The new issue of Behind the Spin is out and the online version should be up soon. Here's a review I contributed that looks at three essential PR texts.
Exploring Public Relations, by Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans (Prentice Hall, £34.99)
Rethinking Public Relations: PR Propaganda and Democracy, by Kevin Moloney (Routledge, £23.99)
Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice, edited by Jacquie L’Etang and Magda Pieczka (Lawrence Erlbaum, £34.95)
Choosing an image to represent PR on a book cover, recruitment le aflet or course brochure is quite a challenge. PR doesn’t have instantly identifiable props; broadcasters have microphones, journalists have notebooks, dentists have drills, but PR people have… smiles?
It’s tough. So tough that a lot of publishers give up the fight and most PR textbooks look rather plain – and often achingly dull. Maybe the publishers take the view that students don’t judge a book by its cover, they buy (loan permitting!) what they are told to on a stuffy reading list.
But a new book that can be guaranteed to feature on pretty near every list for every PR degree course in the UK is breaking the mould. Exploring Public Relations by Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans goes straight for the heart, featuring three cute meerkats, noses a-twitching, and sharp eyes gazing upwards.
Irresistible!
The three engaging rodents offer quite a useful perspective for getting to grips with an admirably chunky and comprehensive work. Yes, they do look cute, but they have unsettlingly thin faces and the one of the right seems to be baring quite sharp teeth. On closer inspection their fur seems a bit rough and not so cuddly. And there’s actually a fourth meerkat there too, a shifty and nervous looking character, peering carefully over the mound…
You could spend ages deconstructing the cover but the point is that Tench and Yeomans, two well-established and respected lecturers from Leeds Met, are sending out a clear message. This is going to be an engaging text, student-focused, with each chapter brightened by case studies, profiles, and things to think about, wittily illustrated with a range of wildlife; penguins, toucans, antelopes, they’re all here.
The most important thing to say about Exploring Public Relations is that it sets out to be the first truly comprehensive British text book, aimed at Level 2 students, and to a large degree it succeeds admirably. This is not meant as a criticism of what has gone before, but Exploring PR is a book whose time has come.
It is not a ‘how to’ guide, and by and large, it doesn’t try to tread the thin and perilous line between academic text and practitioner handbook. So it won’t teach you how to write a press release, but it might give a better idea of how to frame one and how to work out who to send it to. It does this by painting a broad canvas of what is and can be.
For it does indeed try to explore PR, and is not afraid to acknowledge that its subject is fast-moving and stubbornly immature.
The breadth of topics is impressive; it is quite possible that something here will be relevant to almost every lecture or seminar given at Level 2. Altogether 32 chapters are broken down into four sections, The context of public relations; public relations theories and concepts; public relations specialisms; sectoral considerations. No doubt there was some lively debate over what goes where and on running order but most will feel this works fairly well.
As well as drawing strongly on Leeds Met colleagues, Tench and Yeomans have brought together many of the leading academics in the field, usually to good effect. The variety of topics – and, it has to be said, the range of voices exploring them - clearly illustrates why course leaders find it desperately difficult to pack everything they think should be covered into a three-year undergrad degree, why there is such diversity across programmes, and also why there is discussion as to which school or faculty PR should be aligned. I happen to think it fits quite nicely in media; others, including many of the writers of this book, feel more at home in business.
For me, not every page punches its weight. I am not a great fan of diagrams, especially when they try to make something out of the blindingly obvious, nor when they are so complicated they baffle rather than illuminate. Sometimes I feel they try to pack in too much. As a random example, half of page 54 is taken up by a list of European Public Relations Associations, sourced to the CIPR website; wouldn’t it have been easier to simply quote the URL?
Back to the positives. At least it’s British! This is very important. Yes, there is some really useful stuff that puts PR in a European and global context, but the core examples and the underlying picture of practice, is firmly rooted in this country. We all know that PR in the UK and US are different beasts, reflecting different cultures, but up to now for our big books we have looked to, say, Wilcox and Heath, which speak with strong American accents. PR is easier to understand when it related to local experience.
It also has to be weighed against its predecessors. For example, I am a great fan of Alison Theaker’s PR Handbook, and it will be interesting to see how she rises to the challenge of a comprehensive and chunkier with her next edition.
And perhaps someone will grasp the nettle of addressing issues raised by the rise of social medias. Although Richard Bailey has a stab at weblogs in his chapter on Media Relations, there is little engagement in Exploring PR with the major changes that are taking place in the broader media environment. Yes, there is a chapter on the ICT but it skirts around the fact that this is the one area in which the so-called New PR is asserting itself and in which there is a clear and seismic change in media relations; the case for a New PR may be wildly overstated but in a text published in 2006 it should be acknowledged. Arguably, the concluding chapter, What next? Future issues in public relations is the weakest of all, which is a shame.
Exploring PR sets out to cut a broad swathe but PR demands to be seen in a wider context. Here’s where Jacquie L’Etang and Magda Pieczka’s Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice and Kevin Moloney’s Rethinking Public Relations make a dazzling contribution; they might each do astonishingly badly on the cuddly animal count, but both emphatically deserve a place on any PR bookshelf.
Let’s start with Moloney, in that it will be accessible to a wider audience. Moloney developed his theory of PR as ‘weak propaganda’ shining a light on a curiously thin critical literature and this follow up, subtitled PR Propaganda and Democracy, takes the argument forward, skilfully and persuasively.
Notice the lack of punctuation between PR and Propaganda; for Moloney sees no divide and this is crucial. He believes the most important question of ask of PR is its relationship to democracy
Simply, PR is weak propaganda because it produces manipulative messages to tell rather than to say, constructed to get compliance from their audiences; he finds little evidence that PR provides ‘goodwill and mutual understanding, and crucially, finds that societal power balances are such that the biggest organisations have the loudest voices.
But a significant weakness is that Moloney consistently suggests there are alternatives - then fails to deliver. He suggests the way to tackle the inequality of voices is to provide external funding so all have a chance to be heard; how on earth this might happen he, perhaps wisely, skips over.
Although many PR supporters who have felt thoroughly beaten up by the preceding 176 pages, reeling from claims such as citizens and consumers in market-orientated liberal democracies need protection from the negative effects of PR propaganda will be relieved to hear his conclusion that the positive effects of PR outweigh the negatives - just; the trouble is they may struggle to remember where they read the evidence that supports his points win for PR.
L’Etang and Pieczka’s 1996 book Critical Perspectives in Public Relations was an important waymarker on the development of PR as an academic subject but ten years is high time for an expanded update. Now, having mapped out new territory, not least with L’Etang’s work on rhetoric, and doing much to add ‘critical’ to our theoretical readings, the new book emphasises return to studying practice. Certainly this is to the fore in sections three and four where look at PR in sport, particularly football, health and tourism; a searching look at what PRs actually do.
OK, a text that sets out to ‘extend the intellectual vocabulary and reach of PR theory’ isn’t necessarily going to be an easy read, and it does presuppose familiarity with key concepts. But as with Exploring PR at Level 2 it is now hard to imagine a serious final year or MA dissertation that doesn’t draw on L’Etang and Pieczka.
Together, three books that make studying PR more exciting. I learnt from each of them – and the important lesson is that reading just one book is never enough. For example, Lee Edwards’ impressive overview the development of theory in Exploring PR is made tastier by a side dish of Moloney, who sees the Grunig project as a Whig history of PR on a progressive road to betterment if not perfection. As he says, this made PR intellectually respectable and legitimately teachable – and, happily for me, open for endless critical debate.
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