Advice from the PR Pros: James Grunig

The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication has conducted oral history interviews with dozens of the nation’s most influential public relations practitioners. The Page Center website features a vast collection of transcripts and videos of these interviews. On this blog, we will highlight some of the advice given by professionals on attaining positions in the field of public relations.

James Grunig is professor emeritus for the department of communication at the University of Maryland. He has published 250 articles, books, chapters, papers and reports. Grunig was named the first winner of the Pathfinder Award for excellence in academic research on public relations by the Institute for Public Relations Research and Education in 1984. In 1989, he received the Outstanding Educator Award of the Public Relations Society of America. In 1992, the PRSA Foundation awarded him the Jackson, Jackson & Wagner award for outstanding behavioral science research. He won the most prestigious lifetime award of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2000, the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research.

Finding an academic home for public relations

“I think we are either in journalism schools or in communication departments. And each of those units has institutionalized public relations as something different from what I think it is. I taught in a journalism school for nearly 30 years and a communication department for nearly 10 years. I don’t think public relations was ever fully understood or accepted in either of those places.”

“In journalism, educators tend to think of public relations as applied journalism and communication people think of it as applied persuasion or organizational communication. I think my role has been to create a unique body of knowledge in public relations that is communication-oriented but it’s not journalism. It is communication, but it’s not one of those other communication disciplines.”

“There is something I’d like to mention here and that’s the importance of relationships in public relations. The last research that I was doing is on relationships. We looked into communication theory on interpersonal communication and also interpersonal psychology to find out what is known about the nature of relationships; when a relationship’s good, when they are bad for the people involved. And so, public relations is about public relationships and I think that’s been very important.”

“Public relations is a discipline of fads. So it used to be everybody was creating images. Now they’re creating reputations. I think both are cognitive representations, and I don’t see a huge amount of difference. I think what’s really important are relationships. So now the challenge has been, how do I break into that sort of mindset that we’re reputation managers?”

“First off, I don’t think you can manage any outcome like reputation or even relationships; you can only manage the processes that produce a reputation. So, if you really want to manage your organization’s reputation, you have to help manage the organization and then that will produce behavior, which produces a good reputation. Our research has shown, I think quite strongly, that reputation is essentially a byproduct of the quality of relationships that an organization has with its publics.”

“I think that every human being needs relationships to survive in the world. And I think every organization does. And public relations is the function that was invented to help develop and cultivate relationships. I think that’s a really exciting and challenging way to spend one’s life, to help organizations develop relationships. I would hope that young people would be very interested in that role.”