PR Studies

The future of public relations education

Guess which university is currently recruiting for a part-time public relations lecturer? Newcastle University (here's the ad).

This is worth noting because for past two decades undergraduate PR degree courses have only been offered in the UK by the 'new' universities (ie former polytechnics). Public relations was seen as too commercial and unsufficiently academic for the more traditional universities.

Now every HE institution is confronted by a more competitive landscape in which money follows students - and public relations ticks several boxes, notably for graduate employability. There's now a Centre for Corporate Reputation at Oxford University; I understand Leeds University has hired our former colleague Lee Edwards from Manchester Business School to boost its public relations and communications team; and Newcastle University is now offering public relations (within a media and cultural studies context).

This move towards academic respectability is good news for public relations as a discipline; it's good news for the professional bodies such as the CIPR; it's good news for students who have greater choice. It may be bad news however for some of the 'new' universities who may not be prepared for this more bracing competitive landscape.

To draw on an analogy, there are 92 professional football clubs across the four English divisions (Premier League, Championship etc). Despite promotion and relegation, the top teams remain remarkably stable from season to season. So it is with universities (though there are currently more than 92 of them).

Just as some football clubs go into administration (though remarkably few given the poor finances of most of them), some universities may not survive in the new landscape.

You don't have to buy a ticket to a professional club to watch football. Similarly, you don't have to go to university to study public relations. There have always been qualifications and training courses aimed at practitioners (and would-be practitioners).

Yet university remains valuable for those who can benefit from the rounded experience on offer and the useful half-way house between the structure of school and the challenges of the workplace. Public relations combines the intellectual rigour of a university degree with practical applicability and very high rates of employability.

I wasn't faced with tuition fees and was encouraged to 'follow my interests'. While this remains good advice, it also makes sense to consider the future before committing to student debt. In this context, I'm confident in what we're offering and am pleased that more universities are coming to share this view.

 

My review of my year

We encourage students to become 'reflective learners' - but in general undergraduates are poor at reflection. Some assume they're perfect and all assume that they're perfectible works-in-progress.

I know differently. I've never been perfect and with age my character flaws have grown ever more apparent. But my strengths are equally clear and as adults we become proficient at masking the one with the other.

So here's my reflection on my (academic) year, starting with what's gone well. For context, I returned to a full-time role in September after an inexplicable year of trying something different.

Positive

• My teaching hightlight was leading a large, lively and experimental postgraduate module (Public Relations and New Media). Not all welcomed the wilfully unstructured delivery - but it forced everyone to think and there was some very strong student work from a very diverse group.
• I have spent my adult life trying to turn a love of history into paid work in public relations. This year I turned a PR-for-PR project into a paper at a History of Public Relations conference.
• We're in a recession and graduates are sometimes derided for lacking workplace skills. Yet I'm still aware of more employers seeking good graduates than good graduates lacking suitable work. Nothing pleases me more than connecting the one with the other.
• My own research is limited (see below), but I'm delighted that a postgraduate who I supervised has had a paper accepted at the Euprera Congress 2011 (which we have both been involved in promoting).
• I've become something of a professional qualifications expert, and helped with delivery of the CIPR Diploma in another country (in addition to location-based and online delivery).
• I've edited online magazine Behind the Spin for over four years. We have a viable and valuable student magazine (with cash in the bank) - and I should now start looking to pass this on to a suitable home.
• I blog infrequently at PR Studies - yet it's still what I'm best known for. Perhaps this is a weakness (see below)?

Negative

• What have I written? I'm not a traditional academic focused on 'research outputs', but I should be capable of some original thought or interesting publication. So where is it? Are the blogs and tweets merely a displacement activity?
• I was fortunate to have gained a very good education in the humanities, during which quesions were always more interesting than answers. Yet I'm more often teaching people who expect a didactic and definitive approach to knowledge. (Knowing my weakness, I get an opportunity to work on it: I'm leading a new module for first year undergraduates - Principles of Public Relations, a chance to teach theory rather than practice.)
• I'm impatient with process and paperwork. I regret this where students are involved, but still feel there's a point to be made at an institutional level. I could be wrong...

There may be trouble ahead

We have a problem. There's a perfect storm approaching for students and universities. Oversupply of graduates is meeting a shrinking jobs market just when the cost of higher education is about to jump.

What's a young person to make of this? They should shop carefully and decide whether and when higher education is the right decision for them. Education is priceless and the opportunity university brings is valuable. But it's not about the degree certificate alone; it's about the journey. Where should you begin your journey (which city, which university)? What should you study?

Students will have to become more businesslike, starting with 'brand me'. Most are already holding down one or more paid jobs while studying, and should gain credit for their work outside the classroom where it adds to their independence and employability.

What's a university to do? We have to prove our value in a crowded and competitive market. Value starts with staff and buildings but extends to alumni and other networks. What have former graduates gone on to do? What do they say about the course? What do employers think of our graduates?

There's more to education than money and more to degrees than careers. But we can't ignore the cost-benefit analysis that young people and their parents will be conducting.

I anticipate a shift from 'full-time' education of 18 to 21 year olds towards different patterns of adult education, workplace learning and continuous professional development. None of this is new, but there will be renewed impetus from 2012. University buildings will need to be occupied for more than half a day for half the week and half the year.

I also anticipate a shift in emphasis from producing employable graduates to developing entrepreneurial young people. This is exciting - but very problematic for business schools. Would an entrepreneurial young person be better advised to invest £50,000 in their business or in their education (an approximate cost of tuition fees plus living expenses over a degree course)? It depends...

A suitable candidate for company graduate schemes is likely to be a conventional team player. The successful  entrepreneur is likely to be a stubborn, thick-skinned individualist. Which personality type suits the classroom better?

Then there's a cultural problem. Mass higher education has worked hard to reduce failure and so operates in a fail-safe culture. Innovation requires lots of experimentation - including much failure. Since failure is the necessary flip side of success, we will need to learn to embrace it. Risk will need to be taught as a good thing, not as a problem as now.

Trouble ahead? If I think as an entrepreneur, I see plenty of opportunity in education. In the meantime, we're celebrating another batch of graduates next week.

Photo by digitalkatie on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Why PR is going backwards

It was during the final session of the second annual International History of Public Relations Conference (#ihprc2011) when event organiser Professor Tom Watson said something explosive.

While cantering through his 'evolution of evaluation' talk, Watson said that public relations had begun as a holistic activity in the early twentieth century, but during the second half of the century had become a narrower publicity function driven by the rise of the consumer society. 

Watson did not have time to elaborate - nor did he need to given the audience he was addressing. But I'd like to offer my own interprepration in the hope that this will reach a few more people beyond those who attended.

I call this explosive because it reverses the widely-cited and therefore presumably broadly-accepted depiction of PR as having emerged from one-way publicity before developing into professional two-way communications.

Watson suggests we're in danger of going the other way. Other speakers at the conference showed that 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' and keynote speaker Ray Hiebert (starts after 13 mins) comprehensively demolished the certainties of the Grunigian world view (note that he had hired James Grunig to the University of Maryland) when he dismissed the idea of a 'general theory of public relations'.

The tension between PR-as-craft (exemplified by Ivy Lee) and PR-as-strategic-management (Edward Bernays) has been there from the early twentieth century.

Public relations examples can be found further back in history (one paper contrasted More's Utopia with Machiavelli's The Prince - which was, as I suggested, to compare a saint with the devil incarnate), though Gunther Bentele rejects as unhistorical the use of the term public relations to describe these early examples. He suggests they are rather examples of public communication.

History illuminates our understanding of the present, and international perspectives refresh our narrow world view. (The more positive perspective on PR going backwards is that we're revisiting and reinterpreting our roots.) I hope to be back for more next time round (and am already planning some archive research) - and look foward to meeting more people at the next conference. There's so much to be researched and written about:

• Corporate and institutional histories 
• Non-corporate uses of PR
• Country cases (and multi-country comparisons)
• Thematic perspectives (how about public relations and religion?)

Graduateness without a degree (21 by 21)

I spoke to a class of sixth formers about university this week. They, remember, will be the first group having to fund fees of up to £9,000 a year if they choose to go to university.

I told them that except for a few specific professions (like medicine), a degree is still not an absolute essential - but gaining 'graduateness' will be vital for their future success. (I told them I wanted them to go to university, but even more than this I wanted them to want to go.)

The challenge now is to articulate what I mean by graduateness. To kick this off, here's a list for discussion of '21 things to achieve by age 21' - suitable for graduates and non-graduates alike. What would you add or change?

21 by 21

21 things to have achieved by age 21

Citizenship

• Have raised money for a good cause
• Have campaigned in an election or for a cause
• Have written to your MP
• Have a track record of volunteering

Media literacy

• Have had a letter published in a newspaper or have appeared on television
• Have your own blog or personal website
• Have a following on social media (eg 500 Facebook friends; 100 Twitter followers)
• Can name your five favourite novels (and say why you've chosen them)
• Can discuss and explain the day's news headlines

Entrepreneurship and independence

• Have started your own business
• Have gained demonstrable team-building and leadership qualities
• Have lived independently and learned to budget
• Have cooked a meal for six or more

Global outlook

• Can speak a foreign language
• Have lived abroad (not just visited on holiday)
• Are sensitive to cultural and religious differences

Personal achievements

• Have the expected grades and qualifications - plus something extra
• Must have sound basic literacy (spelling) and numeracy (counting) skills
• Endurance (eg have run a marathon; have walked 100 miles)
• Can explain your passion for sport/fashion/celebrity/music etc
• Have in addition to this some notable musical, artistic or sporting skill, or an unusual hobby

Am I too unambitous? I can think of some current first year students (who may be 18, 19, 20, or 21) who have already ticked off most of this list.

Some thoughts on PR theory and practice

In preparation for a peer group discussion this week, here are my thoughts on PR theory and practice drawn from some notable recent contributions to public relations literature.

As so often when discussing theories of public relations, we start with Professor James Grunig.

I assess many student essays at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional levels, and there's a sense from so many of these that Grunig's symmetry/excellence paradigm is the only 'correct' theory of public relations. All others are somehow flawed subversions of the truth, and practice that falls short of the ideal is somehow aberrant. (Grunig has, of course, argued in favour of a 'general theory' of public relations.)

Grunig and Hunt's 'two-way symmetric' model was articulated in a famous textbook published as long ago as 1984, and James Grunig (a Professor Emeritus who still actively defends and promotes his thinking) continues to win hearts and minds.

Two impressive new practitioner texts published this year, Katie Delahaye Paine's Measure What Matters and Philip Sheldrake's The Business of Influence both draw heavily and predominantly on his work.

Like the other milestone textbook of the era, Cutlip et al's Effective Public Relations, Grunig and Hunt's Managing Public Relations drew on systems theory. Systems theory once seemed as solid as Newtonian physics - until some new theories came along (Relativity, String Theory) to change the way we think about the world.

Scientists and mathematicians are now more interested in chaos theory than systems theory. As Jim Macnamara writes in The 21st Century Media (R)evolution, 'Emergent media owe as much to chaos theory as to evolutionary systems theory.'

Consultant Martin Thomas has written a new book called Loose: The Future of Business is Letting Go, in which he analyses 'the chaos and ambiguity of modern life'. 

'We are witnessing the unravelling of the most fundamental building blocks of the commercial world and a collapse of faith in tight, empirical rational models and ways of thinking.'

Modernist paradigms such as symmetry/excellence look less compelling a decade into a twentieth-first century in which chaos theory has replaced systems theory.

Then there is the explicit focus of some emerging public relations scholars. In their introduction to Public Relations, Society and Culture, Lee Edwards and Caroline Hodges deliniate the battle lines. 'Historically, public relations research has been driven by organisational interests, treating the profession as an organisational function first and foremost. The view is exemplified in the work of James Grunig and his colleagues in the United States of America ... This singular focus on public relations in organisations has tended to exclude the social world in which those organisations operate.' (pp 1-2) 

There's nothing new here. The contrast between an organisational perspective and a societal perspective has been made for at least 15 years by Jacquie L'Etang and fellow critical scholars and postmodernists. Yet if it has taken over 25 years for the theories of Grunig et al to gain currency within public relations, it's perhaps no surprise that newer theories have yet to gain wider recognition.

I expect to continue reading essays revolving around 'symmetry/excellence' for years to come, but those teaching public relations have a responsibility to challenge the dominant paradigm and to illuminate alternative thinking.

It's not what we do, it's whether it works

Book review: Measure What Matters: Online Tools for Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement and Key Relationships by Katie Delahaye Paine. Wiley.

Let's start with one of the author's anecdotes from her own practice experience.

"I spent millions of dollars each year writing, designing, and producing pieces of paper that were supposed to make my sales force more effective," she writes. "Whether it ever worked was never questioned, it was what we did."

She's right. The emphasis in public relations practice has traditionally been on what we do, not on whether it works.

This is true of public relations practice. What doesn't or shouldn't change are the principles behind the practice. Now for another quotation from the author:

"The future of public relations lies in the development of relationships, and the future of measurement lies in the accurate analysis of those relationships. Counting impressions will become increasingly irrelevant while measuring relationships and reputation will become ever more important" (p 219).

This quotation is from the conclusion to the same author's 2007 book, Measuring Public Relationships. She cites it again in this new text to point out that what was true then remains true now. Four years ago is not a long time, of course, unless you live in Twitter time.

The rise of fun-raising

Good causes have always sought awareness, and always need funds.

Volunteers have always been willing to help them in this.

In essence, there's nothing new in the emergence of what I'm calling fun-raising, but several factors have come together to empower the JustGiving generation.

• The rise of 'voluntourism': the win-win of a wortwhile activity being linked to raising funds for a good cause. This appeals to activity-minded young people, and shatters the stereotype of the elderly volunteer
• The emergence of online donation as an easier and more transparent system than the old paper forms and the need to ask for pledges and then to go back for the money
• The growth of gift-aid, giving a tax-back boost to our giving

Of course, there are problems with this popularity.

• There's a beauty contest amongst charities and not all good causes are equally popular or photogenic
• There's the risk of donor fatigue since so many are now requesting our support
• There's a danger of risky endurance activities being pursued because of rising expectations of a worthwhile, newsworthy activity

As individuals, we need to work out our own response to these requests. (Mine is to allocate a monthly budget of £50 in anticipation of just such requests.)

As beggars and students-with-clipboards will know, it's hard to get money out of strangers. Charities have realised that it's more effective to devolve fundraising to volunteers who tap into their own networks. As we know from PR, relationships work. May the fun continue.

Referendum: three awkward truths

Here are three things that have contributed to the awkwardness surrounding the referendum campaign.

1. Governments don't like referendums (the last and only other UK-wide referendum was in 1975) in case we cast a vote about them rather than on the issue. But this government is unusual since it's a coalition and the Conservatives and Lib Dems are split on this question. Heads or tails?
2. Many supporters of Yes are only lukewarm about the alternative voting system (AV) because though it may be a bit fairer, but it's still not proportional. Most, though, would not go along with Lord Owen who advocates a No vote because he's holding out for proportional representation.
3. Those campaigning for No don't want the public to realise that they're almost all Conservatives, hence their enthusiasm to put forward former Labour cabinet ministers. But where has the money for the campaign come from?

My verdict? I think the No campaign has been the more effective and may have succeeded. They've learnt some lessons from US politics and have played to people's fears. Negative campaigning appears to work.

Me? I'm voting Yes. Remember how you felt over the MPs' expenses scandal? Most of the worst excesses came from MPs with 'safe' seats. If you support tribal, binary Labour-Conservative politics, then the status quo has suited you well. But for many of us (and for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) politics is much more than a binary choice. So get used to ranking candidates by preference (or simply voting 1 instead of an X if you must).

What of the cost issue (the main thrust of the negative No campaign? By this argument, we'd dispense with all elections whatever the system because they're also expensive. So it's Yes to democracy. Make sure you vote on Thursday.

Review: The Business of Influence

Philip Sheldrake's The Business of Influence is a useful contribution to the literature on PR, marketing and social media - but above all it adds to the literature on measurement and evaluation.

The account starts with two milestone texts from 1999: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Permission Marketing. So we know to expect a discussion of rapid change and blurring boundaries between marketing and PR.

The author covers some theory and definitions (drawing heavily on the work of James Grunig), but is equally keen to cite arguments on blogs and responses on Twitter.

There's original thinking too. The concept of influence flows is an extension to the more usual discussion of communications models. Influence, Shelrake notes, is different from popularity.

He's strong on measurement - and acknowledges that his book complements Katie Paine's Measure What Matters (see my review). Sheldrake's description of AVE reads like a sentence from Cluetrain:

AVE: "a specious sum based on false assumptions using an unfounded multiplier, only addressing a fraction of the PR domain."