Strategic Communication Discipline

Dr. Flora Hung-Baesecke is an internationally recognized scholar. She is a Senior Lecturer and the Teaching and Learning Lead for the Strategic Communication Discipline at the School of Communication at UTS.

 

Her research interests include stakeholder engagement, corporate social responsibility (CSR), organizational purpose, sustainability, strategic communication, social media, relationship management, crisis communication, and employee communication. According to Google Scholar, as of 2024, she is:

• The 32nd most-cited scholar in strategic communication,
• The 90th most-cited scholar in public relations,
• The 7th most-cited scholar in relationship management,
• The 16th most-cited scholar in stakeholder engagement.

 

She serves on the editorial boards of several Q1 journals: Public Relations Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, International Journal of Strategic Communication, and Communication Research Reports. She has won multiple faculty top paper awards at international conferences, including the Public Relations Division of ICA and the International Public Relations Research Conference. Flora is the 2015–2018 and 2023 Arthur W. Page Legacy Scholar. She regularly presents her research at international conferences and publishes in various Q1 journals, such as Journal of Public Relations Research, Public Relations Review, International Journal of Strategic Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Social Science Computer Review, International Journal of Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Communication Management, Asian Journal of Communication, and Communication Research Reports.

 

Outside of the university, Flora is a member of the prestigious Arthur W. Page Society in the USA (membership by invitation only) and serves in various association and conference roles. Currently, she chairs the ICA Research Awards Committee and the ICA Public Relations Division's Robert Heath Most Impactful and Innovative Research Award. She has also served as Chair of the ICA Applied/Public Policy Research Award Committee (2022-2024), a member of the ICA Award Committee (2022-2024), and a member of the ICA Board (2019-2021). Additionally, she is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Public Relations Research Conference (since 2015) and was the Chair of the Public Relations Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) from 2019 to 2021.

 

In addition to her teaching and research, Flora has gained consultancy and professional experience by working in a public relations firm in Taiwan and through agency/corporate research collaborations. These include working with BASF on employee engagement in corporate CSR activities, taking on a commissioned research project with the Hong Kong Police Force, collaborating with Edelman Public Relations Headquarters on several Edelman Trust Barometer studies, and working with the Research and Measurement Department at Ketchum Public Relations Headquarters.

 

Before relocating to the Australia/New Zealand region, she taught at Hong Kong Baptist University, where she served as the Option Coordinator for the Public Relations and Advertising Option, Associate Director of the Center for Media and Communication Research, and Vice Chair of the Graduate Student Committee at the School of Communication.

Jonathan Paul Marshall is an anthropologist who studies processes of disorder, disruption and disinformation, particularly in the eco-social-technical spheres. He is currently finishing the work from a Future Fellowship at UTS, which was a project entitled "Society and Climate Change: Social analysis of a disruptive technology," and is a part-time lecturer in Social and Political Science.

Marshall's research is primarily aimed at showing the general importance of recognising that social life occurs both as, and in, complex systems, and that this has vital consequences for politics, economics, communication and relations to ecologies. He argues that irregularity, disruption and unintended consequences are standard features of social life and cannot be ignored, because they are vital parts of the system in general. Our attempts at producing order, frequently produce the disorder we fear. These processes can be said to be analogous, in their consequences, to the ways that people suppress disturbing feelings and information in their personal lives, for themselves to fit in with social demands.

For example, Marshall has shown the importance of work space politics and managerial hierarchies for the disruption produced by software projects, which translate managerial ideas of what work is, or should be, done into software. The same patterns of structure can also disrupt the information flow within the organisation, leading to organisational chaos and increasing the risk of collapse. Because of the software's insufficiencies for the task, social organisation may develop around the software to bypass the disruption. IT engineers may kluge software together to fix the problems, and so on. This means that automatic updates may cause further chaos, because the organisation and by-passes may not be officially recognised or expected.

Software installation is the meeting of several complex systems: organisational, work flow, and software itself. It is not surprising that this interaction of complex systems can cause unintended effects.

Computerised information gathering does not solve this problem, as the information gathering is framed not by what is actually important at some time in the future, but by what the program designers think will be important. Indeed because computers are constantly expanding, the amount of information that can be collected directly from workers can also expand, almost infinitely. Workers face more and more time collecting information, and less time to do their real work. Habits of information collecting may also be taken into productive work and disrupt work processes.

This kind of information breakdown, and programing to satisfy management visions, was one of the contributing factors to the 2007+ financial collapse, and is becoming increasingly important in political life, not only through the use of simulations to control the economy, but also through the distribution of news and propaganda, through 'information group' identities.

These kinds of problems are relatively easy to fix to a degree, but they run against problems in hierarchy, in expense and in desire for control. Workplaces may need to shift out of old requirements which were once useful, but are now harmful.

To carry out this project Marshall was awarded a QEII Fellowship and worked with Professor James Goodman of Social and Political Sciences and Didar Zowghi, a professor of IT at UTS.

Currently he is working on a project which explores problems with the use of climate technologies, in the transition to a sustainable future. In this project, climate technologies are said to include: renewable energies; biofuels; carbon trading; geoengineering; energy efficiency; nuclear energy; electric vehicles; transport reforms and so on. It investigates the likely unintended social consequences of these technological responses to climate change and ecological destruction, and the likely social disruption of those technologies. The project also explores the ways that politics and neoliberal capitalism have hindered transition, and made the pressures of transition greater than we might otherwise have had to encounter.

The project has been expanded through a UTS Cross Faculty Reaseach Grant attempting to predict and remove obstacles to community energy projects. We have started working in Narrabri with Geni.Energy and Enova Energy. Again the main conclusion is that community energy projects are being constrained by Government policies and regulations rather than by technology. Government policy in Australia is geared towards large scale renewable installations. This can produce situations in which local people do not receive much benefit from the installations. We suggest that community renewables provides easier transition because communities have to negotiate with each other and share the benefits. They can also decide what to do with the excess energy, and what kinds of production need to be encouraged locally. Given the weather events of climate change, it may also provide resilience when communities are cut off from the grid.
The end point of this project will be a computerised model of the factors involved in community energy, with the aim of not only helping people to establish community energy projects, but to test changes in policy settings.

The investigation aims to increase the possibility of informed acceptable and possible technological adaptation and mitigation to the ecological damage largely produced by the economic system. Climate change is only one of many ecological crises that we face.

He has previously conducted research in several major areas:

- The use, and affects, of gender online.
- The construction and maintenance of online communities
- The paradoxes and inconsistencies in so called 'information societies'.
- The psycho-social history of Western science and the occult particularly the history of alchemy in the UK.
- The psychology of the existential crisis produced by awareness of, or disavowal of, climate change,
- the fantasies that people generate to make sense of this crisis.

His ethnographic thesis was published as 'Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control '(Peter Lang). He was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship to do the work on online gender, and edited Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change.

The IT project resulted in Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The Social Dynamics of Information, Networks and Software (Routledge),

Highly experienced advertising strategy and creative development practitioner with a strong background in communications theory and personal experience with the practical impact of fast-changing dynamics that are currently transforming the communications industries. He has been lecturing and tutoring undergraduates and post graduate students at UTS, as well as developing new courses and subjects for on-campus undergraduate and postgraduate programs, as well as a new online postgraduate suite of subjects. His doctoral research was into the nature and future of the concept of an ‘advertising idea’, particularly in relation to the impact that data is having on the application of intuitive creativity to developing advertising materials. This has informed the development of the new advertising focused undergraduate and postgraduate subjects.