What does scholar say about the role and position
of public relations
Contribution of Public relation
department on building relationship between customers and an organization.
Strategic
public relations department is concerned with managing relationships between an
organization and a much wider variety of stakeholders or audiences and range of
priorities at a given time.
Public
relations practitioners communicate with all relevant internal and external
publics to develop positive relationships and to create consistency between an
organization goals and social expectations. Public relation practitioners
develop, execute and develop organization programmes that promote the exchange
of influence and understanding among an organization’s constituent parts and
public ( Sandra, 2009).
Public
relations department is the management of all communication within the
organization and between the organization and its outside audiences. The
purpose is to create the better understand of the organization among its
audiences. Circumstances determined that, audience are most important and need
priority attention at any time. Public relations department involves management
of an organization reputation by identifying perceptions that are held of an
organizations and working to inform all relevant audience about organization
performance.
Etang
(2006) outlines the discipline of Public relations department toward building
customer relations that, the department is the responsible for the management
of organizational relationship and reputation. It encompasses issues
management, public affairs, corporate communication stakeholder relations and
corporate social responsibility.
This
explanation is more interesting in understanding about organization and Public
relations. From explanation, Public relations department is about creator of
organization reputation; therefore, the department is all about creating mutual
beneficial relationship between an organization and its public.
Alison
(2012) argues that, Public relations department is the distinctive management
function which helps establish and maintain mutual line of communication,
understanding, acceptance and cooperation between organization and public;
involves the management of problems or issue, helps management to keep informed
on and responsive to public opinion.
Public
Relations department is there to serve the public interest; helps management
keep abreast of and effectively utilize changes, serving as early warning
system to help anticipate trends and uses research and ethical communication
techniques as its principle, Alison (2012) adds.
From
public relations point of view, the way organization interacts with its
stakeholders is the organization narrative. The narrative involves of those
conversations and actions with and by which stakeholders are engaged. It goes
without saying, but how organization think about their stakeholders will
determine the nature of their engagement and how they priorities their
stakeholders.
So,
if the stakeholders are regarded as recourse, a target or a cost, particular
approach will be taken. If they regarded as a collaborators, equals and as
representatives of an organization obligations to society, the interaction will
be quite different. Their prioritization has not only organization and
pragmatic implications, but ethical’s and moral dimensions because
prioritizations involves judgments about
importance and that is usually followed by resource allocations, with
most time and money being given to those who are most important.
The communication challenges that
an organization faces with absence of Pr department.
Organization
must consider its impact on society, publics, and stakeholders as well as
itself; internal publics, and its industry in order to earn the right to exist
and thrive. Loth (2007) notes that, an organization exists by permission of
society but the vehicles of communication used to negotiate that permission as
the ethical obligation has been little studied. Most often, when encroachment
occurs, public relations is subsumed by the marketing function of organization
(Lauzen, 1992).
The
marketing function is well versed in communication with publics, but often the
other, no consumer publics of an organization are not communicated within such
a scenario. When the public relations subsumed by marketing the focus of the
function shifts from maintaining mutual beneficial relationships with all types
of publics to a limited scope of product publicity (Elizabeth 2007)
Victoria
(2009) notes that, organization practice public relations at deferent levels of
activities that provide an indication of the importance with which public
relations is regarded by the management of many organizations.
If
Loth (2007) accept the argument that public relations officer has a duty to the
society to facilitate dialogue and conflict resolution between disparate
groups, then it is also a valid statement that public relations is moral
conscience and voice of an organization
Public
relation officer are involved in communication task which include activities
such as writing news releases arranging function, organizing meetings and
visits, where information is mainly supplied to public about organizations
added (Dannie 2000).
Derike
(2009) criticized Dannie on the notion that the main duty of public relations
officer within organization is to facilitate communications only, he argues
that, Public relation officer go beyond communication activities, they take
part in the decision making process which guide organization to meet their goals.
.Plessis
(2000) compared views of Derike and Dannie and contribute that, in order to
achieve the broad purpose of mutual understanding between people groups and
organization public relations must fulfill three functions; firstly, public
relations deal with the interpretation of the needs, attitude and opinion of
the people groups and organization.
Secondly, these needs, attitude and opinions
must be communicated between people groups, or organization in such a way that
an understanding of them is achieved. Finally, public relations must manage
this process of communication in order to change or maintain those needs,
attitude or opinions.
Public
relations must be valued in its self as important part of the management term
of the organization, ( Grunning and Grunning, 2000). If organization will not
include public relations department in the decision making core of the
organization makes it exceptionally difficult or impossible to know and
consider the views of those publics. Organization fails when they exclude
public relation department from decision making.
Loth (2007) supports that, organization structure
in which public relations is not a member of the dominant coalition have less
potential of being excellent than do those in which public relation is,
they also have less of a chance of being
ethical.
To
make ethical decisions, the senior public relations executive should have the
authority and autonomy to provide his or her analysis and impute into
organization decisions. Because of the difficulty in gaining membership in or
access to the dominant coalition, many organizations exclude the public
relations department and thereby do not maximize their ethical potential Loth
(2007) adds.
The
constitutive process of decision making addressed the basic questions such as,
what is our place in the World? What do
we stand for? What will we do? How will
we gain and marshal our recourses to achieve what we would like to do? Who would
we need to interact to meet our goals? How do we know when we have succeeded?
All these questions are valued and have communication in their heart since to
be successful.
No
two organizations are the same. This should be Public Relation Department in an
organization that will possess well developed transferable skills which include
the ability to understand the feelings and reactions of a diversity of
audience.
Organizations
relay on the fruitful and considerate interaction between individual
departments, whose work is based on the organization aims, objectives, mission
and vision and strategy. In order to insure the presence and visibility of the
organization and good and solid reputation. Public Relations ns department is
needed.
Challenges that organization faces
in doing organization campaign without Pr department.
To
plan and manage campaigns effectively, it is vitally important to look at the
context in which public relations activities take place, since this differ from
one organization to another. Usually campaign starts small. The owners may know
supplies customers and their employees, and often there would not be a separate
public relations function. Communication is in the form of one to one contact
with the various public (Gregory, 2004).
In
conclusion, with more employees and customers face to face contacts may not be
possible and time will be taken up managing business at these stage public
relations practitioners are employed in an organization because there is
beginning of a formal communication program including briefings, use of online
media notes board, social activities and so on.
The
maturity stage of an organization the public relations probably will be
expanded. The public relations department may be one or more public relations
consultancies and will be running a full corporate program as well as
continuing to support marketing effort. The public relations department will be
using the full range of communication range of communication channels as it
disposal and be interacting with a potential large number of public and
stakeholder with a complex range of connection with both organizations and each
other.
