“…Due to the continuing reliance on excellence theory and other functionalist approaches (Grunig & Grunig, 1992), some public relations scholarship still views activists as antagonistic groups corporations need to manage through public relations techniques (Benecke & Oksiutycz, 2015;Smith & Ferguson, 2010;Stokes & Rubin, 2010). Traditional activism scholarship argues that opposing parties in a conflict begin by trying to find common ground; but, once one party does not reciprocate, media advocacy may begin, providing the pivot to PIC (Fessmann, 2017;Hon, 2017). As Stokes and Rubin (2010) point out, this pivot away from accommodation becomes necessary because corporations and public interest communicators often have conflicting goals, meaning that "the compromise metaphor implicit in the two-way symmetrical model is not always accurate in describing the relationships between corporations and activists" (p. 42).…”