Revelations of an ecological perspective: Issues, inertia, and the public opinion environment of organizational populations

Many public relations scholars identify the importance of environment. Contentions about the role of public relations in helping organizations to continuously adapt to their social environment underpin mainstream research and theoretic literature. However, the field has paid limited attention to specifying, testing, and explicating such complex and problematic presuppositions. This article responds to the resulting opportunity for theory building by applying the untried and underutilized ecological lens to conceptualize and explore a primary sector of organizational social environments, the public opinion environment, at the population level of analysis. Four dimensions of the organizational population's public opinion environment are proposed: stability, complexity, intensity, and direction (favorability). Using macro-level variations in the public opinion environment to explain micro-level responses-specifically, the emergence of activist publics-the article explores four theoretic propositions longitudinally, using three case studies of the same organizational population, Australia's major banks from 1981 to 2001. It lays the foundation for contesting much vaunted but unproved presuppositions about the place of public relations in helping organizations to adapt continuously to their changing environments.