19 The Outcomes of Engagement in Activism Networks A Co-creational Approach Adam J. Saffer Engagement, the “two-way relational, give-and-take between organizations and stakehold- ers/publics” (Taylor & Kent, 2014, p. 391), is fundamental to activism and activists’ networks. However, much of the literature to date originates from the precarious presumption that orga- nizations engage with publics and stakeholders because of activists’ threats to organizational autonomy (Coombs & Holladay, 2007, 2012; Grunig, 1989). As a result, scholars have devel- oped models and theories that seek to identify whom an organization should engage and how that organization should engage with activists (cf. Leitch & Motion, 2010; Leitch & Neilson, 2001). By narrowly focusing on the “threats” activists pose to organizations, our understanding of engagement, in the context of activism, is based on the relational give, not the give-and- take. Engagement can be seen in new and more holistic ways when we consider the relational give-and-take that occurs in networks of activism. To broaden the perspective on engagement, this chapter draws from the co-creational approach to communication in the public relations literature. Public relations scholars have divided the ield’s theory development in to the functional and co-creational approaches. The functional approach regards communication as mere information dissemination and considers publics as consumers of organizations’ messages. Engagement in this light is a matter of the relational give when an organization pushes information to a public. Functional approaches to engagement fall short of the full potential. Engagement is indistinguishable from co-creational communication. From the co-creational approach, publics are seen “as co-creators of meaning and communication as what makes it possible to agree to shared meanings, interpretations, and goals” (Botan & Taylor, 2004, p. 652). Engagement within the co-creational approach elevates the role of communication, obliges a relational give-and-take, and encompasses the engagement organizations, groups, and publics have with each other and issues. More importantly, the co-creational approach can move the theoretical understanding of engagement forward by studying what comes from engagement. Within the emerging co-creational literature, scholars and researchers have begun to con- sider a major theoretical and empirical question: What is the outcome of engagement? Scholars have posited that shared meaning and social capital are two interdependent outcomes of co- creational engagement (Heath, 2009; Taylor, 2009). This conceptual framework suggests that public relations-facilitated discourses in activist networks can foster shared meaning and cultivate social capital (Heath, 2009; Taylor, 2009, 2011; Yang & Taylor, 2015). Yang and Taylor (2015) The Handbook of Communication Engagement, First Edition. Edited by Kim A. Johnston and Maureen Taylor. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.