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Sustainable development poses a grand challenge for society, addressed by organisations through their public relations activities. Grand challenges are complex by nature and call for nontrivial solutions whose effects show at the level of society. That is why studying public relations' contribution to grand challenges requires a macro perspective that accounts for the dynamic interaction between individual, organisational, and system levels in a digital communication environment. This paper offers a new paradigm to analyse organisations' significant and at times undue impact on grand challenges through public relations. It develops a framework inspired by complex adaptive systems thinking and adopts its ten properties for public relations: emergence, adaptivity, heterogeneous actors, nonlinear effects, feedback mechanisms, self-organisation, phase transitions, networks, scaling, and cooperation. The paper applies the framework to the example of sustainable development. It shows why research on grand challenges requires a holistic perspective and how it can help study digitally born communication phenomena. The proposed complex systems paradigm provides space for critical, social scientific, and interpretative research lines in public relations. Inquiries start from the grand challenge and study the communicative interactions between organisations and other actors from existing theory while accounting for the ten properties of complex adaptive systems. The paper outlines how future research can enrich the study of public relations and discusses its limits. • Proposes a complex systems framework for analysing the role of public relations in debating society's grand challenges. • Complexity theories help understand digital issue debates as emerging societal phenomena. • The complex systems paradigm allows to analyse digitally born communication phenomena. • Provides a holistic perspective to analyse organisations' significant and at times undue impact on sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Global models in the theory and practice of public relations tend toward hegemony and simplification. [•] The UK and Singapore are exemplars where hegemony has arguably succeeded and where it needs to be resisted, respectively. [•] Theoretical diversity is required to reflect the complexity of globalization. [•] Epistemological and practical subsidiarity can and should lead the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Territorial disputes between public relations and marketing are nothing new. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Hutton (2010) refocused them as a matter of survival in the face of marketing attempts “to include or subsume much or all of public relations” (p. 509). In addition to aligning with his call to resist marketing imperialism, this article seeks to renegotiate traditional turf wars between the two fields through a review of recent significant marketing books. Advocating a complexity-based perspective, it argues that evolving disciplines, like evolving species, need to respond not only to each other but also to the wider environment and that requires cooperation as well as competition. It also draws on complexity thinking as a resource for improving disciplinary intersections and for adapting to the uncertain and turbulent conditions of the present. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Complexity theory applied to strategic long-term relationship building in advocacy through social media. • Qualitative interviews to understand practices, reasonings, and perceptions of social media directors from 25 advocacy organizations. • Complexity offers nonlinear, holistic thinking & planning for strategic communication with a wide variety of audiences. • Importance of both past and future when building relationships via social media, including that posts can and will be referenced far into the future. • Includes theoretical, practical, and pedagogical implications. This study uses the principles of complexity theory to interrogate how communicators for advocacy organizations facilitate discussions and plan for strategic long-term relationship building on social media. Through 25 semi-structured interviews with advocacy communicators, we offer a deeper understanding of how theory, pedagogy, and practice can all best consider the impact of concepts like fluid boundaries, nonlinearity, emergence, diversity, and interdependence in digital social advocacy communication. We conclude by discussing why and how communicators should focus not just on the present imperatives, but also the impact of the past and the needs of the future in relationship building in digital spaces, including a new theoretical subset of nonlinearity called eternal return. Complexity theory provides insight for how to think in an interdependent way about strategic use and theoretical development of social media, creating moments of current engagement and a space for future resources. Practical and pedagogical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]