COM 610 Issue Management

I believe the most important ideas from this week's readings were the key components from the successful social media case study article. Allagui & Breslow (2016) examine four campaigns alongside their four categories which characterize an effective modern communications campaign. In short, these categories are a) the utilization of digital storytelling, b) compatibility with mobile screens and controls, c) the extent to which the online campaign catalyzes offline engagement, and d) to what extent the campaign allows sharing, both online and offline. Each of the successful campaigns were critically analyzed according to these components. I found them to be useful criteria to keep in mind if I work in public relations or campaign creation in the future. A recent example that has been at the forefront of my mind is how Purdue has been using their social media to bring attention to the issue of potential students choosing Purdue in the midst of this pandemic. There is a lot of u...

An important concept from the readings this week is transparency. Christensen and Langer (2009) define the overall concept as promoting availability of information, availability that minimizes opaqueness and complexity. The authors go on to explain how information is not truly successful in its transparent intent unless outsiders (such as individuals who are not organizational members) are able to unpack and understand the message. Otherwise, by manipulating a message to the extent that only insiders or experts can understand a message, organizations are hypocritical in their claims that they are being transparent. And obviously, organizations can also be hypocritical by claiming to be transparent when in actuality they do not provide open information. One example comes from the agricultural machinery manufacturing corporation John Deere. In 2018, they received an Ag Data Transparent seal of approval, which means that they effectively comply with agricultural data standards of techno...

The readings from this week made me think that we had already read about organizational identification before. However, I think it was simply referenced a few times in the concepts of past weeks, such as with values advocacy or general organization rhetoric techniques. That being said, it is a relevant and recurring concept in regards to organizational issue management. I appreciated how Cheney (1983) detailed the concept of organizational identification. After studying this reading, I understand organizational identification as the process or action by which someone identifies with a target (e.g. organization, group, person) whose characteristics, values, goals, and so on they agree with or support. Because of how there are hierarchies and divisions in society, there are many choices of targets with which to identify. Identifying with an organization can give individuals a sense of belonging. Additionally, it will influence how they respond to messages from that organization, particul...

The most salient idea from this week's readings is the concept of metaphors as explicated by Waymer (2018). I appreciated how he detailed the history and various theories contributing to metaphors, especially breakdown of a metaphor into the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject of the metaphor, and the vehicle is the object from which a rhetor takes attributes in order to describe the tenor. One example Waymer cited was Lakoff and Johnson's time as money example; he described how the perception of time (the tenor) as a valuable resource that we must "spend" wisely changes how we as cultural members perceive time. One recent example of a metaphor I can recall is from the Netflix film Miss Americana, which is a documentary about Taylor Swift. It was released in January of this year. There were various media references included throughout the documentary (both positive and negative). One example stated that "Taylor Swift is the music industry" (Wil...

This week surrounded the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, there was not one purely explanation piece that gave us deep foundational understanding of CSR. This surprised me because there is usually one article per week that does this; I believe there was not one because CSR is more of an industry than an academic concept. Due to the fact that I have seen this concept mentioned a lot in industry-related articles and out in the world, I will be delving into what CSR is and an example of this that I came across. CSR can be defined as the fact that organizations, " as members of a society, [...] have social responsibilities beyond economic and legal obligations; that they have the rights to act, but also moral obligations to contribute to the greater good of society, and to be accountable for their actions. (Janssen, 2013, p. 69). To expand, corporations cannot be solely concerned about their profits; they must also consider their publics, stakeholders, and t...

I believe the most important concept from this week's readings is actional legitimacy. I learned that actional legitimacy is to organizational legitimacy as issue management is to crisis management. Actional legitimacy is concerned with more regular corporate decisions and issue management. As a communication student who plans on pursuing a career in marketing/communications, this concept resonated with me and will be something I will reference in the future. I appreciated how the Boyd (2000) reading provided practical examples for how actional legitimacy is practiced in the real world. A current example is the issue of the coronavirus. I will discuss how two different entities handled this and how their responses relate to actional legitimacy. First, there is Purdue. They sent out an email a few weeks ago informing the university population about the crucial details of the virus and describing their proactive measures with patients at PUSH (Purdue, 2020). This action contributes...

This week's focus was on the concept of values advocacy: when an organization strategically emphasizes certain shared cultural values in order to persuade publics to align with them and support their organization. Support can be exercised whether that is through purchasing their product/service or supporting their policy influences. The first reading by Botsdorff & Vibbert (1994) helped me to understand the full scope of this concept and the three reasons that organizations employ it, namely enhancing their image, dodging criticism, and establishing a foundation of value premises that in the future can be used to benefit themselves or their policies. Values advocacy is important to recognize out in "the real world" in order to identify which of these three functions an organization is using. One example I thought of from the past week was from the Oscars, when Korean director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite won 4 Oscars. The victory came to my attention through soc...