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Journal Article 3.1: Merkelsen, H. (2013). Legitimacy and reputation in the institutional field of food safety: A public relations case study. Public Relations Inquiry, 2(2), 243-265.

Abstract: The overall objective of this study is to examine how the institutional context of food safety affects and is affected by concerns for legitimacy and reputation. The paper employs a neo-institutional approach to analyzing the institutional field of food safety in a case study of a multinational food service provider where a tension between conflicting institutional logics implied a reputational challenge. The study shows how food safety as a well-defined operational risk is transformed into a high-priority reputational risk and how actors in the field of food safety are caught in a state of mutual distrust, partly as a consequence of an intense politicization of food risk over the past years and partly as a result of their respective concerns for legitimacy. The study points to how the field of food safety is colonized by a reputational logic that is paradoxically reproduced by actors at all organizational levels even though they strongly oppose to this logic.

Journal Article 3.2: Obermaier, M., Koch, T., & Riesmeyer, C. (2015). Deep impact? How journalists perceive the influence of public relations on their news coverage and which variables determine this impact. Communication Research, 1-23.

Abstract: Journalists perceive 25–80% of their coverage to be influenced by public relations (PR). However, there is hardly any research on what factors determine where on this wide spectrum an individual journalist will fall. This study analyzed the extent and source of the perceived influence of PR on news coverage via a quantitative survey of German journalists. On average, participants perceived over one third of their work to be influenced by PR, and a number of variables were found to be associated with the degree of this impact. Role conceptions as populist mobilizers and newsroom conventions discouraging excessive reliance on PR decreased the influence of PR on news coverage. Secondary employments in the field of PR, having close personal relationships with PR professionals, and considering interests of publishers or advertisers increased the impact of PR on journalistic content.