Defining Public Relations
Public Relations: Defined
Though there exists a myriad of online dictionary definitions of public relations, the Merriam-Webster dictionary simply defines it as “the business of inducing the public to have understanding and goodwill toward a person, firm, or institution” and also “the degree of understanding and goodwill achieved”. It notes the first known use of the word was in 1898 but fails to attribute the moniker to any originator.
The denotative meaning of public relations, according to textbook authors Terry L. Hapney Jr. and Jason Lovins, is the “practice of establishing and maintaining reciprocal communications channels that ensure understanding, acceptance, and cooperation in the publics-organization dynamic”. With this, the pair echoes an article by Rex Harlow. They also define the public as David W. Guth and Charles Marsh do, to be “any group of people who share a common interest, value, or values in a particular situation”. Internal publics are comprised of organizational members and stakeholders whereas external publics include individuals outside the organization who maintain relations through infrequent interaction.
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) similarly defines the work as “a process focused on strategic communication designed to build relationships consisting of a mutual benefit for organizations and the publics affiliated with them”. They further outline the profession with a code of ethics that serves to guide decision-making by organizational management. Basic tenets of the code call for “advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty, and fairness”. They advise practitioners to serve public interests with accuracy and truth as “advocates for the people and organizations they represent – presenting facts, views, and ideas that inform audiences as they come to conclusions”. Practitioners must “have knowledge and experiences that are integral to the potential relationship benefit experienced by both the organization and its publics” while participating in professional development, research, and continuing education. Furthermore, they must be objective, accountable, fair-minded, respect opinion differences, and embrace expressive freedom.
Connotatively, the public relations definition engenders a different role from the public perspective. Study author Candace White and Joosuk Park elucidate that survey respondents positively viewed the field as “an important activity that benefits society by providing information and disagree that it is damage control, an attempt to hide or disguise something, or a non-substantive activity”. They note that it is “associated with publicity, media relations, and the attempt of an organization to advance its own agenda”. The media frequently portrays public relations in negative contexts, in excess of 80% of mentions, as a practice that attempts to “sidestep or manipulate the truth”.
Public Relations: Profession and Strategic Role
Humanity’s tendency to “target audiences based on demographics… and psychographics” in order to influence decision-making, concentrated in practice over time to become the field of public relations.
Early public relations pioneers, such as Ivy Ledbetter Lee, termed the work they did as publicity before moving to more apropos lexicons. Lee defined it as “the relationship between an organization and the people”. Since 1984, this subtype of public relations has been characterized by the press agentry/publicity model, as proposed by Todd Hunt and James Grunig. The model is one depicting traditional mass media as a channel for one-way communication messages. Glen Cameron and Dennis Wilcox cite P.T. Barnum as a quintessential example of this type of practitioner due to his notorious hype-mongering.
In the 1920s, Edward Bernays coined the term public relations counsel. Chronicler Marvin Olasky labeled Bernays’ work as “manipulation with accuracy”. In the contemporary era, this is exemplified by the two-way asymmetric model of Hunt and Grunig that seeks to understand target audiences for the purpose of persuasion. Though still a technique common to current marketing and advertising firms, Cameron and Wilcox deemed Bernays a leader in mastering the art of imbalanced effects early in his career.
The first textbook published on the subject of public relations appeared in 1952. The authors, Allen H. Center and Scott M. Cutlip, initiated scholarship into a burgeoning field that would go on to be taught in universities around the world. Originally encouraging fact-finding, planning, and communication, then later evaluation, the process evolved to research, action, communication, and evaluation. In 1963, this was known by John Marston’s acronym RACE. Through successive editions, updated with various authorships, the transfer of critical knowledge has enabled students to attain universal qualification with the passing of Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) exams. This standardization elevates the field by engendering credibility to its practitioners whose process is defined by the acronym RPIE. Short for research, planning, implementation, and evaluation, it is strategically informed by social science research data for an outcome-based focus.
Since the 1980s, public relations educators and a high number of practitioners prefer to utilize the methodology of the Hunt and Grunig two-way symmetric model. This balanced form of engagement between organizations and publics highlights mutual understanding for engagement and relationship building. Bernays transitioned to this approach later in his career, according to Cameron and Wilcox as well as Will Lissner. Today, many organizations rely on it for issue identification, decision-making, reputation management, stakeholder relations, strategic planning and communications, as well as crisis and risk management.
This two-way model informs strategic management function theory that “identifies strategic publics though symmetrical communication”. Samuel Dyer notes that this kind of environmental scanning is critical to public relations as it monitors change to preemptively solve problems before crisis evolution. David Dozier defines the scanning as “gathering information about the organization’s publics, their attitudes toward the organization, and public opinion data”. He gives emphasis to the notion that strategy must be built upon social concerns identified by practitioners in participatory decision-making.
Mark Dottori stresses that public relations work is a “strategy function with the core responsibility that ensures the senior leadership team has the necessary expertise and information needed to ‘reach a strategized state’” by ideally filling an influential senior-leadership position. In this manner, business strategy can be developed from primary and secondary research utilizing qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods that include stakeholder input.
© Leigh N. Eldred 2025
References
Hapney, Jr., T. L., & Lovins, J. (n.d.). Public Relations Case Studies: Successes & Failures—Business, Nonprofit, Government, Education, Health Care. Stukent. January 23, 2025, https://my.stukent.com/student
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Public relations. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/public%20relations
White, C., & Park, J. (2010). Public perceptions of public relations. Public Relations Review, 36(4), 319–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.09.002
