Is ‘Reputation Management’ an Adequate Description of the Role of Public Relations in Contemporary Organizations?
Is ‘reputation management’ an adequate description of the role of public relations in contemporary organizations?
1. Introduction
Nowadays, to earn public understanding and acceptance, public relations is the management functions which is practiced to evaluates public perceptions, recognizes the policies and measures of an organization with public interest, and carries out a program of action (Hutton 1999).
According to Grunig and Hunt (1984), they have distinguished there are four models which describe how the public relations has been adopted. The models are press agentry/ publicity, public information, two-way asymmetric and two-way symmetric models.
Press agentry/ publicity and public information models are also one-way communication models whereas the previous one is more concerned with exposure and hype than the truth and the latter one emphasizes on information distribution as telling truth is essential. For two-way asymmetric model, it is a two-way but unbalanced communication. It stresses on backing up organizations’ views and perceptions. Two-way symmetric model is suggested to be the ideal model to practice public relations as it is two-way, balanced communication which aims for mutual understanding. However, in reality, organizations prefer to adopt press agentry, public information and two-way asymmetric models rather than the symmetric model (Huang 2004).
Although public relations has been practiced for years, it has always suffered from an identity crisis during the evolution. For example, the roles of public relations and the press are always mixed up and hard to be distinguished. In the past, people defined public relations as “using communication to build and hold goodwill”, “builder of public opinion” and “motivator” (Hutton 1999). In the present, it is defined as “reputation management”, “perception management”, and ”image management” (Hutton et al. 2001). Lordan (2005) suggested “the role of public relations professionals is to
1. Introduction
Nowadays, to earn public understanding and acceptance, public relations is the management functions which is practiced to evaluates public perceptions, recognizes the policies and measures of an organization with public interest, and carries out a program of action (Hutton 1999).
According to Grunig and Hunt (1984), they have distinguished there are four models which describe how the public relations has been adopted. The models are press agentry/ publicity, public information, two-way asymmetric and two-way symmetric models.
Press agentry/ publicity and public information models are also one-way communication models whereas the previous one is more concerned with exposure and hype than the truth and the latter one emphasizes on information distribution as telling truth is essential. For two-way asymmetric model, it is a two-way but unbalanced communication. It stresses on backing up organizations’ views and perceptions. Two-way symmetric model is suggested to be the ideal model to practice public relations as it is two-way, balanced communication which aims for mutual understanding. However, in reality, organizations prefer to adopt press agentry, public information and two-way asymmetric models rather than the symmetric model (Huang 2004).
Although public relations has been practiced for years, it has always suffered from an identity crisis during the evolution. For example, the roles of public relations and the press are always mixed up and hard to be distinguished. In the past, people defined public relations as “using communication to build and hold goodwill”, “builder of public opinion” and “motivator” (Hutton 1999). In the present, it is defined as “reputation management”, “perception management”, and ”image management” (Hutton et al. 2001). Lordan (2005) suggested “the role of public relations professionals is to
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