Everyone thinks they are "doing" public relations; and in some sense of the words, they are right. We interact with many different people throughout the day. We develop relationships, be it with the clerk at the grocery store, our dentist, our neighbor, our spouse, or our boss, among others. In our careers, we develop even more relationships and call them business networks, sell our products and ideas, and buy and consume other products and adopt other's thoughts and actions. We watch television, listen to the radio, search the internet and connect to others and the world constantly through our smartphones capable of sending texts and emails as simply as a phone call.
We communicate, make our views known and, for the most part, try to get along well with others; but we also do things that endanger our relationships, sometimes without even knowing it and find ourselves denying, defending or apologizing for our actions.
So when an advertisement on Craigslist calls for an administrative assistant to conduct public relations (http://boise.craigslist.org; accessed September 19, 2011) and "bridge public and private relationships," it might be easy for a public relations professional to dismiss that a company that would rely on free advertising to secure such an important position and then relegate the responsibilities along with tasks like "keeping the office tidy," really doesn't understand the subtleties of the profession at all and move on.
However, this, among other things, is the type of problem that the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) wanted to address in 1985 when they awarded a grant to James Grunig to research the public relations profession resulting in the now well-known and often discussed "Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management," The time had come to make the profession professional.
Grunig and his research team set out to define a profession that was universally undervalued because of many misperceptions surrounding its practice. Not only were there companies that viewed public relations as an offshoot of hospitality as was described in the employment advertisement described above, there were others who understood how a dark, manipulative side to the practice persisted with an aptitude for persuasion the fit nicely hidden inside an advertising or marketing department.
Grunig's team began by analyzing the results of questionnaires mailed to 225 organizations and conducting "extensive literature" review. The team defined 14 characteristics of excellent communication practices and concluded that public relations was indeed a function of management used to "make organizations more effective and to explain how and why communication makes organizations more effective." In order to make the practice of public relations professional, this foundation was thereby set.
Over the years, the Excellence Theory has met with many challenges from different theorists and practitioners who disagree with the efficacy of symmetrical communication, or prefer to explore public relations as situational and evolving. Some resist the need to apply theory at all.
Others wish to broaden the concept of public relations, moving away from management goals to include and elevate and achieve higher-demanding societal goals. Postmodernist theorists and practitioners can be found in this realm, questioning if communication can truly be symmetrical as defined by Grunig, and if the act of management is in itself subversive to the practice of public relations as it seeks to control others.
This is the true value of the Excellence Theory; it provides a foundation from which other theories develop and coalesce.
By using a postmodern approach to one's work in order to question management goals, one can become an advocate for all stakeholders and lead their organization by establishing a moral conscience to be shared with others inside and outside of their firm. Most important, by establishing their personal values, a public relations professional can extend their personal influence to keep the practice from being used by others.
Derina Holtzhausen, the leading scholar in postmodern public relations, calls for the creation of a "postmodern condition in public relations."
This blog has been developed to introduce how a public relations professional might apply a postmodern perspective to their work and resist power that might marginalize any group of stakeholders, internal and external, even those who are remote and not easily identified to a particular cause or action.
