Introduction: Public Relations on the international stage. Academic discipline and professional reality (original) (raw)

This monograph entitled Public relations on the international stage. Academic discipline and professional reality introduces a selection of highly topical and scientifically interesting research on the theory and practice of public relations in various parts of the world. Public relations is characterised by being both a highly sought-after professional activity throughout the world (Dühring, 2015; Puentes-Rivera, Hernández-Martínez and Cuenca-Fontbona, 2020) and also a highly specialised and complex academic sub-field of communication, with multiple theoretical perspectives that coexist today (Botan and Taylor, 2004; Compte-Pujol, 2016; Fawkes, 2018). Notable among them is the functionalist or managerial perspective initiated in the final decades of the 20th century with the work of Cutlip, Ferguson and Grunig, among others, according to whom the term "public relations" could be considered a synonym for "communication management" (Míguez and Baamonde, 2011). Although in some areas public relations is still exclusively associated with publicity and media relations, the truth is that it also includes corporate and institutional communication, strategic planning and the implementation of communication, internal communication, lobbying, investor relations, marketing communication, issues management, crisis communication, event departments or, in many cases, by human resources departments (Cuenca and Verazzi, 2020). The first article is entitled "The function of internal communication during the COVID-19 health crisis: Transformation or transubstantiation?" and is by professors Joan Cuenca-Fontbona from the Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Marc Compte-Pujol from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Mariana Sueldo from the ISM University of Management and Economics in Lithuania. The text analyses the evolution of internal communication before, during and after the pandemic from a fundamentally qualitative point of view, through in-depth interviews with internal communication directors or communication directors of large multi-sectoral Spanish companies. The second article, "The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The perception of communications executives in companies: The role and challenges of internal communication" by professors