As members of the global public relations community, we sometimes ruminate amongst ourselves. But out of shyness, arrogance or distraction, we fail to circulate thoughts outside our own, more comfortable, friendly and ‘politically correct’ intellectual environment. We also tend to resist the explicit inclusion in our work of arguments, concepts or methods that come from other intellectual environments. This overall approach is clearly at odds with the core sense of our field of study or practice.
The Global Policy Journal is a sophisticated interdisciplinary publishing venture based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and linked to the other core institutions of the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN): Columbia University in New York, Sciences Po in Paris, and the National University of Singapore. A quick glance at the Global Policy boards gives an idea of the multidisciplinarity and level of the Journal’s contributors.
In the January 2012 issue of Global Policy, my article, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Stakeholder Relationships’: A Challenge to Governance in Organisations,” discusses how the “comfortable” approach is clearly at odds with the core sense of our field of study or practice.
Citing references also available from IPR’s website, I argue that in today’s context the most relevant and added-value role of the public relations function resides in attentively and professionally listening to the often conflicting expectancies of the organization’s stakeholder groups. Interpreting these expectancies to top management before decisions are taken helps to accelerate their time of implementation. This has possibly become one the important indicators of the quality of any organizational decision.
I also refer to the growing and increasingly less-USA centric global body of knowledge for our field, underscoring the global nature of our work and illustrating an interpretation of the generic principles and specific applications paradigm. Indicators of a specific territory’s situational public relations infrastructure are inevitably intertwined with an organization’s generic principles.
A further and more ambitious step forward for the global public relations community is evident in the Stockholm Accords, a two-year (2011–12) brief issued by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management. These Accords define how effective public relations practice creates value by employing external communication, internal communication and the alignment of these two, to strengthen an organisation’s sustainability, governance and management policies. The revised Stockholm Accords will be ready for the Global Alliance’s Melbourne World Public Relations Forum to be held next November.
Toni Muzi Falconi is Italian, currently teaching public relations at the Vatican’s Lumsa University and global relations at New York University. He was founding Chair of the Global Alliance and he is a director of Methodos, the management consultancy.
