Identifying"Public" in Public Relations-who are Stakeholders?

When PR talks about any action it makes it always says about  the "audience".
There are no actions made just for the sake of it, but that directly target  the "audience", "stakeholders", "publics".
Seems so natural,isn't it?
But if we look deeper in the issue-who are actually those stakeholders?
How to define them? How to orientate actions on them?
There is a whole bunch of questions that apper in the mind.


Well, first the term "stakeholders" appeared in 1963 and defined stakeholders as "those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist".
Actually this definition is too narrow.
Another definition that is now widely used and seems to be more relevant is the definition of Professor Freeman, given in 1984 in his book "Strategic Management:A stakeholder approach" (1984).
So the definition is "A stakeholder in an organization is (by its definition) any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization's objective".
There is one more definition made by Johnson and Scholes (2002): Stakeholders are those who have a stake or interest in a particular organisation, i.e. they depend on organisation to fulfill their own goals, and on whom,in turn, the organisation depends.


Professor Freeman talks about stakeholders

I prefer to agree with Professor Freeman,as I think that he detects relations between stakeholders and the organisation as double-sided,instead of Johnson and Scholes,who seem to make stakeholders the head of everything.
So, now the definition is clear.
But who can be a stakeholder?
There are several groups of stakeholders:

• Employees
• Trade Unions
• Financial Investors
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Distributors
• Local Community
• Local and General Government
• Industry groups
• Media

However the term"stakeholders" is often interchangable with wide term "audience". Is it actually possible to interchange these two trems?

Well the difference is not so huge.

Grunig and Hunt(1984) say that "publics are stakeholders that face a problem or have an issue with an orgaisation". 

However here it is necessary to say that Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans agree with Grunig but the same time describe the difference between "audience" and "stakeholders".

They describe a kind of "drift" from stakeholders into publics, when the problem or issue arises. And thus stakeholders form general public and can influence and affect the company.

Like in the example of McDonalds when customers concerned with their obesity organised campaigns for healthier food.

Our favourite Grunig and now Repper(1992) also say that relationships with stakeholders help to create stable,long-term relationships that are actually extremely important fot the company.


There are different approaches of mapping stakeholders.
Here are 3 of them:

• Bernstein’s wheel 

• Esman’s linkages theory

• Power-interest matrix

The last but not the least goes the Situational Theory of Publics by Grunig and Hunt (1984).

I want to tell more about it. It seems to be a very good example of mapping the public as Grunig and Hunt predict that public are not just passive users of information, but they can be really active: change their decisions and thus move from one group to another.

So Grunig and Hunt divided public (we remember they were more for "public" than "stakeholders") into: 

1. Non Public
2.  Latent Public 
3. Active Public 
4. Aware Public

So who is who though?

• Non Public - as seen from the name these are people not interested in your organisation. Your organisation doesn't affect them as well as they just don't influence on your organisation
• Latent Public - those who probably will be affected by your organisation or will affect you, but just don't know it yet. They are very probable of becoming "active" or "aware" public
• Active public - is the most active (ha-ha really obvious) public that will participate as actively (again) as they can in the life of your organisation. The would like to know who,what,where,when and  why in your organisation. They are really interested in what is going on.
• Aware Public - those who know that they are affected by you. They try to get information from you as an organisation.

This Theory of Grunig and Hunt is really a practical one and can be easily used in real life.

So here is an overview of stakeholders now it's for you to decide which theory and ideas you like most.

I've made my choice now it's up to you!