Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management

James E. Grunig, James E. Grunig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136691744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

This book is the initial volume coming out of the "excellence project"--a comprehensive research effort commissioned by the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) Research Foundation. The purpose of this project was to answer two fundamental questions about public relations: What are the characteristics of an excellent communication department? How does excellent public relations make an organization more effective, and how much is that contribution worth economically? The research team began its work with a thorough review of the literature in public relations and related disciplines relevant to these questions. What started as a literature review, however, has ended in a general theory of public relations, one that integrates most of the wide range of ideas about, and practices of, communication management in organizations.

I THE BASIC THEORY

DOI: 10.4324/9780203812303-2

Part I sets forth the basic components of a general theory of excellence in public relations and the contribution it makes to organizational effectiveness. It begins at the philosophical level of worldview and ends with the practical advice of an experienced public relations professional.

2 The Effect of Worldviews On Public Relations Theory and Practice

James E. Grunig

University of Maryland

Jon White

Management Consultant Bedford, United Kingdom

DOI: 10.4324/9780203812303-3

ABSTRACT

The general theory of excellence in communication management and its contribution to organizational effectiveness begins at the level of world view— the way that people and organizations think about and define public relations. To understand the theory developed in this book, we must revise and expand conventional thinking about science and research and about public relations. For public relations to be excellent, this chapter maintains, public relations must be viewed as symmetrical, idealistic and critical, and managerial.

Thought has a self-reproductive power, and when the mind is held steadily to one idea it becomes coloured by it, and, as we may say, all the correlates of that thought arise within the mind. Hence the mystic obtains knowledge about any object of which he [sic] thinks constantly in fixed contemplation.

–H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891)

The scientific method has changed the world and the way people think about the world. In general, the scientific method has improved people's lives and has forced them to think logically and systematically about the things they observe and experience. As a result, many professions— including public relations-have looked to science to ground the practice of their profession.

Despite the obvious benefits of the scientific method, however, there are many myths about it that have shaped the thinking of scientists, professionals, and people in general—in ways that have been detrimental to scientific understanding, professional development, and human progress. Those myths include the belief that science can be totally objective, that it can be kept neutral of values, and that it can discover “truth.”

Many leading communication professionals look to the scientific method to produce a body of theoretical knowledge that will instill order on the chaos that seems to exist in public relations. Communication professionals often seem to flounder without direction in their work. In actual practice, public relations has no consistent definition. Realistically, it can be defined as little more than “what public relations people do.” The work of public relations people varies tremendously from one organization to another or from one practitioner to another. To many critics, that work seems unprincipled, unethical, and atheoretical.

Scientific research and the theory it produces can help to bring order to the chaos of public relations. It cannot do that, however, unless we first identify and explore the fundamental beliefs and assumptions that people have about public relations. In the last 30 years, philosophers and historians of science have changed their views dramatically about the nature of science. Once, they believed that the scientific method could remove subjectivity from the thinking and observing of people. Scientists, they believed, could follow systematic methods to identify and understand the truth that lies outside their minds. Now they know that science is a very human undertaking and that humans impose their fundamental beliefs about the world on their thinking and observing.

Public relations, like the social and behavioral sciences, is especially susceptible to human subjectivity because its practitioners try to understand and explain the behavior of people. People, in other words, observe the behavior of people. Most people have theories about why they and others behave as they do. Those theories may seem illogical to others, but they generally make perfect sense to the people who hold them. Thus, it is quite easy for the observer—the communication researcher or practitioner—to use his or her fundamental beliefs about the world to frame and understand the behavior of others. It also is quite easy for the observed — members of publics or public relations practitioners—to reject the explanations of researchers because those explanations do not coincide with their fundamental beliefs.

The practice of public relations and theories about its practice, therefore, are affected by the assumptions that practitioners and theorists have about such things as morality, ethics, human nature, religion, politics, free enterprise, or gender. People not involved in public relations have other assumptions about the profession—assumptions that cause these people to heap scorn and mistrust upon practitioners.

Such assumptions cannot be changed easily because they usually are rooted in the culture of organizations, communities, and societies. Although the assumptions that make up the worldviews of people are subjective and generally rigid, philosophers and social scientists believe that they can be identified and compared and that some worldviews work better than others in solving the problems of organizations and societies.

We introduce the concept of worldview in this chapter because we do not believe that practitioners and scholars of public relations will be able to understand and use our concepts of excellent public relations unless they first understand the worldview that under girds these concepts and how that worldview differs from others. We begin the chapter, therefore, by explaining the nature of a worldview. We then identify differing worldviews about public relations and select the worldview that we believe—and that research is beginning to show—helps organizations to use public relations most effectively.

The Role of Worldview in Theory and Research

The concept of worldview appears in literature throughout the humanities and social sciences, although with many names. Kearney (1984), an anthropologist, defined worldview as “a set of images and assumptions about the world” (p. 10). In describing the term image, Kearney used a definition that is more precise than the way the term image is used in public relations practice.¹ He pointed out that image has two meanings. One is the “literal sense of a visual representation in the mind” (p. 47)—which also is the meaning of image in cognitive psychology (Paivio, 1971). The other meaning, which pertains to worldview, is what Kearney called “organizing principles that have variously been called schemata, Gestalten, plans, structures, and so on” (p. 47). This also is the meaning of image made famous by the economist Kenneth Boulding (1936).

¹ The term used in public relations has so many meanings that it has little use in building theory. Public relations practitioners use the term image to refer to many different concepts, such as reputation, perception, attitude, message, attributes, evaluation, cognition, perception, credibility, support, belief, communication, or relationship. The average person sees image as the opposite of reality. In everyday language, images are projected, manipulated, polished, and tarnished. We believe the only escape from this confusion is not to use the term. Instead, we prefer to use one of the more precise terms to which image refers—such as reputation, perception, or evaluation. We also try to avoid use of the term to refer to worldview, preferring the more precise notion of assumptions about the world.

Kearney (1984) also referred to worldview as “macrothought.” Macro-thought describes well the concept of schema that now is extremely popular in cognitive and social psychology. Schemas (or schemata) are large, abstract structures of knowledge that people use to organize what they know and to make sense of new information that comes to them.

Psychologists have defined schemas in different ways (Anderson, 1983; J. Grunig & Childers [aka Hon], 1988; J. Grunig, Ramsey, & Schneider [aka L. Grunig], 1985; Schneider [aka L. Grunig], 1985). The essence of schemas can be captured, however, in Craik's (1979) notion of depth of processing— that schemas have “abstract, symbolic properties” (p. 457)—and in Markus and Zajonc's (1985) conclusion that psychologists generally view schemas as “subjective ‘theories’ about how the social world operates” (p. 145).

Worldview in Philosophy of Science

Once we realize that worldviews —or schemas —are theories of a sort, we can look to recent thinking about theories in the philosophy of science to help understand and evaluate the different worldviews that influence the study and practice of public relations.

In recent years, philosophers have abandoned the ideas of logical positivism that dominated science and the philosophy of science for decades. Logical positivists believed that theories are “true” representations of reality that can be verified by objective observation—the excessively optimistic view of the scientific method described at the beginning of this chapter. Philosophers of science now realize that scientists are human, that humans are subjective, and that subjectivity plays a role in theory building.

Led by Thomas Kuhn (1970), a historian of science, many philosophers abandoned logical positivism for a completely relative view of science. They argued that science is as subjective as any other kind of thinking and that competing theories cannot be compared and evaluated objectively. Most philosophers, however, rejected this relative view, which was as extreme in the opposite direction as was logical positivism. Instead, philosophers now describe science and the theories it produces in ways that we would describe as a quasi-objective way of building knowledge (Laudan, 1977; Shapere, 1984; Suppe, 1977, 1989).²

² See J. Grunig (1989 b) for a review of these changes in philosophy of science and their importance for public relations.

Logical positivists, in general, viewed the relationship between theory and the real world as a relationship between two levels of abstraction. Theories are abstract and general. Their truth cannot be determined unless the concepts in a theory can be “operationalized”—that is, unless concrete measures of the abstract concepts can be observed in the real world. These concrete measures typically were called hypotheses, research questions, or research problems.

Contemporary philosophers of science solved the dilemma of subjectivity by adding a third level of abstraction to their view of theory and reality. This third level corresponds to what we are calling worldview in this chapter. Kuhn (1970) coined the term for worldview that is used most often in science. He described worldview as a “paradigm”—a “disciplinary matrix” that “stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community” (p. 175).

Meehan (1968) referred to worldview as a “conceptual framework through which perceptions are screened” (p. 41). Suppe (1977) used the German term Weltanschauung, which refers to a comprehensive mind-set. Laudan (1977) described worldview in terms of a research tradition, such as Darwinism in biology or behavioralism in psychology. Laudan said a research tradition is broader than a theory and that it has presuppositions— or assumptions—that are difficult to test. Brown (1977) also used the term presupposition to refer to worldview—”a priori propositions that the scientist sees ...