Career ambitions beyond strategic communications

It is nearly fifty years since Broom and Smith first published their studies into professional role development in public relations. This established career ambitions of advancement through a hierarchy of aspiration from delivering technical services to attaining an expert manager position. This simple structure has been critiqued for reflecting a traditional favouring of a linear male mobility. Early research found that women in public relations tended to remain in technical positions, while men dominated management...

Maximising resilience of health and well-being assets in crisis situations

A comment left by New Zealand PR consultant, Catherine Arrow, on a recent post on my personal Greenbanana blog indicated that the topic (the language of grief and a biopsychosocial perspective on mental health issues) was worthy of further investigation. The following is the result of our subsequent shared musings concerning the impact of crisis situations on the health and well-being of public relations practitioners. If you have any thoughts on this topic, we invite you to continue...

There’s no place for women at the top of the edifice

It seems like the one voice that’s been silenced in the gender diversity debate is that of Saatchi & Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts. Since his controversial interview with Business Insider UK, many people have shared their thoughts via social media, blog posts, articles and interviews. But not a peep from Roberts who ‘has been placed on leave’. One wonders where the public relations executives at Saatchi were during Roberts’ interview. Did they set this up?...

Responsible communication leadership: putting employees first

By Dr Kevin Ruck Following the financial crisis in 2008, management thinkers and others have rightly questioned the role of business leaders in society. Often fingers point at business schools, regarding their failure to incorporate ethics into programmes. In addition, governance is back in the spotlight. As the UK department store British Home Stores (BHS) went  into administration last week (a situation similar to going into “Chapter 11” in the USA), questions are being asked...

From classroom to boardroom – crisis management lessons from the auto industry

Aaron Shardey gained a first class honours degree in public relations at London College of Communications this Summer with his undergraduate dissertation offering case study research into crisis management in the automotive industry. Given the topicality of the VW crisis, PR Conversations asked Aaron about his research and the lessons he would take from the classroom to the boardroom: One of the things you quickly realise when you study crisis management is that there are...

The joy of pain – VW, schadenfreude and public relations

A global crisis situation – such as that experienced by VW currently – brings out an ugly side of public relations. A hubristic sadism, or malignant narcissism. I’m exaggerating but that’s my point. Those who feel compelled to comment and criticise their fellow PR practitioners commonly rely on speculation and extrapolation, quickly escalating a reasonable reflection into a full blown attack, based on their own righteousness. As I commented on a UK blog post titled...

Holmes Truths: Repositioning PR or getting back to where we once belonged?

Industry analyst Paul Holmes offers advice to our thriving but misunderstood profession By Daniel Tisch, APR, FCPRS There’s a paradox in public relations today: It is a time of unprecedented demand for our skills in modern organizations, but also unprecedented angst about how to position an often-misunderstood profession in a changing marketplace. This was the backdrop at a recent Canadian Council of PR Firms event in Toronto, where the leaders of Canada’s major public relations...

Declaring piffle on those "traditional PR" publicity arguments

Recently I visited Black Creek Pioneer Village, a rather unique “recreated” village (it is described as an “outdoor living history museum”) harkening back to the 1860s, which has grown both in density and its rich “relating” of history in the approximately 50 years since its inception. As someone who holds a double-specialist undergraduate degree in English and History—and, more recently, as a proponent of the “organizational narrative“—it should be obvious why I have an affinity...

Getting serious about PR crisis case studies

Whenever an organisation experiences a ‘crisis’ (or more commonly an incident of lesser magnitude), it is invariably jumped upon as a PR disaster by the online PR pundits who cannot resist the opportunity to criticise how the situation was handled. The view is almost always: “I wouldn’t have done it like that”, accompanied by a list of rules which, in the opinion of the supposed PR expert, should have been followed. Rarely is any research...

Making sense of the impact of social media on crisis communication

An MA thesis focused on making sense of the impact of social media on crisis communication By Tegan Ford Given the number of crisis situations gaining high-profile attention through social media, I decided to look at how the addition of social media to crisis scenarios has disrupted the field of corporate communications. This research forms the foundation of my Masters of Arts in Communications program at Carleton University. This post looks at my thesis findings to...