View from the Ivory Tower
About this blog...Sarah Williams is a senior lecturer in public relations at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is currently undertaking a PhD in public relations professionalism at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
PR Academia V Practice: competition or collaboration?
Sarah Williams presents her research at the Euprera Annual Congress inI was lucky enough to attend the Euprera 2012 Annual Congress in Istanbul the other week, and there were many excellent papers delivered by respected academics and new researchers alike, but what was missing from this, as with many other PR conferences, was practitioner input. There is a great deal of very good research being done by academics in this country and across the world into many different aspects of PR theory and practice but very little seems to make its mark on practice.
This is a lost opportunity for both academia and practice. Practitioners could benefit from the findings of robust research projects, use the findings to guide their practice, even partner with academics to produce research that is pertinent to their operations. Whereas academics can benefit from the first-hand experiences of practitioners and use practitioner networks to produce research that really reflects modern PR practice and captures and investigates the dilemmas and triumphs of the industry.
So why isn't this happening? The CIPR once ran an annual conference aimed at bringing academics and practitioners together but this has not run for a couple of years. It needn't be as grand as a conference but I think that together industry and academia should investigate fora for sharing research and ideas to develop and strengthen the industry.
At a time when Lionel Zetter is calling for a strong, unified professional body to represent the industry, perhaps it is also time for PR academia and the PR industry to find ways to unite?
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Perhaps we need a 'buddy' scheme to pair academics with practitioners to work jointly on projects? This might make research more relevant and accessible to practitioners and more robust and verifiable for academics, helping to overcome the age old problem that practitioners find academic work too theoretical and academics find practitioner work too descriptive.
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Sarah, I think you're right, it's simply that paths never cross. I don't think that academics tend to network in the business community and vice versa. If they did there would be a natural collaboration and sharing of ideas/experience. Students would get access to work placements and companies would get access to the best graduates. Carol Rhead
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Totally agree, Carol, and in times of straightened budgets, things are unlikely to improve as practitioner networking opportunities such as early morning or early evening events are not always compatible with teaching timetables, and practitioner conferences are often prohibitively expensive for university budgets. However, there are things that can be do e. Ketchum Pleon are running a free webinar for students to highlight research done in conjunction with top academics and this is encouraging - more of the same collaboration between practice and the academy is needed, please!
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