PR CRISIS MANAGEMENT

PR Crisis Management

PR Crisis Management

Public Relation

Edward L. Bernays, a well-known historical figure in public relations, is hailed as the “father of modern public relations”. With a career that began in the early 1900s, Bernays is credited for introducing the concept of applying social scientific research and behavioural psychology when developing campaigns and messages to persuade a public's perception and behaviours. But alongside Bernays stood his wife, Doris E. Fleischman, who was a college-educated journalist and fund-raiser in the early 1900s before going into equal partnership with Bernays to start their public relations firm, Counsel on Public Relations, in 1919.

Although Fleischman is acknowledged in history as helping shape the public relations industry with Bernays, her equal role in the public relations firm goes un-noted. Fleischman's legacy instead highlights her feminist writings and her fight to keep her maiden name for the first 30 years of her marriage to Bernays, becoming the first woman to be issued a U.S. passport in her maiden name.

As the public relations industry it has fought and continues to fight for societal acknowledgment as a credible profession, the concept of and conversation about women as leaders in public relations is often overshadowed by the need to address the many barriers that women face working within the public relations industry. Women have increasingly entered the field since the late 1970s, composing 70% of practitioners in the industry in 2000 and as of 2008 composing 60.3% of the 64,000 people working as public relations managers (U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, 2009); thus much discussion over the past 3 decades has also focused on the effect that the “feminization” of the industry could have on the public relations role as a management-level function within an organization.

J. E. Grunig's study of excellence provided a framework for leaders in public relations, characterizing them as those who provide an organization direction and vision, those who are “boundary spanners”—meaning that they are aware of everything going on in and around the organization—and those who create a work environment in which effective communication management is applied using both one-way and two-way communication approaches. Because of society's construct of the term public relations, the industry spends a great deal of time “doing PR for PR,” leaving little energy to deal with the weighty issue of gender discrimination in public relations leadership roles.

Public relations is called “the unseen power” because so much of the work is done on behalf of others and behind the scenes that the efforts of practitioners not only go unrecognized but often it is unclear what the work of the public relations professional is. As a result, the term public relations become a catchall phrase for anything that resembles manipulation, persuasion, or propaganda. The media often portray public relations practitioners as unscrupulous spin doctors or as sexy, high-powered image makers (like Sex and the City's character Samantha Jones who portrays the owner of a public relations firm) or as aggressive, over-the-top event planners (like in MTV's 2005 reality show Power Girls, which ...