ABSTRACT
Public relations as a scientific discipline appears to have a somewhat inferior status compared to other well-established disciplines in the social sciences arena. One possible explanation is that public relations has only recently become a distinct scholarly discipline with growing research and a body literature of its own (Sallot, Lyon, Acosta-Alzuru, & Jones, 2003; Synnott & McKie, 1997). In the 1980s, public relations was considered a professional field that could base its theoretical assumptions on research developed in and for other social sciences, including sociology, psychology, and anthropology, as well as more recent disciplines such as communication and media studies, journalism, political science, and management (Dozier & Lauzen, 2000; L’Etang & Pieczka, 1996). Thus, scientific research and theory development dealing primarily and specifically with public relations phenomena were not widely believed to be worthy of scholarly investigation (Pavlik, 1987), but public relations practice quickly professionalized and the first public relations academic journals were established as well as the first comprehensive study on public relations profession-Grunig’s Excellence study. This clearly indicated that public relations was becoming an applied social science, with an increasing demand for satisfactory theory development (Sallot et al., 2003).
