Call For Papers

Developing Public Relations:
Entertainment, Ethics, Innovation, Teaching, and Territories

In a crowded promotional culture, although the e-word least mentioned is extinction, no field can rest on its laurels. Writers have proclaimed the death, or at least the end of, both Advertising and Marketing. Neither has yet happened but to secure a future, PR must keep developing. Accordingly, we suggest four areas for consideration and add some questions and suggestions below, As usual, we stress these are NOT put forward as any kind of definitive list - but as prompts for a spread of responses:

Entertainment

• What approaches, ideas, practices does PR need to entertain to develop, and to develop a competitive advantage or sustainable way of operating?
• In an economy that often circles round entertainment and in educational institutes where knowledge transfer alone is no longer inadequate, how can PR become more entertaining in society and in the classroom
• How do entertainment texts serve PR - there’s been a growing body of media work from movies to TV series that feature Sex and the PR professional from Samantha in Sex and the City through to Scandal with political PR figures from the West Wing to The Thick of It that constantly needs updating and re-evaluating

Ethics

• This is, and should be, a perennial topic of concern but what have we done well and what could we do better
• Are there useful contemporary case studies, research, especially in the fast-evolving social media area
• Are there new ethical perspectives, trainings, ideas that could be imported to PR?

Innovation

• Innovation has been on the agenda as part of business as usual in many organizations yet, in our experiences, does not feature much in education or research nor have much visibility to outsiders in practice. Is this perception correct?
• Is there any history of innovation or new directions in PR innovations?
• What can PR learn from innovation in other fields?

Teaching

• A PR Review special issue on pedagogy was oversubscribed and won a PRIDE award, so there is clearly interest but, at a time when education in general is undergoing disruption, teaching still seems the poor relation of PR
• What’s new online and offline in PR teaching and how might we discuss it, share it, and evaluate it?
• What do we teach well and what could be teach better and are there significant differences in different countries?

Territories

• If PR is to survive, it will need to hold onto domains of interest under threat (e.g., CSR, reputation management)
• If PR is to thrive, it will likely need to occupy territory currently unknown or occupied by another discipline or disciplines (PR emerged out of a professional struggle for jurisdiction with journalism and faces challenges from marketing).
• Social media continue to disrupt and offer threats and opportunities for PR - how might we best respond?

In line with our consistent practice as conference organisers, we invite a wide range of contributions and welcome any proposals that help explore the spectrum of concerns of developing contemporary PR. We hope to offer publishing opportunities and will keep you in touch with our progress. Please feel free to contact one of us directly if you wish to discuss the relevance of any proposal for a conference paper or panel.

PDF Call of papers BCN PR Meeting #6

For further information: prconference@uoc.edu