BledCom: The spectre haunting PR

Whatever else, PR polymath David McKie (Waikato Management School) makes you think.

His presentation at BledCom of a paper he wrote with Deborah Munshi and Margalit Toledano, Communicating Unity without Diversity, veered off in countless directions and I doubt if anyone in the audience was familiar with all the references. Stripped to its absolute basics, the theme was - I think! - that as long as PR theory is rooted in a single paradigm, the Grunig Excellence model, its US-centric focus will suffocate much-needed investigation of non-Western framings and be very much the poorer for this neglect.

Talking afterwards, David emphasised the importance of Dejan Vercic's comment that it was time to get away from normative conceptions of PR and deal with 'dirty reality'. We had both been struck by Dejan's suggestion that to develop the Excellence model, PR had had to 'commit patricide'; in my notes, 'They needed to kill Bernays to make PR work."

David himself characterised Bernays as 'the spectre haunting PR'; he was referring to his 1928 book Propaganda, and in particular, I think, statements like this, from Chapter One, entitled Organising Chaos:

The conscious and intelligent manipualtion of the organised habits and opinion of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

.....

Invisible governors ... pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and and guide the world.

The great achievement of James Grunig is to recast PR as a business-based discipline that could achieve results through the application of a different conception, ideally based in a two-way symmetrical flow of information; PR as dialogue not command.

The problem for PR is that so powerful was this framing it has remained almost unchallenged for over 20 years and, in the view of McKie and others, a discipline with a single dominant paradigm lacks strength and vigour.

He said: "The way forward is by theorising practice. The rise of Asia in business terms is going to force PR to reflect on its Western-centricity. The fracture will come when the economic power has shifted to Asia. We will get many more complex approaches; two-way symmetry is only the beginning."

Ironically, while at once celebrating what he saw as an overdue challenge to Excellence, David suggests that the two way model that had seemed so unrealistic when first put forward was now looking more viable. The reason was the emergence of what he calls the electronic world; sadly Bled was characterised by an 'electronic absence': "It is not acceptable to me that the Bled Manifesto didn't mention social softwares."

I think David is right. And I think, too, that social softwares will force us to rethink some of the core theories of PR.

Quite where that rethink will take us I have no idea. But I strongly suspect it is more likely to resurrect the spirit of Bernays than to bury him.   

   

 

Comments

[David Phillips FCIPR]

I like this. I am uncomfortable with the Stakeholder theory for the same reasons but do see some merit in social segmentation and go along with the Grunig view to this extent: segmentation has to offer a context with capability to hold a conversation within socially acceptable bounds of common emotional, knowledge and cultural (frequently political) mores and values including a language acceptable to the constituency of the organisation.

Language in this context has to be inclusive of all available senses that can be deployed.

Thus, the concept of 'publics forming round issues' holds water but is more complex than at face value and is only part of the whole. An issue, from my perspective, would be 'nested' withing a range of emotional, knowledge and cultural issue extremes ranging from trivial to life threatening.

This thesis works as well for consumer fashion as it does for terrorist attitudes and behaviours.

Bernays approach works as long as the 'wires' are invisible. Today social media makes them visible and so psychology, and notably neuro-psychology, has a lot to offer the practice of Public Relations because it gives us insights into motives and drivers, stripped of theory (in Bernays case, Freud) based on the fashion of the day.

Furthermore, the benefits of transparency, a process accelerated by the Internet, have commercial advantage but only until tangible assets are stripped down to their basic (and very intangible) values.

So I will go along with your conclusion only this far, at the periphery fashion may resurrect the spirit of Bernays but will not be durable which is why I like this post so much.

Applying such a process does need an ability to draw a 'social frame' in which the constituent has, at a moment in time, the environment, knowledge (emotional, values and cultural) and interactive capability to evaluate benefit derived from the 'conversation' and thus create a relationship.

Organisations are the nexus of relationships (Coase was wrong) and Bainbridge needs to take his thinking on a bit because the primacy argument does not include that magic element of time (who is at the nexus of relationships at the time when the decision has to be made).

It is Public Relations in its purest mode that actually decides who is at the nexus and that, because of Internet transparency, need not be the organisation and may well be the consumer.

Marketing, as we know it is disintermediated.

[Richard Bailey]

Of course we move on, but no one should attempt to wipe history. Propaganda meant something different in 1928, at the start of the era of totalitarianism. If you take out Bernays, what do you do with Kevin Moloney whose very significant contribution to this debate (Rethinking Public Relations 2nd edition) is subtitled 'PR Propaganda and Democracy'? Note the lack of punctuation.