International Positivist Public Relation Critique
1 Internationally standardized?
The profession of Public Relation has become
an internationally needed and admitted profession of the world. Combined of so
many different approach in which the fathers of public relation theorist
originated. While mostly USA is the place of origin where public relation
mostly developed from. As much as we want to claim that the practice and the
theoretical framework of public relation study is widely across nation, and
culture, but still we cannot avoid the fact that there are no value-free object
in this world, especially sciences, where it can be and must be influenced by
its origin culture.
“But this growth is uneven because public relations
practice and education are concentrated in the U.S., the European Economic
Community [EC], and to a lesser extent among the emerging economic powers of
the Pacific Rim, notably Japan.” (Botan, 1992)
The journal also implies some other context
of cultural-related public relation, which is the concept of ethnocentric and
polycentric public relation. lilman (cited in Botan, 1992) who assumed that
there is no major difference between motivating and persuading people at home
and in other countries. Illman believed that people are functionally the same
everywhere so they naturally will respond to the same stimuli in the same way.
This leads to the assumption, for example, that what is known about public
relations in the U.S. or the EC can be applied in less developed counties with
only minor adjustments for the more obvious and superficial, language, legal,
and business differences.
But in my honest opinion, to examine what
people think of, and what people believe, as a matter of fact in stating
bluntly that human is basically programmed with the same matrix is far beyond
the concern of only one discipline, mere social science won’t be able to answer
it, it needs additional information from another discipline to be able to
provide a credible statement.
Nevertheless, I also aware that what is
discussed merely on social sciences, where environment become the most
important key factor in determining what happen inside one individual, and that
the environment itself is affected by the long-lasting process of evolution
called culture, where in the context of social culture, it is also explained in
the grand theory of symbolic interaction that each and every individual in the
whole universe is different because of the experience swallowed by that person
cannot be the same with another people though can have an intersection in a
broader context which is their society and their culture.
The next concept is the concept of
polycentrism in which implied in Botan (1992) that in the approach of the
polycentrism, the public relation strategy and apprehension is more of what I can
call as glocal concept, where the need of a global and multinational company
meets the local barrier which is special internally constructed culture and
need to be solved from within, so It meet with the local wisdom in which to
penetrate even further in the social structure. In this polycentrism, it is
expected that public relations in host countries adjust the system and the policy
of the home country headquarter to fit their locality in where they operates.
This system also has some deficiency in
which that they will have a lacked coordination between the home company and the
host company, then there won’t be any standard means to evaluate the process
and the success rate of the program done by the public relation practitioners
related with the interest of the host company in the mainland. Not to mention
the inefficiency it must suffer from the system where they need to have extra
means in controlling the situation in each host countries.
In the end, I must say that the practice of
public relation cannot be said that it is fully international since the concept
and the use of a local concept in order to correlate with the local people
where the host company is present, yet need some standardization where the
process can be controlled, evaluated, and surveyed also to work in coordination
to the company main purpose.
2 Post-modernism critics of public relation
In the second review I would like to
emphasize that it is all about the post modernism critics on public relation
text and discourse. What I would cover in this review is the basic concept of
the critical perspectives, in which it examines the equality, the discourse,
power of the practices itself, and to continue develop and open up new
perspectives on the discipline itself.
This emphasis on the organisational
environment in which public relations is practised stems from the definition of
public relations as 'the management of communication between an organisation
and its publics' further defines this as 'communication managed for the
organisation by communication specialists. Organisational communication,
therefore, may be either.
It is also criticized from the modernist
perspectives in which comes the definition and the perception about how public
relation build a good will and a well-maintained connection with stakeholders. Where
it has been criticized by the post-modernist perspectives as too shallow and naïve,
where as I quoted from Holtzhausen (2007) public relation is seen to be used to
create perceptions of truth and to devalue certain terms and positions to
create and promote organisational ideology.
Organization and individual is in the
perspectives of critical paradigm as a means of power seeking actor. Meanwhile Deetz
(quoted in Holtzhausen, 2007) argues that a modernist approach to organisations
privileges a management discourse and emphasises upper management's goals for
the organisation as given and legitimate. Organisations and their functions are
evaluated in terms of economic contribution and 'rational' economic goals. The
goal of the modernist approach is a world that can be controlled through
administrative procedures, the elimination of dissension and conflict, and the
blind acceptance of organisational goals and roles. The role of communication
in this approach is to ensure information transfer from the supervisor to the
subordinate to gain compliance and to establish networks to ensure the organisation's
power in relations with the public. This perspective includes the concepts of strategic
message design, management of culture and total quality management.
This journal expose how the disciplines and
the practicality of public relation is still prone to change and needed to be
examined furthermore, as it was mentioned in the journal that the power seeking
actor in the organization and the means to creates a bond and a virtual reality
with the stakeholders is a part public relation’s constrain, therefore public
relation practitioner cannot be separated from the top-level management or the dominant
coalition in order to gain and use all the information to gain more power and
to seek success to the company itself.
“In addition, the above
arguments will hopefully demonstrate the importance of reflexivity in public relations
theory and practice, namely the importance of continuously reflecting and
overturning the theories in the field in an effort to prevent the formation of
metanarratives. I, myself, have proposed many of the theories and applied
several of the research methods I have critiqued above. I still continuously emphasise
strategy when I teach public relations management, although I stress that it is
more a subjective plan for future activities than a rational, objective
document produced by the best brains in the organisation. To critique my own
actions is part of my role as a postmodern theorist.” (Holtzhausen, 2007)
3 References:
Holtzhausen, D. (2007). A
postmodern critique of public relations theory and practice. Communicatio. 28 (1), 29-38, DOI:
10.1080/02500160208537955
Botan, C. (1992).
International public relations: critique and reformulation. Public relation review, 18(2), 149-159,
ISSN: 0363-8111
Darius Iqbal
Cordova
135120207121001
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