global discussion. local perspectives.
Just when you think an issue is sorted, done, dusted and settled – up it comes again. The issue on my mind today is gender and its impact on public relations. I have attended three different events in roughly as many weeks and at each one, the issue of ‘feminisation of the public relations profession’ has taken centre stage.
In these last two weeks -as I am sure each of you- I have been struggling to make some sense out of what is happening in the world, in order to advise clients, friends, colleagues, as well as my shareholders…. on how to interpret current events and act positively. I have come up with this ‘story’:
PR Conversations often seems to advocate the two-way symmetric “normative” approach to public relations, but it is important to recognise the limitations of this “ideal” as championed by Grunig and his followers and at the very least, engage with alternative, critical or radical perspectives.
From the very beginning, and well before the debate on institutionalization began on this blog, I recall that David Rossi -director of public relations at MPS (Monte dei Paschi di Siena), a leading Italian banking institution- while deciding if his organization would sponsor the Euprera Congress in partnership with his peers Gianluca Comin from Enel, Europe’s second electricity company and Carlo Fornaro from Telecom Italia– said to me
In not many weeks some of us (scholars and professionals) will be in Milano participating at the Euprera annual Congress, which this year (October 16/17) is dedicated to the institutionalization of public relations. Although there will be a relevant but small segment of participants from other areas of the world, it is reasonable to expect that most will be European, and therefore are likely to transfer European perspectives. This is one good reason to review...
I am not an advertising agent, but a storyteller. This statement concludes a splendid article by Gugliemo Emanuel, correspondent from London of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera…dated December 1 1909 (yes! one hundred years ago..), significantly titled BUM!
I am not an advertising agent, but a storyteller. This statement concludes a splendid article by Gugliemo Emanuel, correspondent from London of the Italian daily Corriere della Sera…dated December 1 1909 (yes! one hundred years ago..), significantly titled BUM!
In Torino, early July, at the World Architects Conference -in the context of a workshop organised by Ferpi, Assorel (the Italian agency association) and the Global Alliance on how public relators and architects might better work together to reduce the more negative effects on society of the nimby (not in my back yard) and banana (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) syndromes-
I was fascinated to read Toni Muzi Falconi’s reflection on the London World Public Relations Festival on the 28th June 2008 and the subsequent comments. Oh what lather we get ourselves into, on both sides! Critical comment on one side and hurt pride and righteous indignation from the other.
The very selection of the overall theme ‘The public benefit of public relations’ reveals a strong affiliation with that ‘pr-for-pr’ thread of thought which, if one patiently recalls similar attempts…see the preceeding post on this blog..) has possibly done more harm to our profession’s societal acceptability than all recent social critiques bundled together.