A Greater Means to the Greater Good: Ethical Guidelines to Meet Social Movement Organization Advocacy Challenges

Existing public relations ethics literature often proves inadequate when applied to social movement campaigns, considering the special communication challenges activists face as marginalized moral visionaries in a commercial public sphere. The communications of counter-hegemonic movements is distinct enough from corporate, nonprofit, and governmental organizations to warrant its own ethical guidelines. The unique communication guidelines most relevant to social movement organizations include promoting asymmetrical advocacy to a greater extent than is required for more powerful organizations and building flexibility into the TARES principles to privilege social responsibility over respect for audience values in activist campaigns serving as ideological critique

Norms of Presentational Force

This is the author's accepted manuscript, made available with permission of the American Forensic Association.Can style or presentational devices reasonably compel us to believe, agree, act? I submit that they can, and that the normative pragmatic project explains how. After describing a normative pragmatic approach to presentational force, I analyze and evaluate presentational force in Susan B. Anthony's "Is it a Crime for a U. S. Citizen to Vote" as it apparently proceeds from logic, emotion, and style. I conclude with reflections on the compatibility of the normative pragmatic approach with the recently-developed pragma-dialectical treatment of presentational devices

A Test of Monroe's Motivated Sequence for Its Effects on Ratings of Message Organization and Attitude Change

The experiment examined Monroe\u27s Motivated Sequence, an organizational pattern commonly taught in basic speech courses for its effects on attitude change and ratings of comprehensibility of messages. Treatment groups of 21, 23, and 24 participants read one of three versions of a persuasive message that advocated a $50 fee increase to improve parking facilities on campus. One version represented Monroe\u27s five-step sequence, a second version reversed the five steps, and a third randomly ordered the steps. A control group of 22 read a message unrelated to the parking issue. Analysis showed no differences in attitude change across the four groups. The Monroe sequence condition did produce significantly higher ratings of comprehensibility on one of four comparisons