Participants indicated that it is imperative for
the organization to communicate with a wide
range of individuals, groups and organizations.
The main constituencies participants mentioned
include GIs, COs, different religious
organizations and faith groups, other peace or
activist organizations, and organizations with
similar missions.
The organization communicates with different
constituency groups for different reasons.
According to the Counselling Coordinator, the
organization communicates with people in
the military to ensure that their rights are
protected, for instance, through the GI Rights
Hotline and other forms of counselling. The BVS
Volunteer argued that the organization needs to
build relationships with different religious
organizations as they are the ‘backbone’ of
the organization, or the source of ‘the majority
of our donations’. Board Member 1 added, ‘It is
very important to engage them [the religious
and faith organizations] in our advocacy efforts’.
The Executive Director revealed in the interview
that the organization participates in
activities other organizations with similar missions
arrange: ‘[We] go and table [set up a table
in those activities for] the Centre… We work
with some organizations to set up conferences’.
The BVS Volunteer regarded the communication
between the organization and other
organizations with similar missions as a kind of
alliance-building effort:
Beyond just the different faith organizations,
there are a lot of other organizations
with similar missions that we need
to communicate with, like XXXX, a very
very similar organization to us, like
different counter-recruitment organizations…
I mean, especially now they are
planning a kind of large international
conscientious objection day with all the
other different groups that are against
wars persistently.
The organization communicates with its
publics through literature, newsletters, the GI
Rights Hotline, conferences and meetings,
speaking engagement, trainings and workshops.
Among them, literature is probably
the most used communication channel, as
evident on its Web site.
Participants confirmed the critical role of
literature. The BVS Volunteer thought literature
is a good way to help the organization
reach a large group of publics or constituencies
all at once. For the Executive Director,
literature is also an important part of their
educational efforts. All participants nominated
the GI Rights Hotline as one big part of the
organization’s public relations. Also demonstrated
on its Web site, the organization’s
counsellors do address critical issues and
concerns through the Hotline.
The Lobbyist, the Outreach Coordinator and
the Counselling Coordinator suggested that
the organization also works with local organizations,
such as community councils and
schools, to organize speaking engagements
and draft trainings. As the Outreach Coordinator
said, ‘We go there and educate them
about conscription, CO issues, and draft
regulations. And we train pre-enlistment
counsellors and draft counsellors’.
External communication with target
organizations
The two key target organizations the organization
works with are the Selective Service and
the Congress. Participants indicated that their
relationship with the Selective Service is
largely cooperative, with mostly direct and
two-way communication. Board Member 3
analysed the reasons for such a relationship:
We communicate with the Selective Service
for two reasons. For one,we get information
Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Public Affairs, November 2009
DOI: 10.1002/pa
296 Hua Jiang and Lan Ni
from them and their manuals so that we get
information to draft counsellors who need
to know how the Selective Service functions.
And also, we need to communicate with
them because we want to change the
procedure, i.e. the way they handle things
related to the draft or CO.
The organization communicates with the
Congress mainly through lobbying, indicated
by the Lobbyist and shown on its Web site as
well. When the Lobbyist goes to Congress, he
brings the organization’s various publications
such as rationale for a Military Conscientious
Objector Act, a flow chart of current Conscientious
Objector policy versus proposed
bill, a brochure about the organization, etc.
The Lobbyist stressed the importance of
talking to those Congresspersons face to face
in order to influence and change their attitudes
and inform them about what the organization
actually does.
Discussion and conclusions
The findings of this study have important
implications to both theory and practice about
activist public relations.
Explicating the levels of identity for
activist organizations
This study suggests that the identity of an
activist organization does involve multiple
levels (Cote and Levine, 2002). First, regarding
the ego identity, the way an activist organization
identifies itself comes from its fundamental
goals and missions. The activist organization
aims to serve as an educator and
protector for a certain population (GIs and
COs), which was revealed as a key concept in
both the interviews and on-line publications.
Second, its personal identity is manifested in its
interactions with other organizations and
publics. The participants knew very well that
the target organizations (e.g. the Congress)
might perceive them as a typical activist group.
However, this organization tried to maintain its
own identity as mostly an education and rightsprotection
based faith organization and made a
visible effort to differentiate itself from other
activist groups who were perceived to engage
in disobedience behaviours. Third, social
identity is established by conforming to
accepted conventions or norms, in this case,
being a credible representation for its publics.
When explaining what it is and who it is
working for, this activist organization constructed
its central identities that originated
from its fundamental goals and values, which
were used to distance itself from other activist
groups but were still conforming to accepted
social norms for any activist group. This finding
provides a useful framework for understanding
the identities of activist organizations, not from
how they stand in relation to target organizations,
but from their own multi-level construction
of identities. This finding has practical
implications as well. Practitioners
communicating with activist groups may use
the framework as a general guideline; practitioners
working for activist groups, on the
other hand, may use this to learn how to
overcome one major challenge all current
activist groups confront (Smith and Ferguson,
2001), i.e. to position the organizations and to
compete for the limited resources and attention
from publics.
A dual role—the most salient feature
of identity negotiation for activists
When playing the dual role in their interactions
with internal publics and target organizations,
activist groups face great challenges. Results of
this study helped explicate what the ‘dual role’
actually entails.
The biggest challenge for the organization
was the expectation of being the full representation
for themultiple voices uttered by their
diverse publics internally and serving as the
representative with a clear, unified and easy-tounderstandmessagewhencommunicatingwith
target organizations. Such a challenge or
dilemma, to a large extent, stemmed from the
manifestation of this organization’s identity
salience in different situations. As a ‘public’, it
has tomake sure its voices are heard.As a ‘public
Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Public Affairs, November 2009
DOI: 10.1002/pa
Activists playing a dual role 297
communicator’, it is supposed to be a responsible
and ethical representative.
The way this activist organization resolved
this challenge has much to do with establishing
overlapping ‘zones of meaning’ in identity
negotiation. First of all, the organization stayed
true to its fundamental goals and values, to serve
as the educator and source of information.
These goals remained the same with different
audiences. Second, it remained credible in front
of both audiences. By being an honest advocate
for its own publics, the organization gained
trust from its target organizations. By speaking
up in front of target organizations, it won
credibility from its own publics. Such a
theoretical understanding may help practitioners
address the dilemma of facing conflicting
expectations from different publics.
Identities and public relations
practices
The activist organization used publicity or
public information as its key public relations
strategies. From the perspective of the normative
models (Grunig and Grunig, 1997; Rodino
and DeLuca, 1999) or the developmental stage
model (Heath, 1997), this organization may not
be practicing the best public relations. However,
we found that this organization did what
they did because of their self-perceived
identities: a peace and education faith organization.
For example, they distributed a large
amount of literature because they wanted to
educate people about what CO actually is.
They offered the hotline service because they
wanted to provide assistance to GIs and COs.
They did not engage in violent or radical
actions, because they perceived themselves as
different from radical activists.
This finding also supported the notion that
language, semantics included, can play a
powerful role in the construction of identity
(Henderson, 2005). The way that the activist
group in the current study consistently chose
to use words such as ‘education’ and ‘information
provider’ demonstrated its choice in
presenting themselves, their values and their
missions.
As discussed in the conceptualization, an
activist organization may not go through all five
stages of Heath’s (1997) model. In fact, this
study supported the argument that an activist
group’s mission or goal may determine which
stages it goes through. Positioned as an
education faith organization, this group did
not attempt to engage in confrontation, negotiation
or resolution. Rather, it focused mostly
on the stages of strain (recognizing issues and
seeking legitimacy) and mobilisation (forming
organizations and mobilizing resources).
Interestingly, many challenges facing this
group may also result from their self-identities.
The difficulties they face, including misunderstanding,
misperceptions and the most frustrating
one, the difficulties in arousing actions
from its internal publics, might arise from its
perceived role of being mainly a helper or
educator. With a rather loose structure, the
organization found it difficult to create an
integrated whole. This interactive process
between identity and goals certainly presents
an important question for future study: to what
extent does an activist group negotiate its
identity to better achieve its goals? Can it or
should it?
Discussion about the proposition
Responding to the call for more studies on
activist public relations from the perspective of
activists themselves, this study suggested a
preliminary framework of the relationship
among goals, identities and public relations
practices. The proposition was mostly supported
by the findings. The identities of an
activist organization in communication with
target organizations and its own publics are
indeed consistent with its organizational goals.
In interacting with different audiences, it
engaged in identity negotiation through building
an overlapping zone of meaning. In
addition, the self-perceived identities, to a
great extent, influence the public relations
practices.
Theoretically, this framework helps integrate
different constructs (i.e. avowed
vs. ascribed identities, identity salience and
Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Public Affairs, November 2009
DOI: 10.1002/pa
298 Hua Jiang and Lan Ni
identity negotiation) to the exploration of
activist public relations. Practitioners also get a
sense of the underlying reasons why activist
groups practice public relations in certain
ways. Practitioners may want to identify the
fundamental value and purpose of a particular
activist organization before planning public
relations strategies.
Biographical notes
Hua Jiang is a PhD candidate in Public
Relations at the University of Maryland. She
focuses her research on public affairs, social
justice and ethics, work-life conflict and
employee-organization relationships, leadership
in public relations, and global public
relations. She has published scholarship in
Public Relations Journal and Public Relations
Review. She has also presented more than
10 papers at flagship conferences such as
International Communication Association,
Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, and National Communication
Association.
Lan Ni (PhD, University of Maryland, College
Park) is an Assistant Professor in the Jack
J. Valenti School of Communication at the
University of Houston. Her research focuses
on strategic management of public relations,
relationship management, identification of
publics, intercultural communication, and
internal communication. She has published
at major journals such as Journal of Public
Relations Research, Public Relations Review,
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly,
Journal of Communication Management
and International Journal of Strategic
Communication. She has presented more
than 20 papers at major conferences such as
International Communication Association,
Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, and National Communication
Association.
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