A Comparison of Issues Manager and PR Educator Worldviews.

Traditionally, public relations educators have taught basic writing and editing skills to future practitioners. Recently, other skill areas have been added to the traditional mix, including research methods and issues management (Turk & Russell, 1991).Since Howard Chase first coined the term "issues management" in 1976 (Chase, 1984), a plethora of practitioners and scholars have offered their own descriptions. Issues management has been characterized as a process (Buchholz, 1982), a tool (Jones & Chase, 1979), and as a new science (Chase, 1984). Researchers have alternately discussed issues management as a means for helping organizations mold public policy Uones & Chase, 1979) and as a vehicle "not intended...for creating social change or for controlling societal events" (Wartick & Rude, 1986, p. 124).A number of authors have noted their frustration regarding the numerous, contradictory, and often underdeveloped conceptualizations ofissues management. In 1986,Wartick and Rude called on "those involved in IM...to articulate more openly the assumptions and techniques which underlie effective IM. In other words, the boundaries of IM--both what it is and what it isn't--must be more clearly delineated" (p. 138). Similarly, Nelson (1990, p. 27) summoned issues managers to articulate "a clear-cut rationale for its own existence." Nelson noted that the failure to do so would call the future of issues management into question.Two groups important to the articulation of issues management are public relations educators and managers involved in the issues management process. As active participants in the issues management process, public relations managers have a vested interest in the further articulation of issues management (Lauzen, 1994). Public relations managers contribute to issues management through boundary spanning activities. According to White and Dozier (1992, p. 93), boundary spanners are "individuals within the organization who frequently interact with the organization's environment and who gather, select, and relay information from the environment to decision-makers in the dominant coalition." Every contribution practitioners make to issues management is mediatedby the knowledge they accumulate through boundary spanning activities and through their unique perch at the edge of their organizations.In this study, issues management is conceptualized as the process which allows organizations to know, understand, and more effectively interact with their environments. Prior research (Hainsworth & Meng, 1988; Heath & Cousino, 1990; Jones & Chase, 1979; Lauzen & Dozier, 1994) suggests that the issues management process consists of a series of steps or stages including issue identification and monitoring (environmental scanningj, issue analysis, message formation, and incorporation of this "intelligence" into the organization's strategic plan.Public relations managers often contribute to the issues management process through environmental scanning efforts. Managers use both formal scanning (media content analysis, surveys of publics, focusgroup studies of key stakeholders) and informal scanning (media contacts, monitoring written and phone complaints) to act as an early warning system for organizations (Dozier, 1990). Public relations also contributes through practitioner-role enactment that prescribes solutions as experts, that facilitates management decision-making, and that creates opportunities for the dominant coalition and key publics to communicate with each other (Broom, 1982; Broom & Dozier, 1986). Finally, public relations contributes to organizational responses to issues by devising action and communication strategies to manage relationships with key publics around important issues.Clearly, agreement between public relations educators and managers would be beneficial to the present and future practice of issues management. Nelson (1990, p. 28) noted that "those charged with issues management responsibilities generally lack a common grounding in education, theory, or practice. …