✅ A final PhD dispatch before completing my write up
I’m spending the summer writing up my PhD before a break in August. It seems a good moment to take stock, share where the project has landed and thank everyone who has taken part.
The title of the six-year project is What conditions are necessary for public relations to be recognised as a management function and how can these be best applied in practice? It’s a question the industry has debated for decades - usually with more conviction than evidence.
My evidence-base is built on three foundations.
An interdisciplinary literature review of management and public relations scholarship over the past 100+ years to established gaps in knowledge.
A survey of almost 500 UK in-house practitioners established a broad picture of the contemporary public relations practice, generating 35,000 data points.
25 interviews that then went deeper, each pairing a practitioner in a high performing function with the manager they report to, across public, private and voluntary sector organisations.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the project and has commented along the way. My hope is that your contribution will help me break new ground in management and public relations practice.
The century-old claim
The argument that public relations belongs in management is as old as practice itself. Edward Bernays made it in the 1920s when he framed the counsel on public relations as an applied social scientist advising organisational leadership. The claim was aspirational from the outset.
Scott Cutlip defined the opportunity. In the 1952 edition of Effective Public Relations, he and Allen Center described public relations as a management function that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics. Generations of students learned the definition but few saw it within the organisations where they went on to work.
James Grunig and his colleagues, including my long-time friend and mentor Jon White, put the claim to an empirical test. The Excellence Study of the 1980s and 1990s identified the characteristics of communication functions that contribute to organisational effectiveness. It set out a series of idealised conditions that are much debated.
The European Communication Monitor has tracked the state of practice annually since 2007, surveying thousands of practitioners across Europe. Its data gave rise to the Comparative Excellence Framework, which distinguishes high performing communication functions from the rest. My analysis maps to that work.
Each generation of research has closed in on the reality of management versus public relations practice. My contribution sits at the end of this line.
The research literature tells us what excellent functions look like. It says much less about how recognition is actually granted, withheld or negotiated inside organisations. There is very little from both sides of the reporting relationship.
Management and practitioner interviews
Most research on the status of public relations asks practitioners how they think they are perceived. I wanted to test the perception against the reality by asking the manager in the same organisation.
The gap between the two accounts has been one of the most revealing parts of the fieldwork. In one pairing, the practitioner described their role through the craft of the work: the press office, the speechwriting, the crisis playbook and the channels.
Their manager answered the same questions in the language of the business. Asked where communications had made a meaningful contribution, the first response was a question of their own. Did I mean revenue, reputation or board-level recognition?
The practitioner described the work. The manager described the impact on the organisation. Both were talking about the same function. That gap is where my thesis lives.
What happens next
The second half of the title of the project - how can these be best applied in practice? - is as important as the first. Identifying the conditions for recognition is an academic exercise. The value is showing how they can be applied in practice.
The research has been designed to produce something that practitioners can use. I’ll share findings here once the I’ve defended the thesis. We’ve been running the a one-day Communication Management and Leadership course based on management gaps identified in practice since January.
This Substack newsletter, bridging the theory practice gap I spotted, is itself an output of the work. A book and further training interventions are in the works.
The headline, without spoiling the detail, is that recognition as a management function is earned through specific, observable conditions inside organisations. Some practitioners create those conditions deliberately, but most leave them completely to chance.
Have a good week ahead. Now back to writing.
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