This document summarizes a presentation given by Dr. Dean Kruckeberg on using an ecological framework to understand community building and managing change in organizations. Some key points: - Society is undergoing a revolution driven by advances in communication technology that are fundamentally changing humans. - Public relations can help address this change but current theories are deficient. Kruckeberg recommends examining a theoretical framework from natural sciences like ecology. - The work of Aldo Leopold teaches that communities are foundational to ecology. Humans are part of the larger biotic community rather than conquerors of land. - Leopold's concept of ecology included an "ecological conscience" and view of ethics as a community instinct.

1. London College of Communication
Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB
“Community-Building for Organizations
Managing Change Using New Media”
14:30 to 15:30 Thursday, 15 May 2014,
by:
Dr. Dean Kruckeberg, APR, Fellow PRSA
Professor,
Department of Communication Studies,
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2. Based on:
Vujnovic, M., & Kruckeberg, D. ((2013). Conceptualization,
examination, and recommendations for a normative model of
community-building for organizations managing change using
new media. Paper presented at the 16 Annual International
Public Relations Research Conference “Exploring the Strategic
Use of New Media’s Impact on Change Management and Risk
on Theory and Practice,” Miami, FL, March 7-9, 2013.

3. WE ARE IN A REVOLUTION
• Considerable rationale exists today to suggest that global
society is in the midst of a revolution—socially, politically,
economically, and culturally, albeit this revolution is being
created primarily for economic reasons. We are living in
revolutionary times that are fundamentally changing us as
humans—changes that are being caused by advances in
communication technology.

4. Global society is in the midst of a revolution, and these
revolutionary times are fundamentally changing us as humans—
changes that are being caused by advances in communication
technology.
• Socially, face-to-face communication is being relinquished for
preferred electronic channels of communication.
• Politically, power differentials among the three social actors,
i.e., governments, corporations, and nongovernmental
organizations/civil society organizations, are being flattened,
sometimes juxtaposed, and unpredicted power oftentimes
eminates quickly from unformalized, unstructured, and
previously unrecognized and unseen sources—creating perhaps
an intended social justice, but also uncertainty and its
accompanying anxiety.

5. Global society is in the midst of a revolution—
• Economically, immense amounts of information (often unvetted
and suspect, but for which countervailing information is equally
available) is inexpensive to send and to receive.
• Culturally, a global culture is emerging, certainly in people’s
taste for consumer products, but arguably in cultural values,
themselves. Importantly, the communication technology that is
creating globalism also exacerbates the tensions of
multiculturalism. Kruckeberg notes that, in a globalized world,
societal values that are divergent can have no other trajectory
than to meet head-on, resulting either in conflict or in an
imperfect melding of cultures that may be accepted with
resistance.

6. But where do public relations scholars and practitioners
begin and from whom do we learn to address this
revolution?
• We need to withdraw, not only in our response to the
admonishments and directives of critics of existing public
relations theory, e.g., Valentini, Kruckeberg, and Starck (2012),
Vujnovic and Kruckeberg (2005), but even Hardt (1979), who
argues for a theory of society, all of whom address social theory.
• Rather, we recommend a theoretical framework and worldview
from the natural sciences, i.e., biotic communities and their
ecology, which in conjunction with natural history includes
human society and, we argue, encompasses its social theory.

7. A prescient natural scientist, by-and-large unknown to
public relations scholars and practitioners, was Aldo
Leopold, who was born in 1887 and who died in 1948.
• He is best known as the author of “a slender volume of natural
history vignettes and philosophical essays dealing with the
relationship of people to land.” A Sand County Almanac and
Sketches Here and There was published posthumously in 1949.
• In the 1960s, this book grew in popularity and eventually
surpassed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Stewart Udall’s Quiet
Crisis, and Barry Commoner’s Closing Circle as the
philosophical touchstone of the modern environmental
movement.

8. Yet, it is probably safe to assume that few public
relations scholars and practitioners have ever heard of
Aldo Leopold, …
• …who in fact has much to teach us during a revolutionary time
in global history in which a credible argument can be made that
the role and function, if not the body of knowledge, of public
relations, from among the professionalized occupations within
governments, corporations, and nongovernmental
organizations/civil society organizations, can best address the
needs of today’s global environment.

9. We argues for a holistic ecological community
worldview for public relations practice.
• Even though we borrow from Aldo Leopold to argue for
communication practices that would lead organizations toward a
more sustainable paradigm, we acknowledge the work of social
ecologists, primarily Murray Bookchin, whose philosophical work
dates back as far as the 1950s. He suggested that the
achievement of more harmonious and sustainable societies isn’t
solely based on individual ethical decisions, but also on
collective action based upon democratic ideals. These
philosophical approaches serve an important role in building our
arguments based on the work of Aldo Leopold.

10. Leopold first used the term “ecology” in 1920, when the
science of ecology was by-and-large unknown.
• However, the word “ecology” was first used in the late 1860s by
Ernst Haeckel, a German adherent of Darwin. Continental
biologists were the first to systematically explore this new
science that described and organized the distribution of plant
species according to their physiological characteristics.
• Leopold told his students:
Ecology tries to understand the interactions between
living things and their environment. Every living thing
represents an equation of give and take.

11. Leopold’s holistic conception of humankind’s place in
nature considered human behavior to be explainable
the same way as for other organisms, with no
distinctions between natural and human actions.
• To Leopold, humankind was an integral part of the land
community, just as other members of that community were
integral parts of humankind and its environments. Evolution
was a process that subsumed human history and that included
humankind.
•
In Leopold’s (1949) ecological interpretation of history,
humankind was a member of a biotic team. Leopold argued that
many historical events that had been explained solely in terms
of human enterprise were actually biotic interactions between
people and the land, determined by the characteristics of land
as much as by the characteristics of the humans who lived on it.

12. However, Leopold distinguished humans as having the
capacity that was unique among earth’s organisms: to
rectify their misdeeds, i.e., to become (or once again
become) citizens of the land community—but now
knowing, self-conscious citizens.”
• Leopold believed that world problems of his day were a sign that
man had exceeded, or approached too rapidly, a certain upper
limit of population density.
• Leopold further argued that the combined evidence of history
and ecology seemed to indicate that, the less violent the human-
made changes, the greater the probability of successful
readjustment in the pyramid. The biotic pyramid to which he
referred was an ecological description that he preferred to “the
balance of nature.”

13. In the beginning, Leopold noted, the pyramid of life was
low and squat, and food chains were short and simple;
• However, evolution added layer upon layer and link after link.
Leopold considered to be a scientific certainty that the trend of
evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota. Humans are
only one of many thousands of additions to the height and
complexity of this pyramid.

14. TECHNOLOGY
• Leopold said science should lead, not only to power, but also to
wisdom, warning that “all ecology is replete with laws which
begin to operate at a threshold, and cease operating at a ceiling.
No one law holds good through the entire gamut of time and
circumstances.”
• Leopold was concerned about technology’s impact on the land
as well as on human society. To Leopold, technology raised the
land’s carrying capacity for humankind, but this technology had
ignored the adjustments that were being forced onto animals
and plants, assuming that the take from the land as well as
human population could be increased indefinitely. Leopold
believed that, although the technologist sought peace through
more technology, assuming peace would occur as standards of
living were raised,…

15. …, Leopold observed that:
•
• “Nations fight over who shall take charge of increasing the take
and to whom the better life shall accrue. Even in peace-time the
energies of mankind are directed not toward creating the better
life, but toward dividing the materials supposedly necessary for
it.”

16. COMMUNITY
• Leopold recognized communities to be foundational in the
science of ecology. In his papers, he observed:
– The two great cultural advances of the past century were the
Darwinian theory and the development of geology…. Just
as important, however, as the origin of plants, animals, and
soil is the question of how they operate as a community.
That task has fallen to the new science of ecology, which is
daily uncovering a web of interdependencies so intricate as
to amaze—were he here—even Darwin himself, who, of all
men, should have least cause to tremble before the veil.

17. Leopold (1949) said that the basic concept of ecology is
that the land is a community.
• Leopold believed ecological theory provides a sense of social
integration of human and nonhuman nature; Leopold said that
human beings, plants, animals, soils, and waters are “all
interlocked in one humming community of cooperations and
competitions, one biota.”

18. ETHICS
• Leopold’s concept of ecology was of a community that is ethical.
Leopold (1949) considered an ethic to be a mode of guidance
for meeting ecological situations that are so new or intricate, or
that involve such deferred reactions, that the path of social
expediency would not even be discernible to the average
person. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the
individual in meeting such situations. “Ethics are possibly a kind
of community instinct in-the-making.” For Leopold (1949), all
ethics rested upon a single premise:
– (T)hat the individual is a member of a community of
interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete
for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him
also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a
place to compete for).

19. Leopold believed an “ecological conscience” was
lacking. “Ecology is the science of communities, and
the ecological conscience is therefore the ethics of
community life.” He believed:
• The extension of ethics, which thus far had been studied only by
philosophers, was actually a process in ecological evolution,
which sequences could be described in ecological as well as in
philosophical terms. Ecologically, an ethic is a limitation on
freedom of action in the struggle for existence. Philosophically,
an ethic is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct.
• Leopold said these were two definitions of the same thing, which
had its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or
groups to evolve modes of cooperation—called symbioses by
ecologists.

20. Leopold’s response to Darwin was that, As human
civilization advances, each individual should extend his
social instincts and sympathies to all nations and races,
however long this would take.
• To Leopold, the next step beyond what yet remained an
incomplete ethic of universal humanity was a land ethic, which
he nevertheless considered to be discernible on the horizon.
Leopold believed the land ethic simply enlarged the boundary of
the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals—
collectivity the land.
• However, Leopold said, “A land ethic changes the role of Homo
sapiens from a conqueror of the land-community to plain
member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-
members, and also respect for the community as such….”

21. In the long run, Homo sapiens will benefit from a
healthy biota, providing sufficient utilitarian rationale to
elicit political support for ecologically sound decisions.
Something good for owls, trout, and lizards would be
good for humankind.
• Leopold explained that humankind’s technological development
had suspended the “original” laws of carrying capacity and that
humans’ ethical development had suspended the laws of
predation. Leopold said the two were interdependent. “Tools
cannot be made or used without peace; peace cannot be
sustained without tools, for men who are hungry, either for food
or other necessities, automatically fight.”
• To maintain peace, ethics have to be mutually accepted;
however, sometimes this mutuality breaks down, resulting in a
reversion to the “ancestral predatory order.” Leopold noted a
problem: each such reversion is more destructive than the last,
due to advances in technology and social organization made
during the interval.

22. We recommend a normative model of community-
building for organizations in their attempts to manage
change using new media, arguing that 20th Century
public relations theories had failed to peel back layers of
inquiry.
• Considerable rationale exists today to suggest that global
society is in the midst of a revolution that is fundamentally
changing us as humans—changes that are being caused by
advances in communication technology.
• Public relations practitioners’ greater understanding of, let alone
ability to explain, predict, and control (direct), this global
revolution may be suspect at best and theoretically deficient at
worst. Yet a credible argument can be made that the role and
function, if not the body of knowledge, of public relations can
best address this need within organizations for understanding,
explanation, prediction, and direction.

23. Kruckeberg and Starck, Public Relations and
Community: A Reconstructed Theory, 1988.
An appropriate approach to practicing community (and public)
relations must be derived through an active attempt to restore
and maintain the sense of community that has been lost in
contemporary society.
Through attempts by the public relations practitioner to help
restore and maintain community, many of the community
relations problems that practitioners now concern themselves
with would not have evolved or would be more easily resolvable.
To attempt to do this requires practitioners to view public
relations and its function from another perspective—a
community-building, organic and, indeed, ecological model.

24. But where do public relations scholars and practitioners
begin and from whom do we learn to help us to do so?
• We recommend examination of a theoretical framework and
worldview from the natural sciences, i.e., biotic communities and
their ecology. In conjunction with natural history, this includes
human society that, we argue, encompasses its social theory.
• The lessons of natural science for public relations are more than
metaphorical and analogous; rather, public relations must
embrace a holistic ecological community worldview as well as
an “ecological conscience.”

25. We can learn much from Aldo Leopold and the science
of ecology.
• Leopold argued that many historical events were biotic
interactions between people and the land. Leopold recognized
communities as foundational in the science of ecology, and he
was concerned about technology’s impact on the land as well as
on human society. Human beings, plants, animals, soils, and
waters are “all interlocked in one humming community of
cooperations and competitions, one biota.”
• Leopold’s concept of ecology was of a community that is ethical,
noting, “Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-
making.” However, he believed an “ecological conscience” was
lacking.

26. It is important for public relations scholars and
practitioners to broaden their worldview for the benefit
of all, i.e., to assure a sustainable global society to an
inclusive benefit beyond that of an organization’s
obvious “strategic publics.”
• Today’s new media environment, which we argue is
revolutionary socially, politically, economically and culturally,
makes such incentives more clear, as well as more compelling.
• There is much to learn from the communities of soils, waters,
plants, and animals—collectivity the land—recognizing that
humans are only one of many thousands of additions to the
height and complexity of the evolution of this biotic pyramid.

27. Of course, coyotes don’t lobby Congress, and flowers
are seldom regarded as a primary strategic public, i.e.,
they are nonpublics; however, we argue they are part of
the “general public.”
• Homo sapiens have had a good run, but fundamental changes
are occurring in human society, and “ecologists” are needed, not
to create buzz about the latest app or to self-righteously claim to
practice two-way symmetry with primary “strategic publics,” but
to view public relations through the science of ecology and to
view their publics as all of the biotic communities within an
ecosystem.

28. Thanks for listening to me, London College of
Communication!
—Dean Kruckeberg