Innovation in public relations thinking and practice continues to come from all over the world.
Interestingly, in most cases the contributions are not from a single local source but from either regional or global perspectives.
Here are two very recent cases
The first you may peruse here, an initiative developed by Amanda Jane Succi, a professional and educator from Catania, Sicily who is also the General Secretary of the Global Alliance.
She convened last month in her home town a gathering of scholars and professionals from Mediterranean countries and others to discuss public relations in southern Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa.
If you go under the ‘programme’ heading you will see a number of pdf files of the various presentations. Amongst the more notable Holger Sievert, Gianluca Comin, Roberto Zangrandi, Dejan Vercic, Alban Bala, Ruth Avidar, Serra Gorpe.
The second has just come in and is a special issue of the journal Prism from Massey University of New Zealand.
Dedicated to global public relations, this issue has, amongst many others, contributions from Jim Grunig (a rationalization of his recent presentation in Hong Kong on the digitalization of pr), Sriramesh Krishnamurthy, Chiara Valentini
This, of course, is not to say that the US has stopped contributing. The Institute for Public Relations website is regularly making available new materials.
Yet the bulk of innovation today comes from outside the US: from Africa (king3), from Sweden (the network society and the communicative organization), from New Zealand, from Italy…and this is an excellent development.
the new role of public relations in the me-society
your post, toni, gives me an opportunity to explane one minor element.
in the me-society, in the age of relationships we live in, there is a new centrality of the human person which attributes to public relations a new role in corporate governance.
everyone (any single person who is connected) has a new role in society: that of a communicator!
our professional community ha been talking for some years about istitutionalization, which really isn’t applied by many corporations yet, and the rapid spread of social media makes this process more difficult.
from Catania, where there was the MEDCOM, and in reading the special issue of the journal Prism from Massey University of New Zealand we can understand where pr is going.
If it’s true, how you often repeat, that we can barely be held responsible for a maximum of 30% of an organiztion’s communicative behaviour, i think that we need A NEW MANIFESTO OF PR in the digital age.