Situational Theory of Publics

James E. Grunig of the University of Maryland developed the situational theory of publics to put meaning into the term public, which is one of the two key words in the phrase public relations. Public relations practitioners often use the term public to refer to the mass population, which they also call the general public. At other times, they use the plural term publics to refer to the groups for which public relations programs are planned—especially journalists, employees, consumers, investors, governments, local communities, and members of associations and nonprofit groups. Practitioners also commonly use the terms stakeholders and publics interchangeably.

In contrast, J. E. Grunig distinguished between stakeholders and publics and used the two concepts to segment the general population into categories that help communication professionals identify strategic publics and to plan and evaluate public relations programs. He considered the term general public to be a contradiction in terms because a public is always a specialized group whose members have a reason to be interested in the activities and behaviors of organizations.

In its current state, the situational theory of publics is part of J. E. Grunig's theory of the role of public relations in strategic management. Following the lead of John Dewey, who wrote about publics in the 1920s and 1930s, Grunig theorized that publics arise when organizations make decisions that have consequences on people inside and outside the organization who were not involved in making that decision. In addition, publics often want consequences from organizational decisions that organizations might be reluctant to provide—such as lower prices, stable employment, or less pollution.

Grunig reserved the term stakeholder for general categories of people who are affected by the actual or potential consequences of strategic, or important, organizational decisions. Stakeholders are people who have something at risk when the organization makes decisions. Stakeholder categories generally are the focus of public relations programs, such as employee relations, community relations, investor relations, consumer relations, or government relations.

Within each of these stakeholder categories, however, the situational theory can be used to identify types of publics that differ in the extent to which they communicate actively, passively, or not at all about organizational decisions that affect them. Active publics, in turn, can develop into activist groups, or join or support activist groups. Active and activist publics make issues out of organizational consequences, and these issues may lead to crises. Thus the situational theory can be used to identify active publics in programs of environmental scanning, issues management, and crisis communication.

The situational theory is built from an explanation of why people communicate and when they are most likely to communicate. It uses the concepts of active and passive communication behavior to segment the general population into publics likely to communicate about one or more problems that are related to the consequences of organizational behaviors. The theory is situational because problems come and go and are relevant only to people who experience problematic situations related to organizational behaviors. As a result, publics arise and disappear as situations change, and organizations rarely, if ever, have a permanent set of publics.

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