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JCOM 15,2

Public relations as dialogic expertise?

Magda Pieczka
Media, Communication & Performing Arts, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer critical reection on the role played by the concept of dialogue in public relations theory, pedagogy, and practice. Design/methodology/approach This paper is theoretical and therefore focused on the elucidation of the history, meaning, and application of dialogue in public relations in comparison with two other academic disciplines and professional elds: political science and organizational communication. Findings The paper argues that, despite the key normative position occupied by the concept of dialogue in much mainstream public relations scholarship, public relations as an academic discipline has not engaged extensively with the theory of dialogue. While other academic and expert practitioner elds have developed much theoretical reection, a range of dialogical tools, and created spaces in which the expertise is applied, public relations normative interest in dialogue seems not to have translated into developing expert dialogic tools or spaces in which public relations experts routinely use such tools. Originality/value The paper introduces literature and debates about dialogue largely ignored in the mainstream public relations scholarship and aims to stimulate fresh discussion about the nature of public relations knowledge and practice. Keywords Public relations, Skills, Conversation, Communication Paper type Research paper

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Received May 2010 Revised October 2010 Accepted December 2010

[D]ialogue, discourse . . . we all like these words . . . Do they mean enough to us? (R. Heath)[1].

Journal of Communication Management Vol. 15 No. 2, 2011 pp. 108-124 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1363-254X DOI 10.1108/13632541111126346

The aim of this article is to offer critical reection on the way in which the concept of dialogue has been used in public relations theory and practice. As the title chosen for this discussion suggests, I question the extent to which the eld can lay claim to dialogic expertise. I also show that reecting on the role of dialogue in public relations allows us to take stock of how the eld has developed over the last 30 years, both in conceptual and practical terms. My approach is not to focus on the variety of practices, or disciplines as practitioners sometimes refer to them, nor is it to lay out for inspection all the possible strands of research. Instead I emphasise the key common concerns that underpin this variety. Dialogue has been at the centre of public relations theory for about thirty years and, I argue, is where public relations conceptual centre of gravity is to be found. To be more precise, concepts of symmetrical communication, relationship management, and
This paper was presented in an initial form at the Stirling Conference in September 2009 and subsequently developed for the ICA Conference in June 2010.

responsibility, which have been fundamental to the trajectory of public relations development since 1970s, overlap with the key concerns of the theory of dialogue. In brief, I argue that despite assertive statements about the importance of dialogue to public relations theory and professional practice, the eld has a very poor understanding of the concept, and has so far ceded this area of expertise to others to be found in the broadly-dened disciplines of political science, community development, management and organizational development. I present my argument in a number of steps which correspond to the sections into which the article has been organized. The discussion starts by sketching out the central conceptual space in public relations in order to draw out the ways in which symmetrical communication, CSR, relationship management, and dialogue overlap. I then move on to focus on the twentieth century academic interest in dialogue and follow up these brief historical notes with two sections that compare three expert areas: community development, organizational development (Dialogic expertise: knowledge and practice), and public relations (Dialogue in public relations). I offer conclusions in the last section. It is important to acknowledge that this paper is written from a particular perspective, i.e. public relations scholarship conducted in the medium of the English language. Other perspectives, histories and debates can, therefore, only be incorporated in this discussion if they have been made accessible through an English translation or an English-language publication. The conceptual centre of public relations scholarship The discussion of public relations theory here focuses on concepts of symmetrical communication, relationship management, and responsibility (as understood within Corporate Social Responsibility) for two reasons: they clearly occupy a very important place in textbooks and research; and, because of that, these concepts offer a good way to identify the central preoccupations in public relations theory. But before we attend to the passages chosen to illustrate the central conceptual space, some comment is needed on how the texts have been chosen. In deciding which texts to cite, it was not just a question of what was being said, but who was saying it. James Grunig is one of the most quoted and inuential writers in the eld. Ron Pearson was perhaps one the most promising scholars in the eld whose contribution, sadly too brief, was particularly important in the early 1990s and salient to this discussion. John Ledingham and Stephen Brunings work is central to the whole stream of research and writing on public relations as relationship management. And Tim Coombs and Sherry Holladays statement comes from one of the most engaging of the new generation of introductory textbooks in the eld. So my selection is not based on notions of representativeness in statistical terms, but on evident and widely understood scholarly pre-eminence, inuence and impact. The following extracts taken together offer a good way to delineate the central conceptual space:
With the two-way symmetrical model, practitioners use research and dialogue to bring about symbiotic changes in the ideas, attitudes and behaviours of both their organizations and publics (Grunig, 2001, p. 12). What are the structural characteristics of a communication system that promotes communication, negotiation and compromise (Grunig and Hunt 1984)? What are the

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structural characteristics of a communication system that promotes what Ehling (1984, 1985) called message-exchange or communication-as-conversation, or what Ackerman (1980) called neutral dialogue, or what Habermas (1970, 1984) called communication symmetry? How can these characteristics be evaluated and measured? [. . .] A fruitful way to begin to look inside the idea of symmetrical communication is to introduce [. . .] dialogue (Pearson, 1989, pp. 70, 71). Broom et al. (1997) advanced a model for constructing theory concerning organization-public relationships centred around the properties, antecedents, and consequences of organization-public relationships. [. . .] we suggested that concepts of openness, trust, involvement, and commitment may act as dimensions of the organization-public relationship (Ledingham and Bruning, 2000, p. 58). [. . .] public relations as a form of public communication [. . .] is associated with multiple, special responsibilities to society. These responsibilities stem from the need to practice ethical communication and the concomitant emphasis on two-way communication and dialogue in the public arena. [. . .] The concern for balancing the needs of society and the needs of clients produces a tension that may be difcult to manage. PR professionals may nd it challenging to function as the conscience of the organization. (Coombs and Holladay, 2007, pp. 28-9).

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Thus, we can conclude that what the discipline deals in is communication, but what it deals with is relationship. Although acknowledgement is made that relationships are built from communication as well as other kinds of action (for example, product or policy related ones), communication occupies a privileged position. Furthermore, communication is dened, initially at least, by the dichotomy of symmetry/asymmetry (Grunig and Hunt, 1984), which describes the relative positions taken by the parties involved in communication and the concomitant communication behaviours. This, however, is not a purely descriptive distinction; these are value-laden terms and the normative stance articulated on the basis of this distinction favours symmetrical communication. The rationale for this position is drawn from a number of sources, some of them known and acknowledged more directly and used more extensively than others. The following discussion is merely a sketch of the key ideas, writers and theories woven into public relations scholarship (by which I mean research, writing, academic publications and textbooks). The idea of symmetry in communication theory can be traced back to research in interpersonal communication and cognitive psychology. The key moment in the development of this idea is Theodore Newcombs (1953) article offering the co-orientation model of interpersonal communication as a way of explaining the dynamics of human interaction. Symmetry here refers to the specic feature of human communication, namely the link between similarity of interlocutors orientations towards the object of communication and the inuence the perception of this state of affairs has on the parties subsequent orientation to that object. In other words, the closer interlocutors see themselves to each other in their views on a subject (i.e. in their cognitions and evaluations), the more condent they become in these views, and that change happens in a co-related manner, affecting the whole system, not just its individual parts. Newcomb also asserts that symmetry functions as secondary reward value, or to simplify, it is perceived as desirable, as good (pp. 394-395). Public relations scholarship has recognised these ideas very directly in textbook references to co-orientation (Cutlip et al., 2000; Broom and Dozier, 1990; Tench and Yeomans, 2006)

and indirectly in the idea of symmetrical communication and excellent public relations which is present in much research and writing (see Toth, 2007; Grunig et al., 2006). The intellectual link between public relations and dialogue theory which is buried more deeply in scholarship produced in the area is that to Deweyan pragmatism. One of the key themes in Deweys work is the fundamental role of communication in democracy and community-building (Evans, 2001, p. 773). He sees that role as going beyond transmission of facts and information and instead as being the way in which the shared territory and social bonds are constituted:
[m]en live in a community by virtue of things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common (Dewey cited in Evans, 2001, p. 773).

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It is worth pointing out the connection made by Taylor (2004, p. 126) between these two writers: commenting on his own work on co-orientation in the study of organizations as a study of dialogue, Taylor connects Newcomb and Dewey by their shared ontological stand on the nature of organization: they both see it as emerging in and through communication. The constitutive nature of communication can be said to be the dening feature of another key idea reected in public relations scholarship the concept of the public sphere. Habermas interest focused on the constitution of public legitimacy for democracy through communicative action, i.e. public communication conducted within a set of rules regulating the conditions and relationships which need to be present for public communication to underpin an inclusive, fair and rational system of government. These are: intelligibility (which relates to mutual understandibility of the utterance), truth (the propositional content of the utterance being transparent and agreed to by the listener); truthfulness (sincerity, the speaker seriously and exactly intending what is expressed); and appropriateness (a claim that the speaker is acting in accord with socially shared norms and rules) (Burleson and Kline, 1979, p. 417; see also Burkart, 2009, p. 146). In other words, the basis for substantive agreements rests on procedural communication rules. The ideas discussed so far view communication as the fabric of human society and as the fabric of its political life. Corporate Social Responsibility tackles the problem of responsibility from a different angle. Rather than relationships between individuals, or individuals as citizens, CSR takes as its subject the relationship between corporations legally constituted entities involved in economic activity and individual citizens, i.e. between private economic activity and public life. Much of the legitimacy of corporations is dened by their legal obligations, but what is of interest for public relations scholarship lies outside that boundary and deals with phenomena such as public opinion, or to draw from the public relations expert repertoire, with reputation and image (Carroll, 1991; McMillan, 2007; Cowe and Hopkins, 2008). The importance of these phenomena lies partly in their potential link to public debates about legislative change and public policy as they impinge upon the arena of corporate action, and partly in their importance for the competitive market positioning pursued by corporations. Another important point to make is that these phenomena are largely symbolic, constituted through various practices of representation. Consequently, it can be argued that relationship management is another technique of managing the soft, symbolic boundary of social responsibility. As illustrated above, in public relations

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theory relationship management is understood as communication activity producing cognitive and affective outcomes measured as trust, openness, involvement and commitment. To sum up, the common concern reected in the concepts discussed here can be dened as enacting a particular kind of social relationships, and beyond that, a particular model of governance, and a particular kind of society a tolerant, peaceful, deliberative democracy. The way in which this goal may be achieved is through communication focused on qualities manifest through and created in communication activity, typically explained through lists of features referred to earlier. As we shall see, such qualities trust, openness, involvement, commitment, intelligibility, appropriateness dene dialogue as well as relationship management, symmetrical communication, or aspects of social responsibility. A brief history of modern dialogue Having shown how public relations central preoccupations are made up of overlapping concepts discussed above, a brief note relating to the intertwining histories of the ideas is needed here. The idea of symmetry in communication became popular in the 1950s, in the same decade in which the idea of dialogue began its modern career. Publication of Bubers (1958) I and Thou[2] is often referred to as the starting point in the story of modern dialogue because of the profound inuence of the ideas it contained. In fact, as Stewart et al. (2004, pp. 33-4) point out, the term dialogue did not appear in that seminal work, but was introduced in a later essay Dialogue (1965) aimed at explicating the key principle of human life to which I and Thou was devoted the twofold orientation that characterises human encounters with nature and other human beings, the I-it (subject-object) orientation which is in tension with the I-Thou orientation (Stewart et al., 2004, p. 32). At rst, dialogue was the domain of philosophy, humanistic psychology and person-centred psychotherapy (Rogers, Tournier), education and theology (Buber, Freir)[3] before it was taken up by communication scholars in the 1970s, starting with:
[. . .] Johannesens (1971) groundbreaking early essay in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, in which he identies dialogue as an emerging concept for the discipline and charts its prominent characteristics (Anderson et al., 2004a, p. 5).

Equally important to note is the fact that many textbooks in interpersonal communication starting in the 1970s were in tune with many of [dialogues] assumptions (Anderson et al., 2004b, p. 7) and, consequently, popularised the idea. The political impetus behind the modern study of dialogue in public life is usually attributed to Jurgen Habermas whose work has been accessible in English translations since the 1970s. Although his most inuential work was published later, in the 1980s[4], his earlier work on the theory of communication had already attracted attention and discussion: a special issue of Journal of the American Forensic Association was devoted to him in 1979, and a longer article on Habermas appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech in the same year (Anderson et al., 2004a, p. 6). This revival of interest in dialogue had a profound inuence on ideas about communication ethics, for reasons put in highly-charged language by Krippendorff (1989, p. 94) a decade later, when he described dialoguing as:

an ongoing process that respects the autonomy of different reality constructions, enables each participant to interrogate his or her own history and grow beyond it. Dialogue is the most noble form of human interaction [. . .].

Thus when public relations scholarship turned to ideas of symmetrical communication (Grunig, 1976) in its broad sense of a search for shared understandings, honesty, listening, and genuineness; these ideas were already well-established in communication scholarship. Subsequently, the study of dialogue became a rich multidisciplinary eld, producing debate and much applied work, particularly since the 1990s. In order to reect on the status of the concept in public relations, it is important to understand what was happening in this respect in other disciplines. In the next section of the article, I shall discuss two such academic disciplines, in order to then demonstrate by contrast public relations relative lack of expert engagement with the concept and practice of dialogue. Before the argument can be made, however, a denition is in order. Dialogue is a somewhat slippery term: it is a word with a long history in English, it has changed its meaning, or rather acquired new meanings, especially in the second part of the twentieth century, and any denition is complicated by its colloquial usage reecting various aspects of the terms history (see Wierzbicka, 2006). The basic denition of the term she arrives at lists eight key characteristics of the phenomenon and offers a useful start to this discussion: (1) dialogue is a process which goes on for some time, not continuously, but in separate episodes; (2) dialogue is a group activity, prototypically involving two groups, and it is reciprocal; consists in talking about a particular range of topics presumably, topics of mutual interest; (3) dialogue [involves participants who] are aware of their differences: there can be no dialogue between people with the same, or very similar, views. At the same time, it shows that they are aware that the subject matter is important to both sides and that it is emotionally charged: both sides feel something when they think about things of this kind; (4) dialogue is not merely an exchange of ideas; it is not just a matter of knowing what the other group thinks, but of understanding how they think, and being similarly understood oneself; (5) dialogue [refers to participants who] do not aim at resolving all differences between the parties and achieving a common way of thinking, at least not in the sense that each group will shift its thinking and as a result get closer to the other group. Rather, it is hoped that the two groups will discover some common ground possibly, through the clarication of their respective positions. It is also hoped, however, that both groups are open to the possibility of change in their thinking; (6) dialogue [requires an] attitude of respect and goodwill;

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(7) dialogue [participants in dialogue] refrain from saying [certain things]: one doesnt attack or even criticize ones partners (unless one wants to kill the dialogue); (8) dialogue is seen by participants as valuable and productive in itself. In due course the two groups are expected to discover that about some things at least they can think the same and, as a result, their thinking on some points may chang. (Wierzbicka, 2006, pp. 689-90). There is no fundamental disagreement among scholars and practitioners of dialogue about any of the features included in this long, descriptive denition; where there are differences, the arguments focus on the emphasis put on some rather than other of these features, on the nature of the specic denition adhered to, and on practical applications. Linder (2001, pp. 653, 652) deals with the task of sorting through various approaches by relating them to two classical models of dialogue: the Socratic and the Athenian models. While the rst one is dened as Socratic interrogations in pursuit of self-knowledge and virtue, the latter refers to Athenian deliberations for collective governance. In short, they represent two directions present in the western conception of dialogue: inquiry and will formation. Linder uses these models to think through modern ideas on dialogue and argues that the work of Gadamer (1989) and Bohm (1996) (for discussion see Stewart et al., 2004), two names usually found on the short list of fathers of modern dialogue, represent the primary interest in dialogue as a route to discover new ways of understanding or to reach what is hidden from view (Linder, 2001, p. 654). The modern thinkers falling in step with the Athenian model are Habermas and Dewey (1927, p. 655) who view dialogue as a way for participants to form commitments, common purpose and to reafrm the symbolic bonds of culture. Another way of thinking through the differences was proposed by Stewart and Zediker (2000) who talk about descriptive and prescriptive approaches. The rst see dialogue as the pervasive dening feature of humanity in the way Bakhtin (1981) does; the latter argue that human meaning-making is inherently relational, but only a particular kind, or quality of relating is called dialogue, following Bubers views (Stewart et al., 2004, p. 21). These differences in views become very helpful when one considers the practical application of dialogue. Dialogic expertise: knowledge and practice Public relations is not the only eld to have made a claim to dialogue. In fact, other academic disciplines have done so more fully and more successfully, as this section demonstrates. Management or more specically organizational communication and political science, especially in relation to community development, have made focused and sustained theoretical efforts linked to signicant practical engagement in solving real-life problems for organizations and communities. Political communication has been particularly interested in dialogue as a way of improving citizen participation in politics and reinvigorating the idea of democracy as deliberative democracy (Gastil and Levine, 2005; Gastil, 2008). While the normative, ethical argument for enhancing opportunities for citizens to deliberate can be drawn from Habermas, there has also been much interest in the effects deliberation has on citizens political efcacy, i.e. the feeling that political participation has an impact on

political process (for discussion see Morrell, 2005). Although there is some debate about the issue and current research recognises that the relationship between deliberation and citizens political efcacy is still poorly charted (Delli Carpini et al., 2004), it is possible to think about the effects of deliberation in terms of increased social and political capital (Morrell, 2005, p.65). Equally noteworthy for this discussion is the evidence of a nuanced understanding of dialogical communication in the two disciplines under consideration. Morrell (2005, p. 55) refers explicitly to the possibility that different types of deliberation the term he uses for face-to-face public communication among citizens may produce different outcomes. He identies three main types: civic dialogue, deliberative discussion, and deliberative decision-making. On closer inspection, these three types of deliberation mark a spectrum of dialogue from inquiry to will formation. While a civic dialogue is predominantly focused on understanding, on diversity and ability to talk and learn (inquiry); deliberative discussion is more focused on specic policy or decision making area and on building citizens knowledge, but not necessarily consensus. Deliberative decision making, on the other hand, is oriented towards a goal of making policy decisions through dialogic communication (will formation). It is reasonable to expect that the outcome aimed at in each of these types of deliberation will shape the exact form communication takes; in other words, different outcomes can be linked to different techniques. Many techniques and examples of real-life projects using dialogue can be found in literature. For example, the Public Conversation Project (www.public conversations.org/) and National Issues Forums (www.ni.org/about/index.aspx) in the USA, which started in 1989 as groups of people interested in ways of improving and growing deliberation in civic life (Gergen et al., 2001). They have since become non-for-prot organisations developing deliberative techniques, training volunteers, and supporting deliberative projects. A fuller exposition of public deliberation is presented in Gastil (2008, pp. 192-206) who lays out examples such as: sequenced forums, which as he admits is a rather clumsy term that refers to a reworked Town Hall meeting; deliberative polls, a combination of random sampling as in opinion polls and deliberation among groups constructed in this way; or citizen juries, a smaller version of deliberative polls. Further examples could be offered from other countries (see Gastil and Levine, 2005), however, the point has already been made: there is an extensive body or knowledge and practical expertise about public deliberation which works with dialogue as an innovative way of achieving goals outside communication. All of the sources referred to in this paragraph offer details on dialogue as a technique by breaking the process down to elements and describing how these should be managed, for example by laying out details of preparation, approaches to putting groups together, articulation of aims, moderation techniques, and evaluation. Dialogue is also a topic of interest and a source of applied techniques in management studies. As in the world of public policy making and citizen engagement, there are numerous not-for-prot organizations and consultancy services which promote and sell this expertise. As an academic interest, dialogue can be linked to the Appreciative Inquiry approach to managing organizational development, usually dated back to 1987 (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987)[5]. The AI approach originates in a philosophical shift in the position taken on knowledge and action. The positivist

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stance of objective, disembodied knowledge is given up in favour of a stance similar to that underpinning the philosophy of dialogue. Organizational knowledge resides in an organization acting as a complete whole, rather than any particular part of the organization. Knowledge is seen as an appreciation of the creative nature of organizational life, and it becomes known through a process of inquiry which captures personal stories and insights, which uses communication as a process of shared discovery and reasoning. However, dialogue, as both a philosophy and a technique, is more clearly discussed in the context of the Learning Organization concept, specically linked to Peter Senge and a group of academics at MIT. Isaacs (1999) book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together is perhaps the most famous work articulating dialogic principles in the context of their application to solving organizational problems, rather than, as we have seen earlier, those of public political life. Like many other guru books, it is a mixture of theoretical knowledge and an articulation of a technique, laced with the rhetoric of epiphany, urgency, and the common sense characteristic of management fashion-setting discourse (see Benders and Van Veen, 2001). Isaacs (1999, pp. 9, 3) version of dialogue, while putting a strong emphasis on collaborative inquiry, is also very clear about the problem-solving application of such communication:
Dialogue, as I dene it here, is about a shared inquiry, it is a way of thinking and reecting together [. . .]. If the problem of thinking together is both personal and larger than personal then what is needed is a powerful set of practical tools and practices that can help us deal with both dimensions. They must produce pragmatic, successful results out of difcult conversation [. . .].

The book then proceeds to introduce specic skills (listening, respecting, suspending and voicing) as well as designing the dialogic interaction, to which Isaacs refers as the architecture of the invisible. One element of his design is the well-known idea of a dialogue container, something like a setting, both physical and normative, shaping the rules of engagement to enable a particular kind of interaction to emerge. Another dialogic technique with business (and other) applications is the World Cafe: a particular way of running dialogues, also now promoted through a not-for-prot organization called The World Cafe Community Foundation (www.theworldcafe.com/) established in 2001. The World Cafe is built around the practice of small group conversations, and a managed way of mixing groups to promote diversity and the sharing of ideas in order to work towards problem solution. Confusingly, one of the directors and contributors to the book showcasing the approach, The World Cafe (Brown, 2005) is called David Isaacs. Dialogue in public relations Turning to public relations treatment of dialogue, it becomes clear fairly quickly that despite the centrality of the relational approach in public relations scholarship, demonstrated in the rst part of the paper, the concept is somewhat marginalised and actual examples of dialogic public relations are very difcult to nd (Meisenbach and Feldner, 2009, p. 253). The most comprehensive discussion of the concept is offered by

Kent and Taylor (2002, pp. 28, 27) who provide a bridge between public relations and organizational communication literature on the subject and go beyond the Habermasian framework by referring to the inherent unpredictability of dialogue and the consequent risk involved in engaging in dialogue and by hinting at a more nuanced distinction between dialogue and related forms of communication:
[d]ialogue is not synonymous with debate which is the clash of ideas but rather, dialogue is more akin to a conversation between lovers where each has his or her own desires but seeks the others good.

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I see these as particularly important points in the discussion precisely because there is very little in public relations scholarship to help the discipline think about how dialogue can become an expert communication skill. Beyond familiarity with Habermas ideas and their application to measuring levels of understanding in communication between organizations and their publics in a model of Consensus-Oriented Public Relations (Burkart, 2009), we have Pearsons approach to dialogic organizational systems which also draws on Habermas in proposing that validity claims can be re-interpreted as communication rules. It remains, however, somewhat unclear to what extent these ideas have been applied to thinking about organizational systems rather then having been articulated in more universal terms. The potential for a more comprehensive engagement with the concept of dialogue offered by Kent and Taylor (2002) has so far has been associated with work on dialogic features of websites, or more generally, the internet (McAllister-Spooner, 2009; Kent and Taylor, 1998; Kent et al., 2001, xref . 2002). On the one hand, this represents a theoretically good t, given the original excitement about the interactive features of the new communication technologies (Chadwick, 2006, pp. 22-7); on the other hand, there is a danger inherent in the methodologies used so far of reducing the search for genuine dialogue to somewhat mechanistic principles of building feedback loops, or dialogic loops (Kent and Taylor, 1998, p. 326). Despite the identiable stream of research in that direction, McAllister-Spooner (2009, p. 321) concludes that, the dialogic promise of the web has not yet been realized and one could also argue that it has not been realized in the scholarly engagement with dialogue in public relations. The only other way public relations scholarship deals with dialogue is indirectly, by studying the relational outcomes of communication dynamics as suggested by Ledingham (2003). Although this approach has much to commend it, in its present shape it cannot deliver the way for public relations to work with dialogue, for a number of reasons. The rst limitation is the conceptual difculty with the assumption that an organization or a company enters into relationships with individuals in a way that can be understood using interpersonal communication models. Dialogic theory (and symmetrical communication) is based on the interaction of individuals, or groups of individuals, and face-to-to-face communication. First, it seems problematic to assume that encounters between individuals and organizations can be treated in exactly the same way as encounters between individuals. There are a number of issues that need to be considered in this context, for example the fact of the centrality of the human body and biology to our engagement with the world. We feel, we age, we construct our lives in relation to the needs of our bodies and our species, and we remain in the same body throughout our lives. Organizations do not have bodies (they may use their

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employees bodies to represent themselves) and their existence is ruled primarily by the economic or political/administrative logic. Organizations also have an articulated utilitarian purpose in a way that is alien to most philosophical or religious systems that deal with the question of the meaning of human life. Thus when such different entities interact, they interact within a structured sense of expectations and understandings that construct the platform for this engagement. When we as individuals enter into communication, or even a relationship with an organization, we operate in this relationship by retaining a clear sense of the differences in the legal positions between participants in the communication, a degree of sensitivity to strategic needs both our own and the organisations and a sense of appropriate expectation of what our mutual obligations in the relationship and the extent of the relationship are. For example, if I am in a relationship with my bank, I have no illusion that I am anything other than a customer, or potential customer for a related service (such as personal nance advice), or part of some other strategic plan, and am fully aware that our relationship is predicated on the banks position, both legal and competitive. Any other stance on my part could be seen as a sign of lack of basic social competence, to say the least. Thus the rst limitation of relationship management as a dialogic approach is that so far there does not seem to be a sufcient recognition of the delimitations and subtleties of relationship in contexts discussed here. Second, the task of reconnecting relational outcomes to behaviours tends to focus on the individuals behaviours towards the organisation, rather than on mutual changes: for example, in conict scenarios (Huang, 2001), or in deciding whether an individual will continue or sever his or her relationship with an organisation (Bruning et al., 2004). Dialogue implies mutuality, but relationship measurement so far seems to nd it hard to deal with mutuality: the line of inquiry tends to look at the relationship as the predictor of the publics, not the organizations behaviour, and the mutuality of the bond is thus underplayed. Third, by focusing on the relationship between the organization and its publics, organizational members seem to be marginalised, if not excluded altogether, from this theory: What or who is the organization that enters into the relationship with this internal public? To sum up, the phenomenon of relationship is, perhaps unavoidably, simplied by the methodological decisions in this approach which is, therefore, not ready to deal with the complexity of relationships in social life. Finally, the discussion of public deliberation in public relations literature using classical sources and ideas so far has not helped much in understanding dialogue. It has principally been focused on dealing with the legitimacy of persuasion in public life, and has preferred to stick with rhetoric as its key term (Heath, 1992, 2000, p. 71, 2009; LEtang, 1996). Heaths treatment of rhetoric leads him to offer the idea of rhetorical dialogue:
First ethical standards that guide the practice are continually rened by rhetorical dialogue; the limits of one set of ethical principles is a counterset that seeks to elevate practice. Second, public relations adds value to society because of the rhetorical dialogue by which interested parties [. . .] forge standards of business and public policy that create mutually benecial relationships that add social capital to community. Third, public relations adds value to the marketplace and public policy area because open dialogue gives people an opportunity to participate in as well as witness discussions (statements and counterstatements) by which

customers (markets) and publics (stakeholders/stakeseekers) examine facts, values, policies, identication and narratives leading to wiser purchases and more sound public policies.

Comparing Heath s treatment of rhetoric and dialogue with that of Linders (2001) models of dialogue, it becomes clear that perhaps insufcient attention is paid to different philosophies and traditions behind the idea. The term deliberation might t better in Heaths proposition about how public communication contributes to social wellbeing. In this article, as in his earlier writing on rhetoric, Heath et al. (2009) is heavily inuenced by the notion of rhetoric (or rhetorical dialogue) as a statement and counterstatement dynamic, a rather adversarial model of debating retained in his most recent published work on the topic. An interesting departure from this style of writing and references framing his ideas on dialogue can be found in his discussion with organizational scholars in 2006, where he seems much more in step with the theory of dialogue as developed in that particular discipline (Heath et al., 2006). Conclusions What, then, does dialogue mean in public relations? This paper argues that dialogue is poorly understood and used marginally both in research and textbooks. Other academic disciplines and professional groups seem to have developed extensive knowledge of the concept as well as models for its application including its use in consultancy. This is a curious state of affairs as there seems to be something of a disjuncture here between the discourse about the core of the public relations eld as a discipline, the focus of its pedagogy and, one could also propose, the practice (Pieczka, 2010). As this paper has demonstrated, research and theorising deals with dialogue to a limited extent, but textbooks do not cover the term or offer any discussion of dialogue techniques, and dialogue does not seem to appear in the discourse used by practitioners to present their work judging from a cursory examination of websites of professional bodies in the UK, such as the CIPR, PRCA and a number of well-established consultancies. The inevitable conclusion is that public relations functions, and in some contexts presents itself, very successfully as advocacy practice and so far has paid little attention to dialogic communication either in research or pedagogy. Given the continuous growth of the public relations industry in the last three decades (Pieczka, 2008; Miller and Dinan, 2000) and given the professionalization and institutionalization of public relations (Sriramesh and Vercic, 2009, Van Ruler and Vercic, 2004), a question arises about the extent to which the eld needs extensive expertise in dialogue. There is a strong reason why public relations ambivalence about dialogue discussed in this article may have long-term consequences. The constitution of public relations professional jurisdiction needs to be broad and extensive in terms of communication theories, applications, and practices in order to sustain the profession in times of change. If the change in communication technology seems to be widely discussed, the fashion for dialogue and engagement in public policy has not attracted much attention in public relations. Yet it is signicant. For example, science policy in the UK over the last 25 years has been clearly and strongly tied to preferred, and continuously evolving, models of communication between scientists and the public, with dialogue being presented as the most recent solution to the difculties of making policy in this area. Similar trends can be found in health and local government (Pieczka

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and Escobar, 2010). What is more, these policy trends are of international reach, as a series of documents and books published in recent years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development shows (OECD, 2001, 2003, 2008). These policy initiatives have opened up a big area for communication specialists, but what is perhaps equally important is the opportunity this creates for linking communication experts to socially relevant work. So far, as I have shown, public relations as a profession has not shown signs of building and publicly demonstrating appropriate competence and commercial will to enter this area legitimately and with condence.
Notes 1. This comment was made as part of the discussion in a Public Relations Division session Discourse and dialogue: A public relations approach to organizational rhetoric (24 May 2009) during 59th Annual ICA Conference in Chicago. 2. The book was published in its original German version in 1923, translated into English in 1937. 3. The references normally given in this context in addition to Bubers I and Thou are: C. Rogers, Client-centered Therapy, 1951, Freedom to Learn, 1969; P. Tournier, The Meaning of Persons, 1957; P. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970. 4. The Structure of the Public Sphere was published in English in 1989, while the original German work appeared in 1962. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols 1 and 2 was published in English in 1984 and 1987 respectively, while the German original appeared in 1981. 5. For a more detailed history of the idea see: http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/intro/timeline. cfm

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Van Ruler, B. and Vercic, D. (Eds) (2004), Public Relations and Communication Management in Europe: A Nation-by-Nation Introduction to Public Relations Theory and Practice, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Wierzbicka, A. (2006), The concept of dialogue in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, Discourse Studies, Vol. 8 No. 5, pp. 675-703. Further reading Buber, M. (1965), Between Man and Man (Friedman, M. (Ed.), Smith, R. (trans.)), Macmillan, New York, NY. Pieczka, M. (1997), Understanding in public relations, Australian Journal of Communication, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 65-79. About the author Magda Pieczka teaches public relations at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Her research interests include professionalization of public relations, dialogue and public engagement in policy making, and discourse analysis. Together with Jacquie LEtang, she has edited Critical Approaches to Public Relations (1996) and Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice (2006) and she regularly contributes as an author, reviewer, and editor to key journals in the discipline: Journal of Public Relations Research and Journal of Communication Management. Magda Pieczka can be contacted at: mpieczka@qmu.ac.uk

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