>Every now and then, somebody prominently proclaims that public relations is not a profession. Usually this is based on a single narrow definition of the word that requires practitioners to obtain a license or some other form of legal authorization to engage in the work of a professional.

Even if you acknowledge this as the only definition that matters, PR is a profession in some parts of the world. Licenses are required to practice PR, for example, in Brazil, Panama, and Nigeria.

Even in the US, the idea of licensing public relations gets bandied about every few years. The father of public relations, Edward Bernays, was an advocate of licensing. The movement never goes anywhere, though, because the ability to license is based on a defined set of ways to do things. Passing your dental boards, for example, requires that you know the appropriate treatments for a cavity. To pass the bar and become a lawyer, you need to know the exact precedents to apply in a given situation.

In communications, there are too many variables to produce a set of right-and-wrong approaches. Two well-educated and experienced communicators could take two entirely different approaches to the same challenge and both could be right as long as they both achieved the goals they intended to. The approach taken in a pharmaceutical company may well not work in a snack food company, even if the ultimate goal is to increase market share. An audience of small-town residents in the Bible Belt will drive a different approach than an audience of Manhattanites.

In the world of licensed professions, someone who deviates from the defined right approaches can be censured, even lose their licenses, because the governing body can review standards and declare that injecting a patient with medicine A was not an accepted treatment for condition B. The fact that a governing body could not make the same kind of judgment about whether the use of humor was an appropriate way to communicate with audience A about issue B does not diminish the skills, education, and experience required to practice PR effectively.

This leads to the next argument: Without licensing, any bozo can claim to be a professional; you can be prosecuted for practicing law or medicine without a license. But a license is no guarantee of quality; contractors are licensed but I’d like a dollar for every story I’ve heard of shoddy construction. And there are plenty of people engaged in some tangent of healthcare and law who don’t need licenses but still deceive and mislead—or, in some cases, produce better results than the licensed pros.

All of which assumes that you accept this single definition. If you do, it’s at the expense of several other views of what it means to be part of a profession. The venerable Oxford English Dictionary calls a profession “a paid occupation, especially one involving training and a formal qualification.” That’s especially, but not exclusively. THis is not a distinction the OED would make lightly. Wikideia uses the word “usually” which, again, is decidedly not a black-or-white difference.

Princeton’s definition is even looser, calling a profession an occupation requiring special education. Of Random House Dictionary’s six definitions of “profession,” none make any note of special qualifications or oversight by a regulatory board. One of the key definitions is simply “any vocation or business.”

And of course, there’s the most common definition of a professional: someone who gets paid for what they do. Professional athletes, musicians, and entertainers are those who earn a paycheck. Are bloggers journalists? Sure, a lot of them are, but are they professional journalists? Not unless they’re getting paid for their reporting.

If you look at these definitions, a couple of general requirements emerge. First is the academic angle. There is a huge body of academic research and literature in public relations, a discipline in which you can earn a PhD (just as Dr. James Grunig or read the book that bears his name, “Excellence in Public Relations and Communications Management,” which reviews the literature).

To be sure, there are people working in PR with no formal education. That includes me—my degree is in journalism. In fact, as newspaper reporters find themselves on the street, a lot are looking for work in PR, usually in the media relations corner of the business. I know one outstanding PR practitioner who started out as a chef.

The fact is, though, that you can take the bar without having attended law school. How professional you are depends on how well you understand the business. Balancing the inability to license PR in most countries with the need to assess a practitioner’s professionalism, PR’s professional associations have forged a middle ground: accreditation. Accreditation is the means of ensuring that an individual qualifies under a set of acknowledged standards to perform certain work.

Accreditation, unlike certification, is voluntary, and there are plenty of outstanding, professional PR practitioners who are not accredited. And it’s as likely you’ll find an accredited communicator who behaves badly as you are to find a lawyer who acts less than ethically.

But when faced with two communicators who are unknown to you, but who both seem to be equally capable, you can be more assured that the accredited communicator is going to perform his job based on a thorough understanding of communications’ models and standards because he has gone through a process and judged knowlgeable.

You are, of course, obligated to perform within the ethical codes of the professional body that presented you with your accreditation.

Between accreditation and a body of work that reflects professionalism, it’s not hard to identify communicators who reflect the best of the profession.

The purists can argue all they like, but PR is a profession.