Promoting public relations: Public Relations Council of India keynote speech
This is a keynote speech that I gave this morning at a meeting of the Public Relations Council of India to celebrate World PR Day.
Good morning. I’d like to thank my colleague Enitan for her kind introduction. It’s a great honour to have the opportunity to join this meeting of the Public Relations Council of India this morning. Thank you to Mr C J Singh for hosting this meeting.
We’re here to celebrate World PR Day for the second year. It takes place this year on the 145th anniversary of the birthday of Ivy Lee, one of the profession’s forefathers.
World PR Day is the brainchild of Ayẹni Adékúnlé who also joins us today. His vision is for public relations to be recognised as a professional management discipline in order that it realises its potential and value to society.
World PR Day was founded after the misrepresentation of practice in an article by a management writer in an article in the Financial Times in London. I commend Ayeni on building a unified global agenda towards making the world understand and utilise public relations better and am a firm supporter of this vision.
His work has started conversations among public relations practitioners across Africa, Australia, UK and Europe, US, and of course India.
I have worked as a public relations practitioner for the past 25 years. In the past six months my own professional development has seen me join Leeds Business School and embark on a PhD research project to investigate what our profession can do to elevate itself as a management function.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic I witnessed at first hand, the incredible work of practitioners through work for the Government Communication Service and the National Health Service.
The pandemic accelerated many of the changes already underway in media, public engagement, and organisational communication. This included the role of communications as a strategic management function and the need for a more human approach to communications by CEOs and management teams.
If the internal and external communication function inside an organisation didn’t report directly to management before the crisis - it did throughout the crisis.
Practitioners have helped organisations manage complex stakeholder groups. That work continues with the societal shifts around the environment, society, and governance. It continues with work to counter misinformation, address conflict around the world, and tackle the climate crisis.
I said I’d started a PhD recently. Its my own personal contribution to professional development and the body of knowledge in public relations.
Academic study strips back a subject to its foundation and rebuilds it around a hypothesis to create new knowledge that is tested by peers. It’s the basis of human philosophy and progress.
The process is robust but it is also fragile and uncertain. The deconstruction of knowledge to tackle a research question requires critical appraisal and self-examination on the part of the researcher.
My study was originally motivated by observing how public relations contributed to organisational innovation and was elevated during COVID-19. I wanted to determine whether the conditions that enabled this could be captured and applied to future practice.
Herein lies the challenge in studying public relations. It is a professional activity that has evolved within the context of social systems. It is built on a foundation of contradictions and paradoxes. My undergraduate degree was in engineering which has a more established and robust body of knowledge.
This is fertile ground for a researcher. It provides the basis for creating new knowledge but there are so many gaps between theory and practice that is hard to know where to focus my studies.
It results from the relative immaturity of practice but also its failure to learn from the body of knowledge that has been developed in the sphere since the 1930s. It is incredibly frustrating, but it is also why events such as a World PR Day are important to promote professional practice.
Here are some examples.
1. Universal theory of public relations
There is no universal definition or theory of public relations. Instead, various ideologies have developed over the last century or so. I’ve identified seven. There are almost certainly more. They range from a study of social sciences to idealised theories of public relations practice.
2. Definitions - What is public relations?
Public relations practiced in a professional context is used to describe a range of activities including publicity, stakeholder management, internal communications, and public affairs. It is conflated with advertising and promotions. There is limited evidence that the potential that it delivers to organisations is understood by management.
3. A young profession
Anyone can decide to work in public relations practice and call themselves a practitioner. The failure to adopt professional standards is a potential explanation for the failure of public relations to realise its potential as a management discipline.
4. A community of practice
That’s not my line. It’s the title of a research paper by the inspirational Dutch scholar Betteke van Ruler. Academics and practitioners work in different communities. They read different media and attend different events. It’s a possible explanation for limited progress made on issues such as diversity and measurement.
5. Technical versus management
Public relations has two primary modes of operations in practice. At a technical level it can act as a means of content creation and communication with a group of stakeholders. At a management level it can contribute to strategic planning and decision making. The latter is far more valuable than the former.
6. Practitioner versus management perspective
There are countless practitioner studies of best practice and idealised examples of excellence in public relations. There are fewer management perspectives. Academics like practitioners have failed to prove their value to management aside from the work of an isolated number of committed researchers.
There’s a dozen or more of these paradoxes within public relations that could be set up as topics for debate.
My view is that COVID-19 hasn’t necessarily resulted in the elevation of the public relations function within organisations but it has demonstrated its value and organisational leaders were forced to become professional communicators.
Management within organisations for its part faces a unique set of future challenges that fall within the sphere of public relations.
Critical to these challenges are the three principles of World PR Day, namely Trust, Truth, and Transparency in practice. We must build on these important principles to promote practice and ensure that it is better understood and appreciated.
Public relations practice has many of the attributes of a profession albeit practitioners commit themselves on a voluntary basis. It can be practised in a professional context, but it does not meet all the criteria to be recognised as a professional management discipline.
My challenge to colleagues listening today is to measure themselves by the standards recognised by other management professions and the public.
This includes membership of a professional body and adherence to a Code of Conduct set out by organisations such as the Public Relations Council of India.
It includes qualifications, continuous professional development and positive engagement between theory and practice. But most importantly it includes promoting professional practice to management. The biggest challenge of public relations is that it needs its own public relations.
Thank you for joining us and for your attention. I look forward to hearing from my colleague Ayẹni Adékúnlé and continuing this important conversation.
