Are we a “profession?”
In a comment to the social media press release post, the always thoughtful Jay Rosen makes this point:
...it is unwise (meaning self-deceptive) for corporate PR people to call themselves a ???profession.??? A profession gains a cetain amount of autonomy due to widespread respect for a body of knowledge the professional commands. Absent those two things, the term ???professional??? loses substantive meaning and becomes simply a bid for higher status. Neither the autonomy nor the respect-for-knowledge are there for PR, most of the time. But in America, everyone believes that if you???re not called a professional then you are being dissed. Not much we can do about that.
I have heard several arguments again classifying PR as a profession. One is that there are no black-and-white approaches to addressing an issue or solving a problem as there are in, say, medicine, law, and accounting. Consequently, you cannot license a PR practitioner, and the ability to license is a key characteristic of a profession.
The value of dictionary definitions in this kind of question is dubious, but I did find several that raise intriguing issues, such as this from “The American Heritage Dictionary”: “An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.” While any idiot can crank out a press release (heh; that’s pretty obvious), the practice of strategic, professional public relations certainly does require considerable training and specialized study. If not, why would anybody take the trouble to produce volumes like “Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management,” a highly lauded scholarly review of the field’s literature?
But I’m not making any decisions here about whether PR/corporate communications qualifies as a “profession.” Instead, I’m opening the discussion. As a caveat, I’ll concede (and rue) the fact that there are bottom feeders in this profession who are probably more visible than their counterparts in other professions by virtue of the fact that their work is, in fact, public by nature. But leaving the worst offenders aside for the sake of a more substantive discussion, what does or does not make the practice of public relations a profession?
And does it matter whether it is or isn’t?
UPDATE: Let’s throw this additional comment from Prof. Rosen into the mix:
...what I meant is…that the relevant constituencies outside of PR…lack respect for the specialized knowledge (or expertise) that PR is supposed to command. And PR people therefore find it hard to carve out the zone of autonomy that identifies a “profession.” As you said, “everybody thinks they know how to communicate.???
I used an example in my comment of a company president who dismissed a comprehensive, strategic plan to communicate a traumatic reorganization, saying instead, “Just write an article about it for the company magazine.” This president, Prof. Rosen suggests, lacked the respect for the specialized knowledge or expertise that drove us to propose the plan that we did. Because so few people recognize that specialized knowledge, as they would for a doctor or an accountant, we fail to meet the criteria for a profession.
Prof. Rosen clearly is not “dissing” public relations, but raising valid discussion points. So let’s discuss!
01/22/07 | 15 Comments | Are we a “profession?”