Lobbying in the United Kingdom
Formal procedures enable individual members of the public to lobby their Member of Parliament but most lobbying activity centres on corporate, charity and trade association lobbying, where organisations seek to amend government policy through advocacy. Companies and individuals who operate in this sector commonly use the terms "public relations", "public affairs", "political consultancy" or "corporate affairs" to describe their activities (though this was also a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the word "lobbyists" following the 1994 Cash-for-questions affair). Professional public affairs agencies, representing multiple clients, undertake a significant proportion of lobbying activity in addition to individual organisations conducting lobbying on an in-house basis.
Organization–public relationships
In 1984, Dr. Mary Ann Ferguson first suggested that public relations scholars pursue relationship management as the disciplines guiding theoretical and practical framework. It took nearly 15 years for Dr. John Ledingham and Dr. Stephen Bruning (1998) to conceptualize a working definition of relationship management, and Dr. Linda Hon and Dr. James Grunig (1999) followed suit by outlining measurements for organisational relationships and suggesting strategies that could be helpful in understanding these relationships in their monograph, "Measuring Relationships in Public Relations". The burst of excitement around the emerging relationship paradigm at the end of the 20th century has lead to a significant amount of scholarship dedicated to understanding the role relationships play in public relations.