Public Relations Theory

Capabilities and Competencies

Jae-Hwa Shin, Robert L. Heath

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119712954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Winner of the 2021 National Communication Association PRIDE award in the 'Outstanding Textbook' category!

Explore a wide range of theoretical frameworks and themes for public relations in this comprehensive and authoritative work

Public Relations Theory: Capabilities and Competencies is a comprehensive overview of the major theoretical perspectives in public relations, considering the evolution, diversification and merger of approaches that have been spurred by rapid changes in society, cultural boundaries, technology, and media environments. Authors Jae-Hwa Shin and Robert Heath explain both organizational and social theories of public relations, including cases and challenges to help students bring theory and research to bear on solving the daily challenges of public relations practice.

Rather than advocate in favor of a particular theoretical view or position, Public Relations Theory: Capabilities and Competencies covers a broad range of theoretical perspectives and themes in public relations, including:

• An examination of excellence theory, contingency theory, rhetorical theory, and critical theory as these perspectives apply to public relations
• Issues management, crisis management, risk management and conflict management with respect to public relations
• Combining theory and practice for conceptualization and strategic execution of robust public relations programs and campaigns
• The importance of public relations ethics to serve the public good
• How to define "the public" or "relationships" in the field of public relations

The book closes with discussion of emerging topics and the recent transformation of public relations theory to take diversity, technology, and global identity into account and offers insight into future direction.

This book is perfect for upper level undergraduate and graduate students of public relations in journalism and communication. It will also be useful for public relations practitioners who hope to improve their understanding of the theoretical background and principles of their work and serve as an excellent reference for doctoral students and researchers in the area.

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Public Relations: Socially Responsible or Work of the Devil

Introduction

Chapter 1 lays the foundation for the discussion that follows. It explores the nature and constructive role of public relations, examining its DNA and defining its professional practice—established as such in the nineteenth century. Such detective work looks for markers including purposes, strategies, functions, tools, tactics, impacts, structures, and justifying philosophies. It identifies the types of organizations, leadership roles, and contexts in which public relations is important.

In history, public relations can be seen as the means for achieving individual and organizational influence, as well as collective engagement among competing interests: strategic processes and efforts enacted by individuals, groups, organizations, and even nations in order that they can survive and thrive, enacted as forms of issues, risk, conflict, and crisis management. It searches for aligned interests, legitimacy, and the license to operate for reward. To discover what today is called “public relations” requires knowing what it does, what it is, where it occurs, and how it serves or confounds interests that encounter tensions of uncertainty and conflict. It can be a clash of perspectives, interests, identities, and identifications. It can be soothing words that allay differences of opinion. It can foster conflict and division.

Careful analysis of the discipline addresses the rationale for its professional practice as being invaluable to political economies, to the human condition, to the organizations that engage in its discourse. It looks at what defining conditions, contexts, and individual and organizational management requirements are needed to share ideas and co‐create meanings, create divisions, identities, and identifications, and meet ethical challenges. Collective risk management, for instance, is the essence of public relations discourse and leadership strategies, whether in enacting emergency management or in debating contagion or unhealthy living conditions. It is inherent to clashes of interests, wrangles of ideas, and efforts to enlighten, compromise, collaborate, and accommodate.

Because of its prominence in human affairs, public relations must be subjected to descriptive, predictive, normative, and ethical discussion. Theory and research can lead to a better understanding and improved practice of public relations. Without a working definition—a detailed understanding of the practice coupled to normative theory—the profession will fail to add value to society and even decrease organizational effectiveness when trust is broken. Theory and research champion public relations as fundamental to the quality of relatedness that gives integrity to community.

Public relations is strategic (choice‐driven), process‐based, outcome‐oriented, and guided by value‐driven ethical choices. Supporters and critics debate what constitutes ethical principles, and whether they are situational or universal. Public relations can make organizations (and causes) more effective (or less so), more capable, and more successful in achieving their missions and visions based on core values. It entails making ideas public and worthy of consideration, seeking concurrence, fostering reputation, building alliances, engaging in conflict, and being central to competition among ideas, products, and services. It includes attention to issues of public policy and organizational identity and reputation. Public relations deals with choices—those made by organizations and their stakeholders.

Much of the scrutiny of public relations since the late 1970s has seen it as an organizational function, but a competing sociological perspective has addressed whether, how, and how well organizations make society more fully functioning. The challenge is to see public relations from an organizational perspective without losing sight of the dynamics of engaged contests in issue arenas where the more expansive conception of societal good is debated. Public relations professionals must demonstrate to journalists and others that they ethically sort and process information in a chaotic universe, fraught with uncertainty. One of the greatest hurdles that they face is to convince critics that they behave responsibly and with the public interest at heart.

This inventory of topics poses a daunting challenge to public relations professionals, academics, and students. Dirty laundry must be sorted from clean, but both must be given due consideration. Iconic practitioners such as Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, and John Hill recognized the pragmatic value, social responsibility, and ethics associated with public relations. They put their faith in the three legs of the public relations stool. It is pragmatic: it does something useful, and well. It is strategic: process‐based, choice‐driven, and goal‐oriented. And it is ethical: serving the larger good of society and asking in whose interest the profession is practiced.

Public relations employs rhetoric, discursive text, persuasion, publicity, promotion, relationship building, conflict resolution, adjustive behavior, and issue, risk, conflict, and crisis management. It can be propaganda, spinning, and seeking to penetrate publics' mental defenses. It can be a means of engineering consent. It can foster relationships, and help stakeholders to make enlightened choices. It can help organizations to be “excellent” and reflective—or the opposite.

This opening chapter throws a lot of balls into the air, which will be caught and juggled throughout the book. It avoids the tendency to cherry pick by defining the discipline in glowing normative and aspirational terms while casting aside what does not fit that view as something else, something other—anything but public relations. It works to avoid demonizing definitions. It asks: can the beast be subdued by denying that it is in the garden?

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Questions to Frame the Introductory Discussion

• What is public relations?
• Whose interests does it serve?
• Does it foster competing or aligned interests?
• What strategies, functions, purposes, tactics, tools, media uses, professional roles, reputation management techniques, and deliberative processes define its presence and value to society?
• Does public relations serve the collective management of risk and the social construction of shared meaning by which groups achieve sufficient concurrence and coordination to survive and thrive?
• Does public relations advance and result from the excellence of organizations, encourage a balance of advocacy and accommodation, employ discourse to advance and align interests, and engage in ethically critical battles?
• Is there evidence of the purposes, tools, tactics, and strategies of public relations in primitive—as well as sophisticated—societies?
• Can institutions such as commerce, church, and state advance without the service of public relations?
• What impact has globalization had on the practice and conceptualization of public relations?
• How have new technologies and changes in the media landscape affected public relations?

Questions such as these help students to act like detectives, identifying the fingerprints and DNA of public relations, knowing when it is on the scene, and determining how it contributes to or frustrates people's ability to get along, coordinate activities, and live in harmony. They suggest several important themes.

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Key Themes

• Public relations is a timeless activity associated with the human condition and with the formation of societies, used to make individuals and groups effective in their endeavors.
• Public relations in a contemporary sense is more than press agentry and media relations; it includes all of the communications processes and symbolic actions by which groups seek to be efficacious.
• Attention to public relations as a function of (mass and social) media may be more a matter of its nature in a particular historical era than of that across all human history.
• History is replete with public relations functions, strategies, tools, and purposes, even though they may not have been named or conceived as such or be immediately apparent.
• The challenge for those who study and practice public relations is to emphasize social responsibility and collaborative decision making.
• Because public relations tends to center on controversy, conflict management, and matters of choice, it may be conceived both as socially responsible and as the devil's work, depending on context and one's subject position.

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Opening Case: Socially Responsible or Work of the Devil

The title and overarching theme for this chapter come from a class designed primarily for senior‐level public relations students, but which attracted students from other majors. The course was intended to prepare students, in a strategic and critical manner, to use discourse on behalf of clients and to benefit the community, and to understand the importance of social responsibility. It required them to write four papers. The first asked them to define public relations. Some took the easy route and used the definition they had learned from other courses, such as Principles of Public Relations. The instructor wanted them to go beyond that, however, and develop a definition in which they were intellectually and personally invested, or one that they could use during a job interview and to guide their professional careers. The final paper thus challenged them to explain, based on the readings and discussion, what public relations means to them—as a pre‐professional, as a person, and as a member of society. It challenged them to consider from a personal ethical perspective why they wanted to practice public relations, what responsible service to a client or employer meant to them, and what roles public relations plays in society. Can it serve the “public interest” in a socially redeeming manne...