mediations: A chaotic challenge to Grunig

Mediations: Philip Young

Mediations comments on public relations, journalism, and communication ethics, often in the context of social media. Philip Young is a senior lecturer in public relations and journalism at the University of Sunderland, specialising in media ethics. He is also a lead researcher for the Euprera EuroBlog project. All views expressed here are personal and should not be seen as representing the University of Sunderland.

Scoop!

Scoop!
Journalists appear in fiction in many guises and play many roles. Sometimes they provide central characters, often they intrude on the action, their attentions as unwelcome as they often are in real life. Scoop! gathers together these appearances under a variety of themes, some amusing, some trivial, some giving an insight into how the Press works and how it is seen to impact on our society.

Marking does odd things to you, so it is no surprise that Richard Bailey is reacting to reading another slew of essays that reflect the view that Grunigian Excellence theory is the only way of understanding public relations.

In a typically thoughtful piece he suggests that Chaos Theory might help those of us who want to look beyond Grunig but are, quite frankly, floundering in our attempts to construct an alternative. (Actually, that is part of the problem - Grunig isn't wrong, just insufficient...).

I only have the vaguest understanding of chaos theory but I suspect that it's value for PR is in helping explain the implications of fragmentation. Grunig is essentially linear - communication is between an organisation and its publics, and the framing of publics coalescing around issues is a helpful construction for aggregating (stakeholder) sentiment.

In Online Public Relations David Phillips and I suggest that social media has helped shift the vector of communication through 90 degress, putting yet more importance on the conversation surrounding an organisation. It was ever thus, but our claim is that social media gives shape and substance to a myriad of comments, reflections and opinions, bringing them together into something akin to reputation.

I think we are right... but as I was quite possibly the worst candidate ever to attempt A-level Physics, I might struggle to marshall chaos theory to this worthy cause.

Comments

As I've argued on my blog: the social sciences often get in a muddle whenever they pretend to be scientific. Economics, sociology, history and pre-history, and even PR and media studies are all prone to such nonsense. Only recently economics claimed it was a science capable of ending boom and bust cycles. But the recession revealed that the "science" behind economics was BS.

Posted by: Paul Seaman | June 12, 2011 at 07:25 PM

To give some view of what one may mean by inadequate I have blogged about it a bit more http://leverwealth.blogspot.com/2011/06/can-pr-use-roi-as-form-of-measurement.html

Posted by: David Phillips | June 14, 2011 at 11:52 AM

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