Lesson 2 – Theoretical Perspectives

In my point of view, theories are frameworks that help to enable public relations to construct a better understanding for the entire scenarios. For public relations practitioners, they don’t just simply make organizations become prominent and build a good reputation for them, but also need to handle all sorts of crisis management when problems occurred. In this case, public relations practitioners are required to use strategies and effective methods to overcome the barriers.

I think the key points to remember from this week’s readings are that different scenarios have its different theories to apply for, in order to maximize the efficiency in particular circumstances. For instance, the article ‘A crisis of epidemic proportions: What communication lessons that can practitioners learn from the Singapore SARS crisis? has implemented the theory of two-way symmetrical model.

During SARS period, the public relations have played an important role to create public awareness by increasing issue salience. Also, the engagement between the government and the publics are necessary to bring about symbiotic changes in the ideas, attitudes and behaviors. Mutual communications, which is the two-way symmetrical model, helps to gain more trust from the public because they were assimilated on the issue too.

The readings made me think more about public relations theory or practice in that the two-way symmetrical model neglects the theory of power on other organization. Firstly, the organization in this model adapts public’s opinion and do research and analyze in order to satisfy their needs. Secondly, they don’t persuade the publics but to do something that suits them and satisfied them.

This model has gradually become the most effective model in recent years. ‘Several studies have shown the ineffectiveness of the press agetry, public information, two-way asymmetrical models’ (Grunig and Grunig 1992:308).

1st Lesson

The roles that play by PR practitioners amazed me after I have attended the first lecture of Intro to PR theory and practices.

What I thought of PR practitioners at first was manage good social relationships in both the public and the company by using media communications. Surprisingly, PR practitioners do more than what we expect, they need to plan and arrange everything when there are activities or events. They handle all sorts of incident like crisis management, fund raising, sponsorship, press agentry and etc.

I think the key points to remember from this week readings are that public relations cover wide range of work as communication is vital nowadays. Besides that, public relations does not only involves in communication, but it has its own methods or theory to apply in practical

The theory is Grunig and Hunts’s four models which includes press agentry, public information, two-way asymmetric and two-way symmetric.

The theory of press agentry is to get attention and to pressure the public to accept the messages. For public information, they simply aim to broadcast the information to the public. The two-way asymmetrical theory aims to reach a target market where they provide the information about the products and services by organizing campaign and events .Lastly, the two-way symmetrical theory concentrates on public view and comments.

The readings made me think more about public relations theory and practice in that public relations and marketing can be quite similar in some ways. People might mix up if they don’t know the definition of public relations.The differences between public relations and marketing are public relations aim to reach the objectives by passing message with sevices unlike marketing aims to reach target sales by promoting.

This module makes me want to understand deeply about the theory and practice in PR. I am happy that I have found something that I am interested to study =)