London College of Communication

Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB

“Community-Building for Organizations

Managing Change Using New Media”

14:30 to 15:30 Thursday, 15 May 2014,

by:

Dr. Dean Kruckeberg, APR, Fellow PRSA

Professor,

Department of Communication Studies,

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Based on:

Vujnovic, M., & Kruckeberg, D. ((2013). Conceptualization,

examination, and recommendations for a normative model of

community-building for organizations managing change using

new media. Paper presented at the 16 Annual International

Public Relations Research Conference “Exploring the Strategic

Use of New Media’s Impact on Change Management and Risk

on Theory and Practice,” Miami, FL, March 7-9, 2013.

WE ARE IN A REVOLUTION

• Considerable rationale exists today to suggest that global

society is in the midst of a revolution—socially, politically,

economically, and culturally, albeit this revolution is being

created primarily for economic reasons. We are living in

revolutionary times that are fundamentally changing us as

humans—changes that are being caused by advances in

communication technology.

Global society is in the midst of a revolution, and these

revolutionary times are fundamentally changing us as humans—

changes that are being caused by advances in communication

technology.

• Socially, face-to-face communication is being relinquished for

preferred electronic channels of communication.

• Politically, power differentials among the three social actors,

i.e., governments, corporations, and nongovernmental

organizations/civil society organizations, are being flattened,

sometimes juxtaposed, and unpredicted power oftentimes

eminates quickly from unformalized, unstructured, and

previously unrecognized and unseen sources—creating perhaps

an intended social justice, but also uncertainty and its

accompanying anxiety.

Global society is in the midst of a revolution—

• Economically, immense amounts of information (often unvetted

and suspect, but for which countervailing information is equally

available) is inexpensive to send and to receive.

• Culturally, a global culture is emerging, certainly in people’s

taste for consumer products, but arguably in cultural values,

themselves. Importantly, the communication technology that is

creating globalism also exacerbates the tensions of

multiculturalism. Kruckeberg notes that, in a globalized world,

societal values that are divergent can have no other trajectory

than to meet head-on, resulting either in conflict or in an

imperfect melding of cultures that may be accepted with

resistance.

But where do public relations scholars and practitioners

begin and from whom do we learn to address this

revolution?

• We need to withdraw, not only in our response to the

admonishments and directives of critics of existing public

relations theory, e.g., Valentini, Kruckeberg, and Starck (2012),

Vujnovic and Kruckeberg (2005), but even Hardt (1979), who

argues for a theory of society, all of whom address social theory.

• Rather, we recommend a theoretical framework and worldview

from the natural sciences, i.e., biotic communities and their

ecology, which in conjunction with natural history includes

human society and, we argue, encompasses its social theory.

A prescient natural scientist, by-and-large unknown to

public relations scholars and practitioners, was Aldo

Leopold, who was born in 1887 and who died in 1948.

• He is best known as the author of “a slender volume of natural

history vignettes and philosophical essays dealing with the

relationship of people to land.” A Sand County Almanac and

Sketches Here and There was published posthumously in 1949.

• In the 1960s, this book grew in popularity and eventually

surpassed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Stewart Udall’s Quiet

Crisis, and Barry Commoner’s Closing Circle as the

philosophical touchstone of the modern environmental

movement.

Yet, it is probably safe to assume that few public

relations scholars and practitioners have ever heard of

Aldo Leopold, …

• …who in fact has much to teach us during a revolutionary time

in global history in which a credible argument can be made that

the role and function, if not the body of knowledge, of public

relations, from among the professionalized occupations within

governments, corporations, and nongovernmental

organizations/civil society organizations, can best address the

needs of today’s global environment.

We argues for a holistic ecological community

worldview for public relations practice.

• Even though we borrow from Aldo Leopold to argue for

communication practices that would lead organizations toward a

more sustainable paradigm, we acknowledge the work of social

ecologists, primarily Murray Bookchin, whose philosophical work

dates back as far as the 1950s. He suggested that the

achievement of more harmonious and sustainable societies isn’t

solely based on individual ethical decisions, but also on

collective action based upon democratic ideals. These

philosophical approaches serve an important role in building our

arguments based on the work of Aldo Leopold.

Leopold first used the term “ecology” in 1920, when the

science of ecology was by-and-large unknown.

• However, the word “ecology” was first used in the late 1860s by

Ernst Haeckel, a German adherent of Darwin. Continental

biologists were the first to systematically explore this new

science that described and organized the distribution of plant

species according to their physiological characteristics.

• Leopold told his students:

Ecology tries to understand the interactions between

living things and their environment. Every living thing

represents an equation of give and take.

Leopold’s holistic conception of humankind’s place in

nature considered human behavior to be explainable

the same way as for other organisms, with no

distinctions between natural and human actions.

• To Leopold, humankind was an integral part of the land

community, just as other members of that community were

integral parts of humankind and its environments. Evolution

was a process that subsumed human history and that included

humankind.

•

In Leopold’s (1949) ecological interpretation of history,

humankind was a member of a biotic team. Leopold argued that

many historical events that had been explained solely in terms

of human enterprise were actually biotic interactions between

people and the land, determined by the characteristics of land

as much as by the characteristics of the humans who lived on it.

However, Leopold distinguished humans as having the

capacity that was unique among earth’s organisms: to

rectify their misdeeds, i.e., to become (or once again

become) citizens of the land community—but now

knowing, self-conscious citizens.”

• Leopold believed that world problems of his day were a sign that

man had exceeded, or approached too rapidly, a certain upper

limit of population density.

• Leopold further argued that the combined evidence of history

and ecology seemed to indicate that, the less violent the human-

made changes, the greater the probability of successful

readjustment in the pyramid. The biotic pyramid to which he

referred was an ecological description that he preferred to “the

balance of nature.”

In the beginning, Leopold noted, the pyramid of life was

low and squat, and food chains were short and simple;

• However, evolution added layer upon layer and link after link.

Leopold considered to be a scientific certainty that the trend of

evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota. Humans are

only one of many thousands of additions to the height and

complexity of this pyramid.

TECHNOLOGY

• Leopold said science should lead, not only to power, but also to

wisdom, warning that “all ecology is replete with laws which

begin to operate at a threshold, and cease operating at a ceiling.

No one law holds good through the entire gamut of time and

circumstances.”

• Leopold was concerned about technology’s impact on the land

as well as on human society. To Leopold, technology raised the

land’s carrying capacity for humankind, but this technology had

ignored the adjustments that were being forced onto animals

and plants, assuming that the take from the land as well as

human population could be increased indefinitely. Leopold

believed that, although the technologist sought peace through

more technology, assuming peace would occur as standards of

living were raised,…

…, Leopold observed that:

•

• “Nations fight over who shall take charge of increasing the take

and to whom the better life shall accrue. Even in peace-time the

energies of mankind are directed not toward creating the better

life, but toward dividing the materials supposedly necessary for

it.”

COMMUNITY

• Leopold recognized communities to be foundational in the

science of ecology. In his papers, he observed:

– The two great cultural advances of the past century were the

Darwinian theory and the development of geology…. Just

as important, however, as the origin of plants, animals, and

soil is the question of how they operate as a community.

That task has fallen to the new science of ecology, which is

daily uncovering a web of interdependencies so intricate as

to amaze—were he here—even Darwin himself, who, of all

men, should have least cause to tremble before the veil.

Leopold (1949) said that the basic concept of ecology is

that the land is a community.

• Leopold believed ecological theory provides a sense of social

integration of human and nonhuman nature; Leopold said that

human beings, plants, animals, soils, and waters are “all

interlocked in one humming community of cooperations and

competitions, one biota.”

ETHICS

• Leopold’s concept of ecology was of a community that is ethical.

Leopold (1949) considered an ethic to be a mode of guidance

for meeting ecological situations that are so new or intricate, or

that involve such deferred reactions, that the path of social

expediency would not even be discernible to the average

person. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the

individual in meeting such situations. “Ethics are possibly a kind

of community instinct in-the-making.” For Leopold (1949), all

ethics rested upon a single premise:

– (T)hat the individual is a member of a community of

interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete

for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him

also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a

place to compete for).

Leopold believed an “ecological conscience” was

lacking. “Ecology is the science of communities, and

the ecological conscience is therefore the ethics of

community life.” He believed:

• The extension of ethics, which thus far had been studied only by

philosophers, was actually a process in ecological evolution,

which sequences could be described in ecological as well as in

philosophical terms. Ecologically, an ethic is a limitation on

freedom of action in the struggle for existence. Philosophically,

an ethic is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct.

• Leopold said these were two definitions of the same thing, which

had its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or

groups to evolve modes of cooperation—called symbioses by

ecologists.

Leopold’s response to Darwin was that, As human

civilization advances, each individual should extend his

social instincts and sympathies to all nations and races,

however long this would take.

• To Leopold, the next step beyond what yet remained an

incomplete ethic of universal humanity was a land ethic, which

he nevertheless considered to be discernible on the horizon.

Leopold believed the land ethic simply enlarged the boundary of

the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals—

collectivity the land.

• However, Leopold said, “A land ethic changes the role of Homo

sapiens from a conqueror of the land-community to plain

member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-

members, and also respect for the community as such….”

In the long run, Homo sapiens will benefit from a

healthy biota, providing sufficient utilitarian rationale to

elicit political support for ecologically sound decisions.

Something good for owls, trout, and lizards would be

good for humankind.

• Leopold explained that humankind’s technological development

had suspended the “original” laws of carrying capacity and that

humans’ ethical development had suspended the laws of

predation. Leopold said the two were interdependent. “Tools

cannot be made or used without peace; peace cannot be

sustained without tools, for men who are hungry, either for food

or other necessities, automatically fight.”

• To maintain peace, ethics have to be mutually accepted;

however, sometimes this mutuality breaks down, resulting in a

reversion to the “ancestral predatory order.” Leopold noted a

problem: each such reversion is more destructive than the last,

due to advances in technology and social organization made

during the interval.

We recommend a normative model of community-

building for organizations in their attempts to manage

change using new media, arguing that 20th Century

public relations theories had failed to peel back layers of

inquiry.

• Considerable rationale exists today to suggest that global

society is in the midst of a revolution that is fundamentally

changing us as humans—changes that are being caused by

advances in communication technology.

• Public relations practitioners’ greater understanding of, let alone

ability to explain, predict, and control (direct), this global

revolution may be suspect at best and theoretically deficient at

worst. Yet a credible argument can be made that the role and

function, if not the body of knowledge, of public relations can

best address this need within organizations for understanding,

explanation, prediction, and direction.

Kruckeberg and Starck, Public Relations and

Community: A Reconstructed Theory, 1988.

An appropriate approach to practicing community (and public) relations must be derived through an active attempt to restore and maintain the sense of community that has been lost in contemporary society.

Through attempts by the public relations practitioner to help restore and maintain community, many of the community relations problems that practitioners now concern themselves with would not have evolved or would be more easily resolvable.

To attempt to do this requires practitioners to view public relations and its function from another perspective—a community-building, organic and, indeed, ecological model.

But where do public relations scholars and practitioners

begin and from whom do we learn to help us to do so?

• We recommend examination of a theoretical framework and

worldview from the natural sciences, i.e., biotic communities and

their ecology. In conjunction with natural history, this includes

human society that, we argue, encompasses its social theory.

• The lessons of natural science for public relations are more than

metaphorical and analogous; rather, public relations must

embrace a holistic ecological community worldview as well as

an “ecological conscience.”

We can learn much from Aldo Leopold and the science

of ecology.

• Leopold argued that many historical events were biotic

interactions between people and the land. Leopold recognized

communities as foundational in the science of ecology, and he

was concerned about technology’s impact on the land as well as

on human society. Human beings, plants, animals, soils, and

waters are “all interlocked in one humming community of

cooperations and competitions, one biota.”

• Leopold’s concept of ecology was of a community that is ethical,

noting, “Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-

making.” However, he believed an “ecological conscience” was

lacking.

It is important for public relations scholars and

practitioners to broaden their worldview for the benefit

of all, i.e., to assure a sustainable global society to an

inclusive benefit beyond that of an organization’s

obvious “strategic publics.”

• Today’s new media environment, which we argue is

revolutionary socially, politically, economically and culturally,

makes such incentives more clear, as well as more compelling.

• There is much to learn from the communities of soils, waters,

plants, and animals—collectivity the land—recognizing that

humans are only one of many thousands of additions to the

height and complexity of the evolution of this biotic pyramid.

Of course, coyotes don’t lobby Congress, and flowers

are seldom regarded as a primary strategic public, i.e.,

they are nonpublics; however, we argue they are part of

the “general public.”

• Homo sapiens have had a good run, but fundamental changes

are occurring in human society, and “ecologists” are needed, not

to create buzz about the latest app or to self-righteously claim to

practice two-way symmetry with primary “strategic publics,” but

to view public relations through the science of ecology and to

view their publics as all of the biotic communities within an

ecosystem.

Thanks for listening to me, London College of

Communication!

—Dean Kruckeberg