Want to Know About the Future of Public Relations? A Look Back 60 Years Can Help
By John Paluszek, Senior Counsel, Ketchum, and APR, Fellow PRSA
From the Fall 2007 issue of The Public Relations Strategist.
Copyright 2007 The Public Relations Strategist
. Reprinted with permission by the Public Relations Society of America (www.prsa.org).
It’s 1947. London, Berlin and Tokyo are still digging out from the World War II aerial bombings that leveled much of the cities (and many more).
The fledgling United Nations is preparing for the lengthy debate that next year will end in a vote endorsing the creation of Israel.
In America, colleges and universities are flooded — thankfully — with returning GIs who will use the just-passed GI Bill for higher education, enabling them to contribute to, and benefit from, one of the greatest economic transformations in history. Jackie Robinson is courageously breaking the color line in Major League Baseball. He and tennis star Althea Gibson will energize the desegregation of professional sports around the world.
A 26-year-old former journalist, having completed service in the U.S. Army after covering the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals for American Forces (Radio) Network, is celebrating the first anniversary of the founding of his New York-based firm — Harold Burson Public Relations.
Also in New York, an intrepid group of PR professionals, a subset of what Tom Brokaw will call “the Greatest Generation,” were busy creating the Public Relations Society of America. It is a time when the practice of public relations is in its adolescence — when few counseling firms are billing six figures annually (although corporate departments are expanding); when women are virtually excluded from leadership opportunities; and when “information technology” centers on the rotary-dial telephone (operator assistance needed for long distance), the Remington manual typewriter (soon to be replaced by the IBM Selectric), carbon paper (for copies), Wite-Out (for corrections) and the No. 2 wood pencil and ballpoint pen (for just about everything else).
Fast-forward 60 years. The world is, of course, vastly changed, and it continues to evolve in directions unforeseeable in 1947. And public relations, operating at the interface of an organization and society — now truly global and connected — is evolving on a parallel track.
In 2007, economic, political and cultural power and influence reside in a multipolar world that requires what public relations seeks to deliver: mutual understanding, cooperation and, at many levels and in many forms, win-win harmony.
The founders of PRSA and, subsequently, the founders of PR professional societies in many parts of the world, would be heartened and, perhaps, astonished at how public relations has flourished over the ensuing decades.
There are many ways to describe this growth and maturity. Here are a few:
- Professionalism: A code of ethics, accreditation of practitioners and certification of educational programs, a body of knowledge (admittedly so vast and growing so rapidly that it almost defies organization), practice and advocacy in the public interest — these become the hallmarks of the profession.
- Public relations as a business: It does not demean the reputation of “the Greatest Generation” of PR leaders a bit to point out that today’s managers of PR counseling firms are running enterprises many times larger — and much more complex — than those of the 1940s. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employment in public relations grew 44% since 1990 and is projected to grow another 36% in the next decade.
- “Protean” public relations: Leaders of every type of institution now recognize the strategic importance of managing relationships with the public. Additionally, PR practitioners often become expert on a broad and ever-expanding spectrum of communications technology as well as specialties aimed at discrete audiences, ranging from employees, investors and customers to community leaders, nongovernmental organizations and government officials.
- Globalization of public relations: PR practice, to a large extent, reflects the social, economic and political systems of the nation in which it operates. Nevertheless, there is a significant movement toward consensus on vital PR universals. The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, a worldwide confederation of PR societies that represent some 160,000 professionals around the world, has established a universal code of ethics and is undertaking identifying global curriculum standards. It has also championed the relationship of public relations and democratic freedom around the world (see “Letter From Brazil,” above) and, in 2008, will sponsor the Fifth World Public Relations Festival themed “The Public Benefit of Public Relations,” in London.
- PR education and practice: Some 270 U.S. colleges and universities now offer a carefully structured PR curriculum. According to the recent report of the Commission on Public Relations Education, “The Professional Bond, Public Relations Education and the Profession,” the link between practitioners and these educational institutions — through endowments, chairs, grants and other kinds of support — is encouragingly nascent.
Public relations also faces many formidable challenges. Among them is mischaracterization by some media, lack of an entry-level credential and occasional ethical lapses. Despite these challenges, public relations continues to grow and develop as a contributor to social progress.
2025: “Revolutionary Drivers of Change”
Fast-forward to 2025. During this year, PR professionals and educators will fail to meet their obligations if they haven’t prepared themselves and their organizations for a transformed world. Erik Peterson, Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), based in Washington, D.C., has articulated the basics of this transformation. He and CSIS have developed “The Seven Revolutions Initiative” to forecast seminal trends through 2025.
The revolutions, Peterson told PRSA’s International Professional Interest Section’s Global Issues Forum in late July in New York City, will center on population growth, especially in the developing world, resource availability, technology, information, integration, conflict and governance.
In sum, he asked, “Are we going to move to a better or more dangerous world?”
It would be easy to answer in the negative. Terrorism, regional wars, economic inequality, disease and the threats of ecological or nuclear disaster all point in that direction. But author Robert Wright, tracing the long upward arrow of cooperation in human history, tells us in his book Non Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Pantheon Books), that despite many grievous setbacks over the centuries, “it is hard . . . to resist the conclusion that — in some important ways, at least — the world now stands at its moral zenith.”
And, in an observation that seems addressed especially to PR professionals, he adds, “given the centrality of information technology . . . is it possible that we are passing through a true threshold, a change as basic as the transition from hunter-gatherer village to chiefdom, from chiefdom to ancient state?”
The answer, of course, is not solely in the hands of PR professionals. New York Times columnist David Brooks, summarizing a recent paper delivered by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, has offered a fascinating projection of the potential global architecture (providing that nations recognize the world is, indeed, interconnected and that global problems and opportunities must be addressed through cooperation).
Ikenberry and Brooks suggest that the United States could be the center of three new global institutions in which nations come together to solve problems:
“A global social-services sector, providing health care, education, shelters, emergency services and other parts of any healthy community.
“Renewed security alliances in part to enmesh China before it becomes so powerful it’s uncontrollable . . . . The U.N. . . . reformed and a Concert of Democracies . . . created where the free world could respond as threats emerge.”
So the related questions for every PR practitioner and educator are as follows: How will you and your organization or institution fit into this kind of world? How will you prosper in this social environment? And what can the PR canon and portfolio, as they continue to evolve, contribute to a better society?
No one can answer these for you.
But the answers will be apparent for each of us who is as creative, bold and dedicated as those who preceded us in public relations 60 years ago.
John Paluszek, APR, Fellow PRSA, is Senior Counsel at Ketchum and PRSA’s liaison to the United Nations.
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