I agree that you can’t force people to engage with you, but you can foster that engagement and indeed initiate it, if by “initiate” we mean “make an overture”. Engagement is rather like love. You can’t make someone love you, but you can make the first move. And like love, it rarely happens at first sight, but only after a long-slow process of getting to know each other and learning to trust one another.

Bill, while it may not be new that you can’t control outcomes, it’s amazing how many people still expect the comms/PR people to “make” bad press go away, just to give one example.

I think the best that we can say is that PR fosters engagement by 1) preparing the organization for it and 2) making an overture towards stakeholders.

I think that what Jim means is that as you cannot manage (in the sense of control the outcome)of relationships with publics (I prefer stakeholders).

I remember that some years he convinced me that you cannot manage reputation either, but that a relationship, because of its direct interactivity, is more manageable than reputation.

Then what happened is that the term management has come to mean many other things as well, and the term governance has become more used and not only in its sense of the management of management but more participated, more interactive, more quote in the public interest unquote.

I prefer to use govern also better than engage (which I did in fact use in your quote…) because stakeholder engagement (talk about splitting hairs…)only comes after stakeholder involvement: meaning that you involve all your stakeholders (who decide themselves who they are and are not selected by you, but you decide to engage with the ones you believe are more important (and this is definitely a decision of management).

Any sense to you? Or is only splitting hairs?
thank you

“The understanding of the cultural system of any territory, along with its legal/institutional, political, economic, active citizenship and media systems is at the very basis of any effective effort to engage publics in effective relationships.”

And yet, less than a year ago, James Grunig told Markus Pirchner on this site:

“I believe it is an illusion to believe public relations ever could initiate and manage interactions and relationships with publics.”

Unless we are splitting hairs here, there is a conceptual difference between these two statements that must be reconciled. Otherwise, the “global” public consists of any group that might get ticked off by your organization or policies and become active.

And just try explaining to management the difference between “engage” and “initiate and manage,” or why “engage” is measurably better. Because Professor Grunig thinks so? I don’t think so, because what management expects PR people to do is initiate and manage. Subtleties like these just land PR in the same soft patch it has been struggling to get out of for years.

Leaving aside the horrible and revealing language used by cipr’s marcommms group to tout its event, why would it be ethically questionable to integrate awareness and knowledge of neuroscience in performing our activity?

Very interested to read your thoughts about this.

I’m just about to write a post on Greenbanana about PR and psychology as the CIPR Marcomms Group is running an event: Unlocking the secrets of the brain: the nascent world of neuro PR – claiming “Applied psychology and neuroscience are the new tools available to PR practitioners”.

As someone with a degree in psychology – and a reader of Jon White etc – PR has long been apparent to me as applied psychology.

Should we should take the next steps of determining our campaigns on the basis of neuroscience? Would that address the challenge of culture? It sounds ethically questionable to me.

Kristen – I’ll explain my understatement as a British trait – which could also be taken as irony, or tact. Actually, my mum lives in France, where she is known in her village as the Roast Beef, or to parody the Little Britain comedy show, “The Only Brit in the Village”.

There are various scholars of organizational culture who have ‘bridged’ the gap between the ever dripping general concept of culture and the needs of anyone who intends to keep this facto in mind when operating.
Two important ones are dutch: Ghert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars.
The first (see http://www.geert-hofstede.com/) is an ex IBMer turned consultant and scholar.
He developed a widely used process to assist organizations in understanding the influence culture has on both organizations and nations.
He looks at a number fundamental variables and through an acceptably rigorous methodology allows one to receive intersting operational inputs.
Similarly, but with a more specific focus on organizational culture, the second, Fons Trompenaars, also scholar and management consultant (disclosure: privileged that he is a good friend and colleague), has not only added a couple of variables, but has also developed a significantly different operational framework in his analysis.(see http://www.trompenaars.com/main/index.php)

Recently I heard from asian colleagues comments about the eccessive ethnocentricity of both approaches.
Probably so and useful to keep in mind, but still it seems to me to be, as we say in Italy, meglio che un calcio in bocca (better than a kick in the mouth..).

So there is some sort of accepted methodology to professionally approach what Heather likens to a russian doll set….
I have often used it in recent years and it has proven to be highly convincing.
Yes, certainly we have not found the golden geese, but at least we have operational tools to impede us to go wild chasing the nth definition and, when tired of running, give it up and return to business as usual (which is even worse than the russian doll syndrome).

Having said this, I do concur with Heather that the degree of social liquidity, the fading presence of anything which looks like what we have learned to call public opinion, the ongoing splintering and composition of publics in lack of authoritative references to refer to etcetera, etcetera….. make it very challenging to answer Heather’s question: quote
Can PR really hope to accommodate individuality or are we simply looking to segment into homogeneous cultural clumps (stereotypes) and hope they will do?unquote

A tentative reply could be that this digital and liquid society is helping and pushing public relations professionals to return to their uniqueness: relationships.
In theory technology today allows what only a few years ago was considered blasphemy, but which is at the very basis of our profession.

I will not go to the extreme to say that psychology is more important for us than sociology, but I will dare to say that psychology is more important than good writing….

The reason why I bring up the good writing issue is not only that the anglosaxon (particularly american)pr education model has a paranoia about good writing mostly because it is culturally subservient to journalism much more than to organizational or management thought, but also because such paranoia is historically based on the need by organizations to use printed and widely distributed media in order to reach stakeholder publics which otherwise would not have been reachable and which to the contrary today can be.

France has always been predicated on the concept of a centralized, homogenized state. It first tried to wipe out internal diversity (by forbidding the use of Breton and other languages) and then tried to impose a total assimilation model on its immigrants. It is illegal (i.e. unconstitutional) to even collect statistics on people’s ethnic origin because it goes against the principle of everyone being the equal/the same (the terms being used interchangeably, which I don’t agree with) in the eyes of the Republic. The problem is that it is not true on the street: experiments changing names on identical CVs have shown that prejudice is rampant, if insidious. However, without any statistics to even know the size of the problem, it is virtually impossible for the state to address the problem. Just one look at the Assemblée Nationale is enough to convince you that the French institutions do not in anyway reflect the current French population.

The problem from a communications perspective is that the disconnect between the institutions and the population effective discredits any communication or other campaign on the issue before it even gets started. I have been amazed to see how a cult of Obama exists in my suburb, which has a large working class neighbourhood. I think it is related to the fact that Obama’s election has pushed these groups to compare and contrast and explicitly ask the question: where is our Obama?

To be honest the French use much more Franglais than the Québecois do (I generally am highly amused by conversations between a French person and a Quebecker because of the subtext around this fact). And it has been years since I have heard of anyone getting a warning letter about using too much English in their international-facing business (although at my former place of employ we received them regularly for a while, even though our mission had nothing to do with interacting with the French public…)

But we are digressing a bit…I guess the point is that no culture stands still, so defining respect of a culture is rather like pinning gelatin to the wall.

Sometimes we need to be frank that the culture is a problem. My brother worked for years in a project with the Ministry of Health in Botswana to reduce the transmission of AIDS. After a long period of modest results the ministry and its project partners came to the conclusions that certain cultural practices (what they call “small houses” or having multiple families in the different places that a man migrates among for economic reasons) were a major vector, and they started explicitly trying to modify this cultural behaviour. It was a courageous step, but unavoidable if the scourge of the disease is to be reduced.

The 2001 census recorded mixed race for the first time showing the UK has the largest mixed race population within the EU. This is the fastest growing demographic group here, with half mixed race Britons aged 18 years of age. According to Wikipedia, by 2020 the mixed race group will be the largest ethnic minority in Britain – increasing by 50% in the next decade.

In 2005, it is reported that 3.5 percent of all births in Britain were mixed race. As you say, these statistics will have an effect on culture and communications in years to come – but we should note of course, that in the UK at least, assimilation of different communities has occurred over centuries bringing diversity to the UK culture in lots of ways.

Traditionally, I suppose the French state has attempted to resist some cultural changes – such as Franglais. English has always been more adaptable as a language – witness our bungalows and pyjamas from India as well as lots of French, Italian and German derived words.

Also, I see news announced today that in the Netherlands, Mohammed is the most popular name in four Dutch cities and it is reported as the 2nd most popular boy’s name in the UK (combining all variants – and accepting that the name is often given, but not the name used).