PR 660 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Hypodermic Needle, James E. Grunig, Public Knowledge

• School: Ball State University
• Department: Public Relations
• Course: PR 660
• Professor: Becky McDonald

Document Summary

Mature sciences have a single paradigm instead of multiple and conflicting theories. Paradigm: set of presuppositions, theories, methods, and exemplars of solutions to research problems that provide a unified view for scientists associated to the paradigm. However, in immature sciences, everyone has their own theory and there is a lot of debate about competing theories and which are the best. By integrating a lot of the prominent pr theories at the beginning of 1985, the excellence theory tries to develop a broad and general pr theory. It"s not about imposing a single theory but bringing complementary and competing theories together to answer questions or solve problems that concern pr practitioners or scholars. Pr research started in the 50s and 60s as a prong of mass communication research. Mass communication scholars devote a lot of their time to explaining mass communication effects.