This article reviews approaches to the segmentation of organizational stakeholders, recommending spec$cally that in the early (stakeholder) stage of strategic management, publics should be segmented using crosssituational approaches grounded in the notions of "consequences" and "resources." In the later (public and issue) stages, publics should be segmented using situational approaches, derived from notions of "problem" and "issue. " The review and synthesis seeks to help scholars theorize more systematically about segmenting publics in public relations and to enable practitioners to more strategically segment and prioritize their organizational stakeholders.Public relations practitioners work for organizations, and organizations operate within environments that include myriad stakeholders or publics. Thus, strategic public relations practice should start with formative research to segment or "enact"' the environment into "the most important components."* Under resource constraints, organizations must selectively invest resources in building relationships with specific components of their envir~nment.~ This article reviews one aspect of formative research-ways to segment organizational publics to facilitate the identification of strategic constituencies within the stakeholder environment. Such segmentation of publics has been recognized for decades as being critical to the success of public relations programs? Yet most public relations efforts at stakeholder segmentation seem narrowly f o~u s e d .~In contrast, this article argues for a more comprehensive approach that is both theoretically grounded and pragmatically effective.Thus, this article will (1) provide researchers a review of segmentation approaches, framed by the theory of strategic public relations management;6 (2) advance three propositions for future scholarly investigation based on this theoretical framework; and (3)
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