Education:
Ph.D. The University of Maryland (communication ethics, business
management) 2000
M.A. University of South Carolina (Crisis Management) 1993
B.A. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (sociology, journalism)
1992
Shannon A. Bowen, Ph.D., University of South Carolina is a Professor (full rank and tenured) in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina. She specializes in issues management and decision models for helping organizations better face ethical challenges. Prof. Bowen has been a frequent facilitator of GovStrat workshops on Business and Professional Ethics since early 2021 and has already gained popularity and likeability for her broad and deep practical and evidence-based insights among our learners who are chiefly Directors and C-Suite Executives, Senior Managers and other employees.
Dr. Bowen teaches and researches ethics across corporations, public affairs, and the public relations industry. She is a former journal editor for the journal Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and is an ethics columnist for P.R.Week. Her professional experience includes working on Capitol Hill and as a research analyst for clients including corporations, numerous political campaigns, and two presidential campaigns.
Dr. Bowen served on the Board of Trustees of the Arthur W. Page Society, currently serves on the IPRRC Board of Directors. She has published more than one hundred journals articles, book chapters, books, and encyclopedia entries, as well as the Dictionary of public relations measurement and research (3rd ed.) that is a free online resource at the Institute for Public Relations. She has won numerous academic awards, grants, and the JJ&W Behavioural Science Research Prize.
Her most cited works are on ethical decision-making models in the pharmaceutical industry and Kantian ethics. Her doctorate is from the University of Maryland in the excellence theory tradition of Grunig, as well as in business management; she won the ICA Robert L. Heath Outstanding Dissertation Award for her analysis of Kantian ethics in application to the pharmaceutical industry. Her recent books include “An Overview of the Public Relations Function” and “Excellence in Internal Communication Management” (Business Expert Press).
In 2020, Dr. Bowen won the inaugural “Leadership in Scholarship Award” for a record of high-impact scholarship from the College of Information and Communication at the University of South Carolina.