PUBLIC RELATIONS IN A TRANSITION SOCIETY

This study addresses the questions of how organisations managed their relations and communicated with different stakeholders in a communist and post-communist (transition) society, how they changed their stakeholder systems, how public relations emerged in a new social context, in a transition society which changed very rapidly and at a fundamental level, and how organisations built up their public relations functions in this situation. Public relations processes are studied mostly in stable societies, under conditions where only one or two system components have changed. Transition society processes are not typical – in the situations dealt with in this study all possible ‘things'' changed, which made the situation chaotic. The author focuses on relations building and communication management processes in the present study. In general all analysed processes in the present study deal with the change from totalitarianism to democracy, from a planned to a market economy. The findings of the present study may be relevant in a wider context also as an analysis of communication and organisation relations in a changing society in general.