Abstract
Something exciting is happening, finally, in the academic study of public relations (PR)—PR history is getting treated with much more breadth and depth than simply rehashing the usual (“Ivy Lee did this,” “Bernays did that”) accomplishment skimming and how-to-do-it advice of agency and corporate communications superstars.
Today, more and more research is emerging that explores PR in a broader historical context than ever before. Articles and books, including a new series published by Routledge, examine far off, even ancient, manifestations of communication strategies and tactics—used for good or ill—that today would be recognized as PR, even though those manifestations occurred as part of broader movements hundreds or thousands of years ago.
A strong new addition to this trend is Simon Moore’s book that is part of the Routledge series dubbed “New Directions in Public Relations and Communication Research.” Moore chairs the Information Design and Corporate Communication Department at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His book examines ideas of eminent thinkers—ranging from Confucius to Carl Jung—in the context of the mass communication of those ideas, many of which have resulted in economic, political, or spiritual movements still influential, in varying degrees, today.
In each chapter, Moore provides an overview of a key “work” by 1 of 10 influential thinkers. The overview is followed by a discussion about how PR fits into the mix, or, more broadly, how managed communication syncs up with the thinker’s thinking.
For example, in Chapter 5, Moore reviews Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, and then, later, interprets Luther’s work in a PR context:
With this work, driven into a door, a storm broke which has still not subsided, and has been fed by the communication it released. It is the most significant forerunner of single-issue, campaign-based communication: direct, morally certain, and using passion to energize or distort reason.
Hence, Luther’s work is examined through the contemporary lens of issues management.
Yet Moore does not limit his examples to widely familiar Western thinkers such as Luther. One of the more fascinating chapters deals with a work written around 950 CE, On the Perfect State, by Abu Nasr al-Farabi, who, according to Moore, lived most of his adult life in Baghdad. For Al-Farabi, communication in a perfect political state is based more on an innate, natural order of human and possibly divine elements, and it pretty much can only exist as top-down, one-way communication. Moore explains that for this Middle Eastern philosopher, a key feature of a perfect state is that messages “emanate directly from the ruler, while his subjects wait to receive them: passive, uncritical, and ready to learn.” What is being proposed, Moore points out, is that, in modern terms, PR, or even propaganda, does not really need to exist in an ideal state as imagined by Al-Farabi because nature takes care of message dissemination, reception, interpretation: done deal, no news conferences or tweets necessary.
Moore’s text embodies a consistent sensibility that the reader is not, and should not be, likely to over-interpret ideas of great thinkers as totally, or even mainly, PR based. For example, when dealing with Confucius in a chapter called Virtuous PR, the author writes, “Certainly it is hard to think of him—and perhaps any great philosopher—lifting (or lowering) himself from contemplating ‘order, harmony and hierarchy’ and taking an interest in the business of managed public communication.” However, Confucius was, at least in part, concerned with communication, as he advocated the value of being “trustworthy in speech.”
The scope of what Moore is attempting to put into PR contexts is absolutely intriguing, and ranges chronologically from the fifth-century BCE to the late 1950s. His examples also have great ideological range. For example, he has separate chapters on Hayek and on Marx/Engels, thus allowing Moore to discuss communication in the context of differing interpretations of economic idealism.
When taking in the whole book, a reader may get the sense that the author is pushing references to literary, philosophical, and social science icons a bit too heavily. After all, it would be hard to find another PR text with references all between two hard covers to Brecht, Camus, Chaucer, Dante, Gandhi, Jung, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Machiavelli, Orwell, Plato, Poe, Shakespeare, Updike, and Wittgenstein, to name a few. However, taken as a whole, such references and their presentations in meaningful PR contexts give the reader an intellectually invigorating panoramic view of PR history that goes far beyond the usual spectrum of Barnum to Bernays.
At 139 pages of text, the book is the perfect length for a cover-to-cover reading on a weekend (OK, a long weekend) and also for quick-reference use by both graduate and undergraduate students (mostly, grad students). It is not a thick, heavy, brick of a history book that is hoisted onto a scholar’s bookshelf and never opened. It is a usable, accessible, thought-provoking springboard for countless papers and projects in PR history.
Essentially, what Simon Moore does with this book is anchor the academic study of PR right where it ought to be—firmly in the liberal arts.