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Stuck, stasis and deadlock
Academics engaged in the debate seem in agreement that measurement and evaluation in public relations are “stuck” (Gregory and White, 2006), in a state of “deadlock” (Macnamara, 2014) or “stasis” (Macnamara and Zerfass, 2017). Scholars and professional associations have suggested “myriad models” (Place, 2015, p. 120) as well as more or less rigorous frameworks (such as the evaluation framework proposed by AMEC, the Association for Measurement and Evaluation in Communication, or the Barcelona Principles). Nevertheless, despite widespread agreement about the topic’s strategic importance (Gregory and Watson, 2008), actual adoption by practitioners lags, at times appearing lacklustre, even reluctant. Thorson et al. (2015) summarise: “In general, surveys of practitioners tend to show a great deal of excitement about the future of PR measurement, but they also show that this excitement is not translating into action over time” (p. 10).
Research conducted by Jesper Falkheimer, Mats Heide, Charlotte Simonsson, Sara von Platen, Howard Nothhaft and Rickard Andersson in the so-called “Communicative Organizations-Project” suggests that the industry in Sweden is no exception (Falkheimer et al., 2017). When asking roughly 500 communication practitioners in 11 organisations about areas in the greatest need of development and improvement as well as resources invested in the same areas, a curious discrepancy emerged. While 10.4 per cent of respondents (n=493) expressed the opinion that “evaluation of communication” is in greatest need of development and improvement, only 0.6 per cent of respondents (n=489) stated that they devoted most resources in form of time and money to it. The evaluation of communication was considered the third highest priority concerning development and improvement, but came last of 18 items, even behind miscellaneous “others”, in terms of resources invested (in the self-assessment of practitioners). In other words, the results reproduce what other studies found before: practitioners rate measurement and evaluation as highly important, but effectively do very little about it.
The scholarly community has suggested many explanations for this discrepancy, and the resulting deadlock and stasis. Volk (2018) initiated a renewed debate by drawing attention to the following issues in the measurement and evaluation debate (see Volk, 2018 for the following):
confusing terminology and inconsistent measures;
downplay of confounding variables and intervening effects;
overreliance on positivist epistemology;
under...