A recent critical turn to both public relations and institutional studies has highlighted ‘agency’ as a shared important theme. While public relations scholars call to bring back ‘agency’ into analysis of practice and process of public relations, neo-institutionalists use ‘agency’ to explain heterogeneity and innovation in institutional outcomes. In this context, this article proposes to use ‘agency’ as a meeting ground to explore how the two disciplines could engage in a dialogue that improves mutual understanding and theoretical enrichment of each other. It argues that institutional thoughts such as ‘embedded agency’, ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ and ‘institutional work’ advance understandings of the downplayed issues of power, diversity and activism in the public relations literature. In turn, the multi-paradigmatic public relations scholarship provides useful tools for analysing institutional agency. Also, this article discusses future research agenda to advance fruitful collaboration between the two domains.

最近对公共关系和机构研究的重大转折强调了“机构”是一个共同的重要主题。公共关系学者呼吁将“代理”重新带入对公共关系的实践和过程的分析中，而新制度主义者则使用“代理”来解释制度结果中的异质性和创新性。在这种情况下，本文建议使用“机构”作为聚会场所，探讨这两个学科如何进行对话，以增进彼此的了解和彼此的理论充实。它认为，诸如“嵌入式机构”，“机构企业家精神”和“机构工作”之类的机构思想使人们对公共关系文献中被淡化的权力，多样性和行动主义问题有了更深入的了解。反过来，多元范式的公共关系奖学金为分析机构代理提供了有用的工具。此外，本文讨论了未来的研究议程，以促进两个领域之间卓有成效的合作。