wide range of ethical challenges in digital practices. Results also revealed that professionals use various resources to deal with ethical issues. Those resources include ethical codes of practice of professional associations, ethical guidelines of their organizations and their personal values and beliefs. As common as experiencing ethical challenges, over 85% of surveyed professionals reported that they have participated in communication ethics training. However, only 30% of participants indicated that their ethics training took place in the past year.

The research provides solid evidence that the digital communication environment generates more ethical challenges, while it creates new ways of delivering content in corporate communications. Professional associations and organizations shall dedicate efforts in providing timely ethics training to PR professionals at all levels of leadership within and beyond corporate communications.

The purpose of this study is to elaborate on the notion of crisis distance and to investigate its influence on publics' crisis responses (i.e. crisis severity, crisis emotions, organizational reputation and supportive behavioral intentions). In addition, this study aims to unearth the underlying mechanisms behind the effects of crisis distance.

This study conducted an online survey by recruiting a representative US sample to examine the proposed research questions.

This paper offers empirical evidence that each dimension of crisis distance (i.e. temporal, social and hypothetical crisis distance) is associated with publics' crisis responses. Furthermore, by investigating distance-crisis-organizational sequence models, the ways in which crisis distance ultimately motivates publics' supportive behavioral intentions was revealed.

As an explorative study to propose a crisis distance model, the current research provides a springboard for expanding the existing scholarly literature on the nature of crisis.

Prevailing thought in academia holds that the ideal model of public relations is two‐way symmetrical. In this model, communication flows both ways between an organisation and a public while both are prepared to change their own behaviour. The result is posited as the most professional, ethical and effective practice. Contingency theory offers qualifications and reservations of excellence theory. One qualification is that dialogue between an organisation and a public may not be allowed for a number of reasons, such as legal constraints or moral convictions against compromising with a public. To build the contingency theory from the ground up, top practitioners are interviewed to learn whether six such proscriptive factors ring true in their experience. The implications of the findings for practitioners, educators and those interested in theories that help define professional practice in public relations are discussed.

This paper aims to analyze the opinions of newsletter editors in the Sierra Club in an effort to understand the roles an editor and newsletter content play in building relationships in an activist setting. There are two goals: to examine editorial decision making in an activist organization; and to examine the role of interpersonal interaction as part of an organizational‐public relationship (OPR).

In‐depth interviews with 14 Sierra Club newsletter editors examined issues related to newsletter content choice, issue frames, sources, and mission.

The findings illustrate normative practices for grassroots gatekeepers. Editors saw their role as facilitating relationship building and activism among members. This has theoretical implications for OPR theory by suggesting a new facilitative relationship type.

As all qualitative research, the findings of this study are not generalizable. This study is further limited because it focuses on a single organization and one communication channel.

Most editors suggested that content selection was based on the expertise of the editor or an editorial or executive board. This provides strategic communication opportunities for both the national and the grassroots organization, if the editorial decision making model is identified by strategists.

Mid‐level gatekeepers, such as newsletter editors, are an important public to study because of their potential impact on key publics. This paper provides both practical and theoretical implications. Practical implications include insights into how some activist gatekeepers make decisions and into information salience.

To examine how public relations practitioners define influence and where they find influence.

Depth interviews with 162 public relations practitioners.

Public relations professionals defined influence in terms of shaping decisions, having access, and being heard. They said they were most influential in crisis situations and when preparing communication messages or plans. They are least influential in strategic decision making, when they are perceived as technicians, and in interactions with senior executives. The most common influence tactic used by these professionals was rational influence.

The authors suggest eight tenets regarding influence for public relations practitioners.

Practitioners have long noted the need for increased influence across the organization. But, there is little scholarship that examines just how public relations pracitioners should increase their influence and ascent to organizational decision making circles.

To explain how the components of attraction theory work in unison to prompt students to take an initial stimulus and progress through critical thinking processes and into knowledge acquisition, organization, and synthesis.

Although schema theory has an important role in understanding knowledge acquisition, it does not provide directives for how to plan instruction so students can build their understandings and comprehension of subject matter. This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach to the implementation of a new theory of learning that builds on cognitive science, affect, and interest.

Students can become re-attracted to learning through effective teaching inclusive of a jolt, curiosity, retrieving explanations, counterexamples, clarifications, and embedding that information within schemata.

Proactive investigations and continued research on attraction theory can enrich our understanding of teaching and learning, provide answers for what works in the classroom, and equip us with tools from which to select for unique classroom circumstances.

Despite an increasing body of research on value co-creation through social media, service organizations still face difficulties in leveraging the potential of social media communication to facilitate value co-creation with multiple stakeholders. This article addresses this challenge by adopting a multistakeholder, communication perspective.

This article uses a conceptual approach and builds upon concepts widely recognized in the public relations (PR) literature to assess communication in multistakeholder social media-mediated exchanges.

This article discusses the role of social media communication in enabling value co-creation as well as the communicative challenges that come along with it. Moreover, applying PR academic insights to the service innovation and service recovery research fields, it advances theoretical propositions that predict how service organizations can successfully build upon the social media communication fundamentals – namely dialogue, engagement, social presence and conversational human voice – to trigger value co-creation with and among multiple stakeholders.

This article introduces selected relevant theoretical concepts from the PR field and develops novel theoretical propositions that are likely to make unique contributions to the service management field. The article also advances future research avenues that will help service and communication scholars together move the field forward.

Faculty status for academic librarians is an issue that has been the subject of much debate in recent decades. The purpose of this paper is to examine the key points raised during this debate, in the hope of achieving a suitable resolution.

This paper begins with an overview of the issue of faculty status for academic librarians from an historical perspective and then continues with a review of literature from the past three decades. The pros and cons of granting faculty status are examined, as well as alternate models, followed by a proposed recommendation.

While there are a number of concerns regarding the value of faculty status for academic librarians, such as disagreement with the basic tenet that librarians are primarily teachers, the weight of the evidence seems to support the granting of faculty status to academic librarians. This status provides academic freedom, recognition of librarians in their role as educators, and financial benefits and job security and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of American Colleges, and the American Association of University Professors.

While this paper is a review of selected relevant literature, only a small portion of the literature was of an empirical nature. There is a need for more studies which directly measure the impact of faculty status for academic librarians on the librarians themselves and the students, faculty, and institutions they serve.

The paper shows that with faculty status, academic librarians receive the same rights and privileges as other faculty and participate in college or university governance, thereby increasing the integration of the library with the institution.

In the knowledge management domain, the conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is critical because it is a prerequisite to the knowledge amplification process wherein knowledge becomes part of an organization’s knowledge network. In this article, knowledge exchange protocols are examined as a vehicle for improving the tacit to explicit knowledge conversion process. In an experiment testing the use of knowledge exchange protocols, it is learned that while structure may significantly improve the tacit to explicit knowledge conversion process, it also may matter how the structure is employed in this process.