Serving stakeholders ethically in a polarized world – Scholar Q&A with Elina Tachkova

First-time Page Center scholar Elina Tachkova is a crisis communication expert and faculty member at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her work centers on crisis response strategies to organizational crises, with a focus on ethics and protecting affected stakeholders. Amongst other topics, she is interested in how companies navigate polarizing issues such as climate change, social justice and diversity across different regions. Her Page Center project explores how organizations map and prioritize stakeholders and adapt communication strategies in polarized environments. In this Q&A, Tachkova talks about her project and shares her thoughts on the needs of stakeholders and the ethical strategies companies can use to reach them. This project is part of the Page Center’s 2026 Call on Social Responsibility, Advocacy, and Activism in an Age of Political and Cultural Polarization.

How did you find your way to the Page Center call and submitting your proposal?

The Page Center has always been a well-known and prestigious institution in public relations. I've seen a lot of very interesting research funded by the Page Center, and what I particularly like is that it's applied research. It means that these projects are something that make a difference in the profession. We can translate these findings into something that will affect a lot of people. So, I've been looking at the different calls, and I think the one this year really fit. I felt it was easy for me to make the argument why this research should be funded, and it was very aligned with my line of research in ethics.

You’ll be looking at how organizations are responding to a recent shift in advocacy, how people react to it and what it means for a business. Can you talk about that shift?

I think it's really the current socio-political situation in the world. We mostly think about the U.S., right? But, in other places the same issues that are polarizing people exist. It's just they're not getting so much attention, and it's been that way for a while. But I talk about affective polarization or how this growing animosity that exists between the parties leads to “intractable conflicts” in organizational communication. That’s when people really can’t find a ground to coexist together. That’s when it becomes problematic.

So, what changed?

People have always had different opinions and disagreed on topics, but now it's becoming us versus them, me over them. There has been a shift in the conversation that is becoming troublesome. It’s troublesome to see all the animosity that's growing. Because of globalization, multinational companies work on multiple markets at this point. They are facing these issues and wondering, “How do we communicate in a way that we're not alienating different stakeholders in different areas?”

Can you share an example of how an issue can drive polarization in this context?

The easiest example that I can give comes from an interview I did with one of my participants. He said, the European Union has 20-plus different countries, and yet they seem to be very united and have more or less the same stand on these polarizing issues. The United States is one country with 50 states, but there's such a variance between these states into how people think about issues. We've seen companies in the U.K. and U.S. remove some of their quantifiable targets in reporting about DEI, such as having minorities represented or having women in leadership. The U.K. is technically not part of the European Union, but it’s because of that pressure.

Talk about the plan for your study and what you hope to uncover at the end.

I am doing interviews, and what I want to find out through my interviews is how companies go about prioritizing their key stakeholders. We in public relations talk about legitimacy, power and urgency, but I think that because of all the shifts that are happening due to polarization and affective polarization in particular, these notions might be challenged and might be starting to look different. So, how do companies prioritize their stakeholders? How do they choose who to engage with? How do they identify issues that they should talk about and others that they should not talk about? What kind of communication strategies are they employing? When I talk about helping organizations, it's to improve the experiences of stakeholders, and that's where the ethics part lies. I am helping organizations in order to help people.

Any thoughts on future steps or where you can take this line of research next?

A lot, actually. I really enjoyed our discussion at the Research Roundtable*, because that gave me a lot of things to think about. For example, one of the board members asked, “Do you want to look at this topic in terms of regions, or do you want to look at it in terms of generations?” That difference matters a lot. So, exploring those differences could be something to do potentially. I also think that it might be interesting to look at different markets, and this is what some of my reviewers on the grant also mentioned. Can you include South America and Australia? South America is super interesting, because there’s not much research at all done in this area.

Can you share the Page Center’s role in your research and helping make this project happen?

I didn’t know that we would get feedback from board members. I love that. I wish all of them were there to pick our projects apart through their lenses as practitioners and people who have so many years of experience. I really appreciate that. I think that gives grounded feedback, because as academics, we can focus too much on the theory and what drives the theory. I love doing applied research, and the fact that the Page Center is doing ethics and applied research, and we're getting feedback and working closely with people who have had such an experience is amazing. It’s something that scholars really appreciate, because sometimes we can get carried away from the real world.

*The Research Roundtable is an annual meeting where scholars present their research ideas to the Page Center Advisory Board.