Abu Dhabi Police Department: the Reputation Management - Research Proposal Example

PROPOSED TITLE: “An Analysis of the Reputation Management of the Abu Dhabi Police amongst the Expatriate Community” Keywords: Corporate reputation, public relations, community relations, communications Abstract: The purpose of this proposed study is to assess the effectiveness of the reputation management practises of the Abu Dhabi Police department (ADP) in the context of the perceptions of the expatriate community in Abu Dhabi. The primary research will take two directions: First, a content analysis of public relations communications from the ADP – those issued directly and through secondary media sources – will be conducted. Second, a series of in-depth interviews with a number of residents representing a cross-section of the expatriate community in Abu Dhabi will be conducted, and their impressions analysed. The expected deliverables of this research are conclusions qualitatively describing the effectiveness of the ADP’s reputation management practises, and recommendations how those practises may be improved or refined. The value of this proposed study comes from its relevance – Abu Dhabi has a very large population of foreign nationals, far larger, in fact, than the native Emirati population – and from the gap in existing research; very little research appears to have been done on corporate reputation management for public sector organisations of any kind, and none has been done in the context of the police organisation in Abu Dhabi, or elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates. Literature Review: 1. Background Abu Dhabi is the capital and largest of the United Arab Emirates (which include Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain), and along with Abu Dhabi and Sharjah accounts for about 85% of the UAE’s population, of which about 80% is made up of expatriate nationals, nearly all of whom are guest workers. About 45% of the expatriate population are South Asian (Indians and Pakistanis), with Iranians and Arabs from other parts of the Middle East comprising about 30%, and Westerners (Europeans, Australians, and North Americans) making up about 5% of the population (Foley, 1999: 26). From the perspective of Western expatriates, who generally view conditions in the UAE positively, there are sharp divisions in their host society which are probably most obvious in Abu Dhabi, being the political and economic centre of the UAE; native Emiratis – who are a minority in their own land – are considered almost a separate society, with a social hierarchy amongst the foreign population consisting of, from top to bottom, Westerners, other Arabs, Iranians, Filipinos, and South Asians and Africans (Davis, 2007: 63-66; Hari, 2009). The attitude towards the police among European or American expatriates is not necessarily fearful, but cautious; some anecdotally relate stories of serious trouble encountered with the authorities for what in their home countries would be relatively minor offenses, such as traffic infractions or use of alcohol (Hari, 2009). For their part, good corporate reputation and its consequences, good community relations, are a critical priority for the ADP. According to ADP Director of Police Operations and Human Resources Major General Mohammed Al Menhali, “Our priorities are to maintain security and safety for all, make roads safer, control crime, take more of a community-based approach in order to help build confidence in our services, and support Abu Dhabi in its creation of the most open, efficient and safe business and tourist environment possible. We are committed to developing our people and capabilities to achieve this. Abu Dhabi is one of the safest cities in the world and we want to keep it this way.” (Hendrikz, 2011) To achieve the communications interchange necessary to follow the “community-based approach” and “help build confidence” in their services, the ADP – as is typical of government service agencies in Abu Dhabi – maintains a small- to medium-sized public relations operation, which relies mainly on a conventional, one-way communications approach in disseminating official information; the ADP does, however, also follow the trend among public and private organisation in Abu Dhabi of making heavy use of the Internet as a communications tool, which is likely to enhance the effectiveness of the ADP’s PR operations (Ayish, 2005: 382, 385). The use of media also functions as a one-way communications tool; Abu Dhabi’s media follows a “Reformist Government-Controlled” pattern wherein media professionalism is balanced with support for the political, security, and cultural concerns of the emirate (Ayish, 2002: 141). 2. Defining Corporate Reputation Barnett, Jermier, and Lafferty (2006: 34) draw on a variety of sources to provide a definition of corporate reputation as “Observers’ collective judgments of a corporation based on assessments of the financial, social, and environmental impacts attributed to the corporation over time.” One of the fundamental ideas upon which corporate reputation is built is that it bears some value for the organisation. Other ways of defining corporate reputation are based in game theory and signalling theory; in the latter, the communication content of the corporate reputation ‘signals’ determine the observers’ perceptions of the reputation, while in the former, ‘reputations’ are considered sets of characteristics that differentiate amongst different types of firms (Fombrun & Van Riel, 1997: 6). In any of those definitions, corporate identity (collections of symbols, such as brands), help to focus a corporate image (impressions of the organisation), to which the quality of reputation is assigned by observers’ judgments, and this equation results in some value quantifiable, i.e., financial value to the firm (Barnett, Jermier & Lafferty, 2006: 33). Other researchers, however, point out that the nature of the value to the firm, or the use that corporate reputation can be put to by the firm is not entirely clear in the existing literature (Lewellyn, 2002: 446-447). Another problem of more immediate impact for the proposed study is that the majority of the literature addresses corporate reputation in the context of businesses, wherein financial outcomes are at least implicitly the overall goal, which would not apply to a public organisation like the Abu Dhabi Police. If, however, the organisational view of corporate reputation is adopted, the problems of purpose and applicability are partly solved. The feedback of stakeholders and external observers helps to give the organisation focal principles, or “a general sense of the right way of doing things,” insofar as the “right way” can be defined as that which elicits a positive judgment (Fombrun & Van Riel, 1997: 8). Internal objectives, however, can reduce the effectiveness of corporate reputation as a moderator of organisational behaviour and builder of positive firm-stakeholder relations, particularly objectives that are related to operational or financial efficiency (Nakra, 2000: 36; Grunow, 2007); judgments of the corporate reputation that are based on firm competence are helped by these objectives, but judgments based on the “sympathy” of the firm – or how it maintains its relationships with stakeholders or other outsiders – are harmed by them (Schwaiger, 2004). 3. Relationships of the Organisation In view of the somewhat segmented nature of the population described above, the relationships of the ADP to the people of Abu Dhabi can be described by situational theory, which segments stakeholders into different publics according to the level of relationship the organisation must have with them in order to be effective (Hallahan, 2000: 499; Grunig, 2006: 155). These relationships can take the form of either exchange relationships, which are based on a past and expected future exchange of benefits between the organisation and stakeholders, or communal relationships, where the relationship is based on mutual concern for organisation and stakeholder welfare (Hon & Grunig, 1999: 3). In the case of the ADP, the latter presumably would be more important. In either case, there are four components of the relationship suggested by the literature that will be investigated by the study (Hon & Grunig, 1999: 2-3): Control mutuality, or the degree to which the organisation and the public can influence each others’ actions; trust; satisfaction; and commitment, or the intentions of the organisation and the public to continue to exert efforts to promote a positive relationship. 4. Public Relations Theory There are two theories that are indicated by the literature as being applicable to this proposed study. The first is agenda-setting, which operates on two levels: The first level is salience, or the importance of an object or actor; and the second level is the attributes of the object or actor (Meijer & Kleinnijenhuis, 2006: 544). Using the ADP as an example, first-level agenda-setting would occur when an issue such as crime, or when the ADP as an organisation becomes the primary focus of audience attention. Second-level agenda-setting would occur when the ADP is associated with the issue of crime. The second theory is issue ownership theory, in which an organisation becomes intimately linked to an external issue, such that public sentiment towards the issue becomes a yardstick for the organisation’s reputation (Meijer & Kleinnijenhuis, 2006: 545). Thus, the crime rate or nature of crimes in Abu Dhabi will reflect on the corporate reputation of the ADP, whether or not the ADP overtly does anything about crime. Using agenda-setting, the ADP can create or control the issue through their PR activities, which are a means to help construct a certain social reality (Hallahan, 1999: 206). The degree to which the ADP’s PR communications are asymmetrical, as has been suggested (Ayish, 2005; Wright & Rwambizabuga, 2006), or more symmetrical and dialogic (Kent & Taylor, 2002: 24-25) is an area that will be investigated by this study. Main Research Question: Making a reasonable assumption that the objective of the reputation management practises of the Abu Dhabi Police department is to create and maintain a positive corporate reputation amongst Abu Dhabi’s expatriate population, the main research question of this study is: To what degree are the reputation management practises of the ADP successful in creating and maintaining a positive corporate reputation amongst Abu Dhabi’s expatriate residents? That question of course suggests a number of secondary research questions, which are detailed below. Secondary Research Questions: 1. Are there differences in the perceptions of ADP’s corporate reputation between different expatriate groups? As explained above, there is some suggestion that Abu Dhabi society is significantly stratified; do people from different groups have different perceptions of the police? 2. What are the sources of information study respondents use for forming their judgments of ADP’s reputation? In what proportions do expatriates get information from ADP’s PR communications directly, from the media, or from other second-hand sources (such as gossip)? 3. To what degree is media information about the ADP reflective of PR communications from the ADP? As described earlier, the Abu Dhabi media could be characterised as being supportive of the government and its agencies, thus it would be expected that most news concerning the ADP would be positive. What is unknown is whether media reports are independent, or whether there is evidence that the ADP actively employs techniques to use media exposure as part of the department’s PR strategy. 4. Is there evidence that public opinion modifies or otherwise affects ADP’s PR communications? Or put another way, is there evidence of dialogic communication in ADP’s reputation management activities; Ayish (2002, 2005) suggests there is not, but this has not yet been tested. Methodology: The methodology proposed for this study consists of two primary activities: First, a series of in-depth interviews will be conducted with a relatively small number of respondents representing a cross-section of Abu Dhabi’s expatriate population. This will make the study very nearly completely qualitative in nature, and there are some practical reasons for this. An important consideration is the ethical hazard, which is discussed in more detail below and which will almost certainly tend to limit the number of willing participants. Another more fundamental consideration is the nature of the study topic. The dependent variable in this research is the “effectiveness of ADP’s reputation management,” while the independent variable is “public perception of ADP’s corporate reputation.” That independent variable is itself dependent on a vast array of possible subsidiary variables – ethnic group, gender, social and economic status, sources of information, personal interaction (good or bad) with the ADP, personal habits, and so on. Thus the suggested approach is subjective, relativist perspective that falls somewhere between interpretivism and critical theory (Murray & Ozanne, 1991; Clarke, 2005). The ontological perspective is one of a socially-constructed, contextual, and dynamic reality; the axiological perspective is interpretive, seeking to explain a phenomenon; and the epistemological assumptions are that the knowledge gathered is value-laden, contextual, and reflective (Murray & Ozanne, 1991: 132-135; Cohen & Crabtree, 2006; Bryman, 2012). The second part of the research will require content analysis of media stories involving the ADP, and the PR communications content from the ADP. For this part of the research, some quantitative analysis, such as a comparison of key words and phrases using a Mann-Whitney U Test can be conducted, and these results can be compared to a similar test of the content of interview responses (Shier, 2004; Macnamara, 2006: 5). This will, however, require a significant degree of critical and interpretive analysis; one practical reason for this is the language variations that will be encountered. ADP’s PR content and local media reports are mainly provided in Arabic, or in English translated from Arabic, and of course, foreign residents of Abu Dhabi speak a number of primary languages. Because this is a qualitative study, there is naturally some concern for the validity and reliability of the results. Conducting an analytical content analysis, however, of information drawn from different sources – ADP PR content, responses of interview participants, and media content – strengthens the validity and reliability of the results according to the different standards applied to qualitative research than quantitative research, because it tests for consistency of information through triangulation (Golafshani, 2003: 601-604). Thus, even though there are limits to the range of data gathered, there is a high degree of confidence that the results will be appropriately reliable and valid. Ethical Considerations: Because of the potentially sensitive nature of the information that would be gathered from interview participants, and the implication from some sources that people critical of the government – although early pilot interviews seem to indicate that is not a significant concern for this study – or its agencies in Abu Dhabi might be placing themselves at risk of unwanted attention from the authorities (Davis, 2007; Hari, 2009), extra caution will be exercised to maintain participant anonymity and security. No personally-identifying information will be collected, including information that could be used to indirectly identify a participant, such as place of employment. For added assurance, all interview participants are drawn from people who have recently (within the past year) left Abu Dhabi and have no immediate plans to return. Project Structure: The plan of work is as follows. A comprehensive review of the literature, of which the selection provided in this proposal is only a small, indicative sample, will be conducted first, and will focus on three main areas: Theoretical background of reputation management and public relations communications, analysis of public relations and community engagement amongst police departments and other public agencies, and relevant social and cultural factors in Abu Dhabi. Concurrently with the literature review, a content analysis of media reports pertaining directly or indirectly to the ADP and the ADP’s own PR communications will be conducted, covering a time period of at least two years. The primary research will consist of a number of in-depth interviews with recent expatriate residents of Abu Dhabi, and following this, an analysis of the content of those interviews will be compared to the earlier content analysis. Composition and revision of the final report will then follow. References Ayish, M.I. 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Mathematics Learning Support Centre [online], 2004. http://mlsc.lboro.ac.uk/resources/statistics/Mannwhitney.pdf. Wright, C., and Rwambizabuga, A. (2006) “Institutional Pressures, Corporate Reputation, and Voluntary Codes of Conduct: An Examination of the Equator Principles”. Business and Society Review, 111(1): 89-117. Read More