The profession that dare not speak its name

I read an article “Australian Public Relations: Status at the Turn of the 21st Century”. Raveena Singh and Rosaleen Smyth wrote it. You can find this article also from the given Australian –pr material in Kaja’s blog.

I found the article interesting and informative. It for example said that current issues, that were influencing Australian PR field in turn of the 21st century, were the preparation of Olympics 2000 and the concomitant international positioning of Australia. At the micro level issues concerned about Aboriginal reconciliation, government communication and intercultural communication.

In that article was also mentioned that nonprofit sector is going to develop fast and that public relations as a profession will encounter more challenges and demands because Australia’s population is becoming even more diverse and multicultural.

However these informations felt a little bit aged, there have quite a few years passed by from this research..

Then I found paper, which offers updated information concerning also above-mentioned article. The article “The state of Australian public relations: Professionalisation and paradox” has been published in Public Relation Review in November 2009. You can find the full PDF-text about this Bussy’s and Wolf’s study and their findings from here.

More than half of respondents, who answered to this survey, have expressed their professional identity by becoming members of the Public Relations Institute of Australia. Yet, only about 20 % of respondents said the words ‘public relations’, ‘PR’, or ‘public affairs’ were part of their job title. That made the researchers to ask a question: Are we embarrassed of our field of practise?

Survey is made for School of Marketing in Curtin University of Technology, so it is quantitative research, quite full of numbers and percentages. From the article you can find information about salaries (1 Australian dollar = 0.62 euro) and about the main barriers to use of Web 2,0 in PR work among other things.

Nevertheless I would like to find more information about current issues in Australian PR nowadays. So my search will go one..

Written by Sanna