Dialogue is defined as “any negotiated exchange of ideas and opinions” (Kent & Taylor, 1998, p. 325). Public relations can facilitate dialogue by establishing channels and procedures for dialogic communication (Kent & Taylor, 2002). Dialogic theory argues that organizations should be willing to interact with publics in honest and ethical ways in order to create effective organization-public communication channels (Kent, Taylor, & White, 2003).
Contents
Historical development
The concept of dialogue has its roots in various disciplines such as philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, and relational communication (Kent & Taylor, 2002). Philosophers and rhetoricians have long perceived dialogue as one of the most ethical forms of communication and as one of the central means of separating truth from falsehood. Theologian Martin Buber was considered as the father of the modern concept of dialogue (Kent & Taylor, 2002). In public relations, dialogue was explained as “communicating about issues with publics” (Kent & Taylor, 2002, p. 22). There has been a theoretical shift from public relations reflecting an emphasis on managing communication (Grunig & Hunt, 1984) to an emphasis on communication as a tool for establishing relationships (Botan, 1992).
The consideration of dialogue as a public relations theory should be attributed to Pearson (Kent & Taylor, 2002). According to Pearson (1989), public relations can be conceptualized as the management of interpersonal dialectic. After that, Botan (1997) claimed that “dialogue manifests itself more as a stance, orientation, or bearing in communication rather than as a specific method, technique, or format (p. 192).” Kent and Taylor (1998) argued that “dialogue is product rather than process” (p. 323) and viewed the symmetrical model as a procedural way to listen or solicit feedback. Furthermore, Kent and Taylor (2002) clarified the concept of dialogue in public relations and proposed principles of dialogic theory.
Features
Dialogue as an orientation has five features (Kent & Taylor, 2002):
Principles
Kent and Taylor (1998) proposed five dialogic principles which could guide organizations to establish dialogic relationships with publics on websites.
A dialogic loop allows publics to query organizations and provides organizations with the opportunity to respond to questions, concerns, and problems.
Websites should make efforts to post information of general value to all publics.
Websites should include features that make them attractive for repeat visits such as updated information, changing issues, and special forums.
Websites ought to provide conveniences for visitors to figure out and understand. Tables of contents are useful and should be well organized and hierarchical.
Websites should contain only essential links with clearly marked paths for visitors to return to the sites.
Extension
The dialogic theory has been extended to explain how various organizations build dialogic relationships with publics through websites (Esrock & Leichty, 1999; Taylor, Kent, & White, 2001; Kent et al., 2003), blogs (Seltzer & Mitrook, 2007), and social media such as Facebook (Sweetser & Lariscy, 2008; Bortree & Seltzer, 2009) and Twitter (Rybalko & Seltzer, 2010). For instance, Esrock and Leichty (1999) studied the dialogic capacity of organizational Web sites and found that only a minority of Fortune 500 organizations employed Kent and Taylor’s (1998) principles of dialogic communication. Another study examined how environmental advocacy organizations employed dialogic strategies on their Facebook profiles and found that using dialogic strategies led to greater dialogic engagement between organizations and visitors (Bortree & Seltzer, 2009).