ABSTRACT
Public relations theory and best practices tend to focus primarily on companies, for-profit organizations, rather than on other types of organizations. This chapter examines activism, at least one case and one instance, to better understand some of the problems and the challenges for other organizations, often businesses or governments. If we think that public relations is limited to business promotion, we can ignore the promotional efforts by activists to call attention to, frame, and advocate one or many issue positions. In fact, we are likely to only obtain the democratic exchange long championed as the essence of public relations by seeing how and when activists engage in the dialogue that occurs on various issues. But, we would be remiss if we ignore the promotional aspects of activism by only addressing their issue engagement.
