ABSTRACT
In an invited paper to the Public Relations Division of the Association for Education in journalism in the mid-1980s, Ferguson (1984) reviewed 9 years of research published in Public Relations Review and concluded that a paradigm focus for the field “would greatly enhance the prob ability of productive theory development” (p. ii.). That paradigm focus, she added, should be on relationships: “By this, the author means that the unit of study should not be the organization, nor the public, nor the comm unication process. Rather the unit of study should be the relation ships between organizations and their publics” (p. ii).
