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Textbook publishing: Opportunism, theory, and the captive audience Public Relations Inquiry 2012 1: 107 DOI: 10.1177/2046147X11422649 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pri.sagepub.com/content/1/1/107

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PRI1110.1177/2046147X11422649Book reviewsPublic Relations Inquiry

Book reviews

Textbook publishing: Opportunism, theory, and the captive audience

Public Relations Inquiry 1(1) 107–110 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2046147X11422649 pri.sagepub.com

K. Butterick Introducing Public Relations: Theory and Practice London: Sage, 2011. 228 pp. £22.99. ISBN 9781412921152 K. Harrison Strategic Public Relations Melbourne: Palgrave, 2011. 900 pp. $110. ISBN 9781420256383 J. Johnston and C. Zawawi Public Relations: Theory and Practice Sydney: Allen&Unwin, 2009. 494 pp. £55. ISBN 9781741756272 Reviewed by: David McKie, University of Waikato, New Zealand

These three books bring to the surface challenges and opportunities in publishing textbooks for courses. Keith Butterick’s back-page blurb describes him as ‘an awardwinning journalist and founder and director of Plus Public Affairs Ltd. … [and] Director of the Huddersfield Centre for Communication Research PR at the University of Huddersfield.’ In effect, he is someone who has crossed van Ruler’s interplanetary (professionals are from Venus, scholars are from Mars) divide. Indeed, despite Piezcka’s shrewd comment that the qualification for changing from practice to academic teaching, is a willingness to take a cut in salary, the field’s education grew from Edward Bernays producing teaching books out of experiences. These origins established textbooks as important in public relations education and their continuing importance, especially for publishing sales, still diverts too much energy from the quality and range of academic books appropriate to a mature discipline. But times are changing. The Bernays-initiated line continues with a wide range of contemporary, still mainly US, textbooks, which often involve small numbers of academics with practical experience or joint academics–practitioner ones. Nevertheless, as the field grew at postgraduate level, the need to engage with theory became increasingly pressing for practitioners moving into education and into publishing. After Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) textbook Managing Public Relations, the symmetrists constructed a straightforward escape route from engaging with theory – simply follow the linear model of ascent to two-way symmetrical communication as the goal and destination of PR theory. That then dominated as public relations theory singular, despite no other communication discipline settling for such a simplistic model. However, with the apparent end of excellence publications, the lack of successors to the founding writers, and the lack of traction of Toth’s (2006) The Future of Excellence in Public Relations and


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Communication Management, the movement’s credibility is eroding. As a result, combined with the increasing acceptance of critical public relations as more central than marginal, the theory problem won’t go away. To his credit Butterick acknowledges the challenge and goes for at it head on with the book’s bold opening heading and sentence: INTRODUCING THE THEORY Part One does not provide an in-depth analysis of every public relations (PR) theory and different area of research, instead it is an overview of why theory matters in PR and provides a detailed analysis and critique of the dominant model or paradigm of excellence theory. (p. 3)

Although he has the confidence to critique the Grunigian paradigm, Butterick’s nervousness is visible in the decision to start off with what the book doesn’t provide. Unfortunately, sentence 2, goes for a simplistic get-out clause by asserting ‘PR theory is based on and related to practice which is why two of the most important aspects of current PR practice, reputation management and crisis management, are discussed in detail’ (p. 3). As a ‘Get out of jail free’ card it just doesn’t work. A book considering theory in another academic discipline would neither make such an unsupported claim nor show so little sensitivity to the complexity of considering relations between theory and practice. Unfortunately, the weak opening is not an aberration. Chapter 1 is only two pages long but, after its lofty starting claims, it degenerates to end with journalistic puff: Those coming to PR for the first time will find an incredibly dynamic, fast-moving industry that is full of challenges and opportunities and looking for new talented people to make their mark. That is one of the attractions for who want to work in PR – the fact that they have the chance to make a splash – and who knows, it could be you!

Perhaps professional diving would be a more appropriate career for students aspiring ‘to make a splash’. Chapter 2 then takes under nine pages to offer an abbreviated history of PR with a rather confused cut and paste of the usual suspects – Ivy Lee and Bernays – and then a three-paragraph summary mangling of L’Etang’s (2004) excellent Public Relations in Britain: A History of Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century. L’Etang gets about the same length as Butterick devotes to the history of the excellence project and in using her work, Butterick treats it as a straight history rather than a history of professional practice and doesn’t seem aware of that major distinction and many more refined ones. He follows up with an out-of-date outline of communication theory. Chapter 3 looks at how to demarcate advertising, marketing and PR, and concludes with the uninformed platitude that ‘PR can and does support the marketing and sales function and a specific discipline, marketing public relations, has evolved to do just this’ (p. 47). I say uninformed because he fails to cite, or show any familiarity with Hutton’s (2001) essential history and theorizing of the relationships. Butterick concludes that marketing public relations ‘is at the cutting edge of marketing and sales initiatives … [whose] proponents believe that PR will then be better placed to take advantage of new forms of communications such as guerrilla marketing’ (p. 47). If he really thinks guerrilla


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marketing is cutting edge he would do well to read Jay Conrad Levinson’s (1984) initial book and see how it took many of PR’s basic stock in trades while ditching their ethics. That said, guerrilla marketing is undergoing a renaissance in morally-wild regions of social media but to raise it without also raising ethical considerations does students no favours. Part 2 introduces ‘The Practice’ (p. 89) but offers nothing new, many old case studies, and lots of lists in tiny paragraphs with sets of instructions that are mainly banal, turgid to read and consistently superficial. Moreover, in an age of globalization, the international elements are risible and, just as there are no references to Heath’s (2001, 2010) Handbooks, so there are no references to Sriramesh and Vercic’s (2003, 2009) Global Handbook of Public Relations. Similarly, social media has little coverage even as it threatens to transform the field while offering students better points of professional entry than they have ever previously had. I strongly recommend that future PR academics, to use an ugly, but useful, hybrid, do basic reading – such as, at least, the key handbooks of their field, before embarking solo on an authored book. They may have a captive audience for their courses but writing a textbook should require substantial foundational work. At least, at 228 pages, Butterick was short. Turning to Kim Harrison’s (2011) 900page opus on Strategic Public Relations, there was space for more insight. His book’s ‘About the Author’ section signalled a background similar to Butterick, albeit in Australia rather than the UK: This book brings together Kim Harrison’s 30 years of wide-ranging knowledge and experience in public relations, during which he has made an influential contribution to the profession in Australia. He combines his extensive industry experience with well-researched knowledge to link public relations education and practice in an easy-to-read way. (p. iv)

Despite his professional background, Harrison’s title verges on false marketing. Although titled Strategic Public Relations, only one of its four parts – featuring six chapters out of a total of 23 chapters (and some of those chapters are devoted to basic communication campaign planning) – is on strategic PR. None of those six chapters addresses either recent strategy outside of PR, or recent thinking on grand strategy in PR, and Harrison offers no strategic justification of the use of strategic in the title. Indeed Harrison’s contents are more accurately expressed in the subtitle A Practical Guide to [PR] Success, as it is predominantly a pedagogic guide to students considering public relations as a career. And the same spectre of theory haunts his pages. Harrison dematerializes it partially by devoting almost four pages (pp. 77–80) to ‘The excellent contribution of James Grunig’ – with no quote marks around the pun on ‘excellent’ – and just over a page to ‘Debate and criticism’ in quotes for reasons that are unexplained. To me they seem to imply that excellent public relations, as in Toth (2006) can be unambiguously equated with excellent project public relations, and that debate and criticism are more questionable. Again after the opening Harrison falls away dramatically. He ends with a couple of unanswered questions, including one that asks: ‘is ‘excellence’ still a suitable term to use today for best practice?’ (p. 81). Surely, if theory is to influence practice, that is not a terminological question but a practical one to guide practitioners towards theory with contemporary relevance. On academic touchstones Harrison benchmarks alongside Butterick in ignoring the field’s major Handbooks, but displays much more knowledge of academic sources and journal articles. Overall, without much excellence of any sort,


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he presents more detailed, and more helpful, guides to practice with the key contemporary touchstone of social media getting substantially more coverage. The final book in this troika, like Harrison, comes from Australia. Although two years older, it is more intelligently optimistic and more helpfully executed than the other two. The third edition of Johnston and Zawawi’s Public Relations: Theory and Practice features writers from theory and practice across a range of Australian locations, organizations and universities. The increased pluralism not only increases sales, as the single book can be set across many different curricula taught by many of the contributors, but diversity – the 18 contributors can more justifiably add their own input as part of a manyauthored collection. In addition, it features a solid chapter on theory, by Mackey, who clearly displays research knowledge of his subject and is not stuck in indecision about where excellence comes in the history, as well as providing research on the history of Australian public relations rather than the third or fourth hand catalogue of the usual American suspects. While the chapters are uneven, and some of the applied ones could learn from Harrison, the book’s overall effect makes for a far better advanced and integrated approach. In addition, the first edition, which appeared in 2000, set a standard in having enough diverse authors and a marketing strategy able to compete with US textbooks in their country of origin. It was an innovative approach that has been improved on in the two subsequent editions of Tench and Yeoman’s multi-authored Exploring Public Relations (2006, 2009). Opportunism in textbooks that increase depth and range and special knowledge for students is welcome. Individual and under-informed tomes, along the lines of Butterick and Harrison, which appear to be designed for captive student audiences, are past their use-by date. References Grunig J and Hunt T (1984) Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Heath R (ed.) (2001) Handbook of Public Relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Heath R (ed.) (2010) Sage Handbook of Public Relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hutton J (2001) Defining the relationship between public relations and marketing: Public relations most important challenge. In Heath RL (ed.) Handbook of Public Relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 205–14. L’Etang J (2004) Public Relations in Britain: A History of Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Levinson JC (1984) Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from your Small Business. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Sriramesh K and Verčič D (eds) (2003) The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sriramesh K and Verčič D (eds) (2009) The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice (revised edition). New York: Routledge. Tench R and Yeomans L (eds) (2006) Exploring Public Relations. Harlow: FT/Prentice Hall. Tench R and Yeomans L (eds) (2009) Exploring Public Relations (2nd edition). London: Pearson. Toth E (ed.) (2006) The Future of Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
