International Communication Association
Public Relations Division
Annual Business Meeting Minutes
Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile
Room: Michigan
Chicago, IL USA
May 25, 2009, 16:30-17:45p.m.
I.WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION OF OFFICERS 2008-2009
The meeting was called to order by Division Chair Craig Carroll on May 25, 2009, at 4:30 p.m.Members were welcomed to the meeting and the officers for 2008 – 2009 were introduced -
Chair: Craig Carroll, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA; Vice Chair: Øyvind Ihlen,
University of Oslo, NORWAY; Secretary: Jennifer Bartlett, Queensland U of Technology,
AUSTRALIA.
II.OLD BUSINESS
a. Approval of minutes from Montreal, May 2008
Minutes from the Montreal meeting that were distributed to members, were approved by the
attendees at the meeting (n=55).
b. Election results and introduction of officers for 2009-2010
Craig Carroll who has been acting as Chair since Betteke van Ruler stood down during her term
begins his official term as Chair from the conclusion of the conference. Elected Vice Chair:
Juan-Carlos Molleda, University of Florida, USA will also begin his term at the conclusion of this
conference. Secretary: Jennifer Bartlett, Queensland U of Technology, AUSTRALIA continues
her term until the end of the 2010 conference.
c. Announcement from ICA Board meeting
Carroll presented an overview of the key points from the ICA board meeting. The key points
noted were:
Finance - ICA is doing very well financially despite the global economic crisis. One of the
reasons for this is the income from the lease of premises at the Washington DC Head office to
another business.
ICA Publications – At the Board meeting, James Katz was announced as the incoming editor of
Human Communication Research. Carroll noted to the ICA board that the Public Relations
Division was not represented among HCR’s editorial board. Carroll noted to the Division that
there were no publications from the Public Relations Division in either Human Communication
Research or the Communication Yearbook in the past year.
ICA Fellows – Carroll noted that there are no Fellows from the Division. He told the Division that
while there are no formal requirements for nominations; approval for Fellow requires serious
support including, for example, 8-9 letters from the Division from full professors. Carroll noted
that in addition to scholarship requirements, nominees must have service to the academy
demonstrated through their leadership to ICA. Action for supporting nominations from the
Division was determined in the New Business of the meeting (See below).
Upcoming Conferences – Carroll reported that the contract is now signed for the Singapore
conference for 2010. The 2011 conference will be held in Boston, (Westin Harborside); 2012 in
Phoenix (Sheraton). Arrangements are being finalized for London, England as the location of
the 2013 conference.
The Singapore conference will be held from June 21-26th, 2010. ICA will budget for a loss for
this conference but offers a number of special deals to make attending Singapore conference
attractive to members from outside the Asian region. Among these are a registration fee of
$125 which will include lunches and 1 dinner; hotel deals will include breakfast & free Internet in
rooms; and a special deal for a US$1300 flight from nominated ports flying to Singapore (no
frequent flyer miles). There will be two keynotes for the conference: Censorship & New Media
and; Matters of Communication.
7. ICA Awards and procedures
Carroll reported that the categories for the two most popular nominations were the Article of the
year and Young Scholar awards. It was undetermined how many were from the Public Relations
Division but this raises the point that the Division needs a presence at the Award level.
8. International Federation of Communication Associations
http://ifedca.org
d. Activities review by Chair, with sub-reports by committees or individuals
1. Report on Membership and Membership Drive (Bonnie Neff)
Neff noted that the Division membership is growing but not as fast as other divisions and we are
also losing some members when new members come on board. Currently there are 459
members in the Public Relations Division.
2. Report on Finances (Craig Carroll)
Carroll noted that membership numbers have an impact on the Division’s finances. During the
year, $3 was received from each members and Lenovo Corporation donated $1500 to the
Division. In previous years, Samsung has donated to the Division thanks to Hochang Shin’s
efforts. Carroll noted that one important aim of the finances is to support travel for members
from Level 3 countries. Carroll mentioned that the Political Communication Division has good
funding coming from a Journal; Carl Botan added that their division also received funding
through the publication of a book.
Journal for the Division – Carroll mentioned the listserv discussion where the Division’s
members were asked if we want a journal for the Division. Bonita Neff noted that there had been
prior discussion on this issue in Dresden. Bey-Ling Sha suggested there was general support
for a journal, but questions remained as to which journal and who the editor would be. It was
established that a partnership should be formed with an established journal.
A committee was formed to consider these journal issues related to a journal for the Division
and the committee consists of: Elizabeth Toth – Chair; Kirk Hallahan; Maureen Taylor; Bonita
Neff; and Magda Pieczka. The group agreed to meet electronically as some will not be in
Singapore for the 2010 conference.
3. Report from Committee on Awards (Bey-Ling Sha)
Bey-Ling announced details of the Grunig and Grunig Thesis and Dissertation awards for theses
defended in 2008 and 2009. Prizes will be presented at the 2010 conference.
4. Support for Division Newsletter (Jennifer Bartlett)
A Newsletter was re-introduced in the 2008-2009 year. Comments and submissions were
invited from members to be sent to Secretary Jennifer Bartlett.
5. Internationalization efforts (Craig Carroll)
Carroll noted the wide range of representation among our panel chairs, respondents, presenters
and officers and the presence of the taskforce on cross-national research.
6. Report from Taskforce on Cross-National Research (Mark Eisenegger)
A meeting was held on Friday of the conference with interested members discussing the
direction of the Taskforce. A preconference related to the taskforce was announced as a
possibility for the 2010 conference.
7. Report from Webmaster & Listserv (Mark Eisenegger)
An on-line forum was introduced to the website which is now managed from the University of
Zurich. Currently the Division has access to the Taskforce website as well as the ICA Public
Relations Division site. This will now be integrated and will operate as one site by June 2009.
In addition, the list serve will move from Syracuse University to the University of Zurich. A
member from the floor noted that academia.edu.au was another option of such a service.
Carroll noted that Mark’s work with the website provided leadership and a reference point for the
ICA on-line forums available to other divisions. The members commended Mark on this initiative
and a special thank you was given to Mark.
8. Report on ICA Chicago Conference Program (Øyvind Ihlen)
Vice-chair Ihlen presented an overview of the statistics of the papers and acceptances for the
2009 conference. In total, there were a 106 papers submitted and 6 were accepted as posters,
46 as full papers which represented an acceptance rate of 49 %. In addition, there were 13
session submissions of which 5 were accepted which equates to an acceptance rate of 38 %.
One of the panels made it into the theme sessions of ICA giving us an additional slot. There
were14 countries represented on panels. One session was a co-sponsored panel with
Philosophy of Communication.
A list of the 18 allocated conference slots were provided to the meeting. Four consisted of the
business meeting, chair’s panel, top paper panel, and top student paper panel. The topics of the
other sessions included: International Public Relations, Crisis communication, Ethics, CSR;
Organization-Public Relationships; Reputation; Digital; Leadership/Roles; Government Public
Relations; and New Theories in Public Relations.
There were 5 panels: Keywords in Communication: Conceptualizing Publics in Public Relations
(ICA THEME SESSION); Towards a theory of public relations using keywords from sociology;
Discourse and dialogue: A public relations approach to organizational rhetoric; Public relations,
communitarianism and CSR: (re)conceptualizing the role of public relations in response to the
‘credit crunch’; and Identifying trends and practices in public relations: International research
insights and methodological challenges.
Reviewers – there was a list of 138 reviewers who reviewed papers for this year’s conference
program and most were limited to 2-4 papers in an attempt to manage the workload for all
involved. However, some ended up doing 5. The following people are given special thanks for
taking on this extra work: Diana Nastasia, Piet Verhoeven, Mike Kent, Jane Fitzgibbon, Mike
Mitrook, Vilma Luoma-Aho, Sabine Einwiller, Chiara Valentini, and Nadine Yehya.
Acknowledgements
The program chair, Øyvind Ihlen, was thanked for his contribution and work in managing the
program this year. Carroll mentioned that Ihlen doubled the number of paper reviewers for the
Division.
III. NEW BUSINESS
1. Presentation of Awards. There were two awards presented for 2009.
Karla Gower presented the Plank Centre for Leadership in Public Relations Award for Top
Student Paper award to Juan Meng from University of Alabama. The Robert Heath Award was
presented to Tomasz Feduik, Kristin Pace, and Isabel Botero from Illinois State University for
their paper on Crisis Response Effectiveness.
2. Announcement of Incoming Vice-Chair
Juan-Carlos Molleda will take the position or Vice-Chair for the Division for 2009-2011. Thanks
were given to Øyvind Ihlen for his work as outgoing Vice-Chair.
3. Nominations for Secretary 2010-2012
Vilma Luoma-aho was nominated as Secretary for 2010-2012 and she accepted the nomination.
Her nomination was accepted by the members.
4. By-Laws
The Chair asked for nominations for a member to check the status and position of the Division’s
By-laws. Bruce Berger was nominated and accepted the nomination and agreed to take on this
task.
5. Reviewers Sign Up
Members were invited to sign up to act as Reviewers for 2010.
6. Membership Drive
Bonita Neff is heading up the membership drive. A call for volunteers to assist Bonita was made
and interested members are to contact Bonnie directly.
7. Reports from the Editors
International Journal of Strategic Communication. Kirk Hallahan spoke on behalf of IJSC Editor
Derina Holtzhausen that the journal was going well and invited members to consider submitting
to the journal.
Public Relations Journal (On-line). Don Wright, editor of the PRSA academic journal, informed
the meeting that the online format has proved to be successful as many practitioners prefer to
go on-line to gather information. The journal has now been running for two years and they seek
to conduct more investigation into the type of research practitioners need to do their job.
5
Reviewers are only asked to review two papers per year. A thank you was made to Wright for
attending the meeting even though he is not a member of ICA.
Journal of Communication Management. Magda Pieczka reported there had been a very good
response to the history of public relations special issue. The journal is now owned by the same
publisher as corporate communication however the editors are happy to run with two separate
journals even though there was a small amount of overlap. The editor is working on getting
regional editors on board and the prospect of special issues to address interests in cultural and
contextual issues. Regular book reviews are now covered in the journal and Johanna Fawkes is
editor of this section.
8. Job Announcements –
Molleda reminded members that job ads must go through ICA and cannot be distributed directly
to members via the association’s listserv available to the Division. This is done to ensure that
dues get paid to ICA for advertising job vacancies.
9. Fellows from the Public Relations Division
Kirk Hallahan formally nominated Bob Heath and James Grunig to be put forward as candidates
as ICA Fellows from the Division. Kirk will spearhead one nomination bid and asked for another
member to work on the other nomination. A determined effort is required to support nominees
for Fellow positions as noted in the Chair’s report. Craig Carroll seconded this motion.
IV. Adjournment
The Members thanked the Chair for the management of the meeting and noted the closing time
of 5.45 pm.
