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Members of the group were LEA advisers, dietitians, a representative from Education Catering and a School Medical Officer. An important consideration from the beginning was that any material produced should be attractive and interesting to use. From the Working Party a smaller writing group of advisers and dietitians was formed, and the task began. The bulk of the writing in the final stages was done by Issy Cole‐Hamilton and Jacquie Watson.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that public relations (PR) history‐writing has profoundly shaped the discipline and that its US bias may have limited theoretical developments. The author aims to explore the challenges in writing PR history and to consider some of the strategic philosophical issues and challenges that face historians.

Historical interpretations are shaped by authors' social constructions and thus the paper is written reflexively. The author discusses the way in which histories are structured and patterned by their authors' assumptions and values about the nature of time; human civilisation, progressivism, situationalism, inevitability, human agency, cultural change, flux and transformation.

Existing (largely US) PR historical writing is analysed in terms of its theoretical impact through the “four models” and it is argued that this typology is not appropriately applied to other cultures with different paths of historical evolution. As a way of demonstrating this point, key aspects of British developments in the twentieth century are drawn out to reveal a dozen “models” of PR practice that could potentially form the basis of theoretical research.

Overall, the paper contributes a discussion of historical methodology in relation to PR; shows the connection between history and theory‐building in PR; and demonstrates that history from other cultures can reveal alternative models for theoretical development.

The aim of this paper is to begin a conversation about historicising the public relations (PR) curriculum in universities.

The paper discusses PR history and historiography to identify the underlying ideological and methodological influences. It considers scholarship on PR education, and the inclusion or, more often, the exclusion of history except where it serves to reinforce a narrative of steady, and apparently unproblematic, professional development. The paper reviews the presentation of history in textbooks and discusses the authors' experiences of teaching PR history. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the inclusion of history in the PR curriculum offers an important critical intervention in PR education.

The PR curriculum tends to meet industry expectations around practice and skills in order to develop students as future practitioners. But this paper argues that a more historical and historiographical understanding of PR can develop in students important skills in research, analysis and interpretation. It can also introduce students to working with ambiguity and alternate perspectives. Foregrounding new histories and challenging existing histories introduce students to richer and more complex understandings of PR. It also introduces students to epistemology and ethics, and therefore offers a way to introduce critical thinking into the curriculum.

A more historical understanding of PR develops student skills in research, analysis and interpretation as well as critical thinking.

The purpose of this paper is to find out whether public relations (PR) students feel ready and adequately prepared for their future jobs and how they cope with the reputational and ethical issues of the public relations industry, also during the pandemic.

Survey research among public relations students in Poland was conducted twice, in 2019 and 2021, to explore their opinions on the applicability of public relations studies, career prospects for PR students in the industry and their approach to perennial reputational problems of PR. The 2021 survey also looked into challenges for the public relations education created by the pandemic, including lack of students' direct interactions with teachers and prevalence of online instruction methods.

The study shows that most public relations students feel confident about their career choices and appreciate their level of preparedness at PR schools for real-life assignments in the public relations industry. In addition, students are aware of the ethical and reputational issues of their chosen trade, and they tend to advocate for the field among friends and families and even rectify widespread misconceptions about PR. The role of public relations during the COVID-19 pandemic – according to respondents – has grown significantly, thus creating new, exciting opportunities for public relations professionals, though not necessarily for PR students or graduates.

This paper contributes to research on public relations education, its effectiveness, widely discussed reputational and ethical issues plaguing the field, relationships of educators and students with the PR industry and the role of PR students as advocates for their trade.

This paper seeks to compare different national PR histories in order to unfold the degree of abstract reflection in PR history writing. It aims to provide some suggestions for a future PR historiography, based on this comparison.

The paper compares British, German, and US American PR historiography. The study is based on a comparison of 36 PR histories. A triple matrix of theoretization is used in order to differentiate the histories.

Within the comparison American PR historiography accounts for 24 public relations history approaches, whereas Great Britain (1) and Germany (11) offer fewer histories. However, this richness in quantity does not lead to theoretical diversification. Owing to the paradigmatic obligation to a progressivist understanding, American PR historiography actually entails only one theoretic approach, while its German equivalent includes three different theoretic approaches and British PR historiography – being at its start – at least contains one explicitly non‐progressivist, methodologically well‐informed, fact‐oriented example. Paradoxically, the prevailing American PR historiography, on the one hand, conceptualizes PR as a modern phenomenon but, on the other hand, claims even ancient beginnings.

The corpus of analysis contains only studies that attempt to supply an encompassing overview of (national) PR history.

Public relations managers may use these findings to achieve a more nuanced critical understanding of the history of their occupation, and thereby reflect on its current state, which may lead to intensified ethical endeavours.

The paper presents a pioneer systematic comparison of the three national PR histories, which may lead to enhanced national and general PR historiography. Another value is the establishment of a theoretically informed comparative measuring instrument, which (in future) can also be applied in order to compare and improve other national PR historiographies.

The literature lacks knowledge on how organizations can manage trolling behaviors in online communities. Extant studies tend to either focus on user responses to trolling behaviors (i.e. a micro-level perspective) or how the trolling infrastructure is governed by platforms (i.e. a macro-level perspective), paying less attention to the organizational community host. With more organizations hosting online communities on social media networks and trolling behaviors increasingly disrupting user engagement within these communities, the current understanding of trolling management practices has become inapt. Given the commercial and social damage caused by trolling behaviors, it is important to understand how these can be best managed. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the meso-level perspective of trolling management by focusing on organizational practice.

The research design consists of an in-depth non-participatory netnography based on a case study of PETA’s (“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) Facebook community.

Six distinct trolling management strategies are identified and categorized by their direct versus indirect communication approach: non-engaging, educating, bolstering, expurgating, asserting and mobilizing. Some strategies are deemed to be more successful than others in generating positive community outcomes such as reduced trolling frequency or further support from like-minded community members.

The findings contribute to the meso-level perspective in the trolling management literature by introducing a novel, empirically informed typology of organizational trolling management strategies.

Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.