Financial investigations: Auditing research accounts of communication in business, investor relations, and public relations (1994–2016)

• Published in: Public relations review Vol. 43; no. 2; pp. 306 - 313
• Main Authors: Doan, Mai Anh, McKie, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.06.2017
• Subjects: Financial communication; Interdisciplinarity; Investor relations; Public relations; Interdisciplinarity; Public relations; Investor relations; Financial communication
• ISSN: 0363-8111; 1873-4537
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.02.010

•Offers the first comprehensive investigation of the development of investor relations through published articles on the field.•Compares and contrasts the approaches of communication-centered and business-centered research on investor relations.•Demonstrates how investor relations and public relations have limited interactions with each other and with other disciplines.•Draws on the investigation’s findings to recommend five directions to reduce this academic insularity while improving the practice and research of investor relations. In this article, we investigate investor relations (IR) scholarship across business-centered and communication-centered fields of study from 1994 to 2016. This investigation’s aims were to examine development almost a quarter of a century of IR scholarship and to use that to explore how to improve future IR practices and studies. We found that scholarly research in IR and public relations (PR) failed to display many signs of interaction with each other, rarely intersected with other disciplines, and reveal considerable potential for developing synergies from their existing differences. In conclusion, we argue that the current academic insularity also quarantines the practitioners. To address these issues we propose specific future collaborations to improve both IR’s scholarly output and its practice.