PR Books for a Desert Island

Let’s play an academic parlour game. Imagine that warming, rising sea levels are about to flood our libraries. We get in a rowing boat and float up to the third floor where the PR books are. The academic fireman said you can only take 12. For taking or leaving, for wet or dry, here are the Desert Island PR texts chosen by Kevin Moloney of Bournemouth University.

The list is alphabetical by author surname – except for the last, very relaxing read.

Let’s have Davies, A. (2002) Public Relations Democracy, Manchester: Manchester University Press. What a strange combination of words in the  title, one not often put together. It is an up-to-date date picture of the current British PR scene, analysing the good and doubtful aspects. It is a well written, critical, academic text which circles around the big question about PR – does it benefit the rich and powerful, or the poor and marginal in a liberal democracy ?

About 70% of our students go into marketing jobs for their 40 week work placements. So no wonder Christopher Fill is onto his third edition of Marketing Communications (2002, London: Prentice Hall). It’s a UK focused marketing omnibus, with a PR chapter set amongst our sister promotional techniques. That is how we should learn and practice our PR - one string on the promotional bow, all coming together for the right tune.

One can’t travel far in degree-level PR without coming across James Gruning, and his and Hunt’s famous four-part typology of practice. Since 1984, it has been over-used by PR teachers, largely because there was no other framework which made our subject academically and publicly respectable. And most over-used has been the two-way symmetrical model. Chapter eight ‘Models of PR’ in Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organisations, ([2002] by Grunig, L., Grunig, J., and Dozier, D., London: Lawrence Erlbaum) is the defence and re-statement after 20 years of application and attack of that idealistic aunt sally.

We all need to go back to basics and understand them – especially if you are a teacher or third year undergraduate. Shirley Harrison’s Public Relations: An Introduction (2000, 2nd ed.) is a good primer because it is for a UK readership; is clearly written, and makes you think – the prime quality needed in a textbook. At least one more UK- (and European-focused) textbook is coming out shortly. It’s good to build up a long British shelf of literature, and stop relying on American door stoppers.

But let’s welcome one more door stopper at least. Actually, it will hold back two doors for it is in two volumes, and is so new that it is ahead of its time. Encyclopedia of Public Relations (Sage) is published in 2005 but in our hands now. It is edited by Robert Heath who represents a different focus on PR than James Grunig – PR as modern rhetoric. With 450 entries, most of our informational needs will be met. But there is danger for us in encyclopedias: they are like fast food snacks; they fill a gap quickly but their small chunks haven’t got all the intellectual and practice flavours needed for full understanding.

We write media releases, sell them in and hope for the best. Tehnically, what we are doing is encoding meanings to promote the interests and causes which we work for, in the hope that they will be decoded by stakeholders in the way we designed. Mickey, T. (2003) Deconstructing Public Relations (London: Lawrence Erlbaum) is a guide to our own PR Engima machine. It’s the only book I know dedicated to our coding – not in a DIY way but in a critical way. It’s not well-written but it is short and gets one thinking.

Two of the most thoughtful authors in the British PR academy are L’Etang and Pieczka and I see that their Critical Perspectives in Public Relations (International Thomson Business Press) is much cited by students. I think that is because it engages with some of the philosophical questions revolving around our work – personal ethics, corporate responsibility, self-interest, the public interest, truth telling and persuasion. If the book is eight years old and students still use it in numbers, it’s hitting the right buttons.

I squeeze L’Etang in again with her new Public Relations in Britain (2004) from Lawrence Erlbaum. We are 100 years old as a distinct job, so it is good to know where we come from – it might point to where we are going. And she  tells us about an early spotting of that old joke about ‘ethics’ and ‘Essex’.

Modesty should forbid me from mentioning Moloney’s Rethinking PR: the Spin and the Substance (2000) out of Routledge but it won’t ! My argument is that PR is weak propaganda, and that this designation needs confronting in a democracy. If there is a normal distribution curve of PR academic opinion, my views are on the outer edge. But to grow as an academic discipline and practice, we need clashing ideas.

While on truth, we need a good guide to questions of conscience which come up on the job. Parsons, P. (2004) Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice (London: Kogan Page/IPR) is new and good. You walk away from it with five handy rules on how to start thinking about these torments of conscience.

A few students back from placement tell me they lied, and many more admit being in the company of our linguistic ally, the half truth. Jensen, J. (1997 in Ethical Issues in the Communication Process from Erlbaum) conjured up a lovely phrase to describe us – hemispheric communicators. Don’t worry, we are not alone; lawyers and advertisers walk the same walk. And estate agents

And finally, because it has a PR hero; is a bit of laugh and is badly written in  the way which makes you think you do better in a press release, pick up  Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (2004, from Robinson) by M. C. Beaton. She is the sort of PR many of us want to be – a ‘High-flying public relations supremo . . . has decided to take early retirement . . . in a picture-perfect Cotsworld village’, who takes up sleuthing for murderers. Now, where did she learn those skills?

Comments

[nino]

I would love to have a chance to read almost all of the books. But I'm afraid this books are not avaluable in my country.(Georgia). I need them really soon, before my final exams.