Infusing Two-Way Symmetry with Postmodern Values: Isocratean Rhetoric and Public Relations’ Dominant Theoretical Paradigm • Charles Marsh, Kansas • Postmodern philosophy has presented significant challenges to the practicality, universality, and justice of the dominant paradigm of public relations theory: the Excellence Theory, including the concept of two-way symmetrical relationships. This paper seeks to show that the successful, symmetrical rhetoric of Isocrates in fourth century BCE Athens presents a practical model for the infusion of postmodern values into 21st-century two-way symmetry.

That’s quite a mouthful. Does it fit under the category with the smiley face?
This is typical of the crap that gets published while PR grads can’t write a coherent sentence.

1) Public relations’ role in contributing to strategic decision-making, strategy development and realisation, and organisational functioning.

The significance of disintermediation, the value of intangible assets, enforced transparency, management of unknowns and porous organisations is not much discussed in PR circles. It will be interesting if this study brings these issues into the debate.
They require a comprehensive understanding of ICT and social media mediated business and economic theory and advanced management tools.
We have an example.
The human misery of UK floods, mirrored in China on a gargantuan scale, offers a view of the extent to which these management strategies have to be considered.
The engine of news and views in the UK was not the the mass media. It was the blog posts and cell phone videos of vox pop. The engine of the news was not reporters on the ground, it was Joe using his cell phone from a bedroom window.
Their impact is different to the mediated media because they create instant publics with tools (blogs etc) and teeth (organisation).
The Walham electricity sub station that was vulnerable to inundation is now and forever under the scrutiny of the global public with a ‘long tail’ history accumulating all the time. Historically it would have been a local issue and one week’s worth of headlines. Now it has specific values attached that can be summoned up at any time and has now changed the asset value of the sub-station and the company.
The story will affect the way the company sets prices, presents its earnings, deploys investments and assets not just for a consumer or financial audience but to social groups using social media directly influencing political, traditional media, investors and others. They can and will demand and get added corporate transparency far more effectively than any newspaper acting in its traditional role.
So much for issues on this scale. But what of the preparations in consumer PR for the disaster taking place today in China? The country where much of our consumer products come from? This is not a one off corporate matter for the PR industry.
To do anything based on this study will require a huge change from what we know today.
To be involved in strategic decision-making, strategy development and realisation, and organisational functioning will require both understanding and capability that is well beyond any PR conference contribution or academic papers on that will be presented this year across the world. Corporate Social responsibility will be chewed on endlessly and, by comparison is bling.
Could a PR practitioner really deploy the kind of heavily computerised risk analysis that is common in the City? Are there practitioners tough enough to put across the significance of this level of change to modern management?
Are the responses to the delphi study hype and hope or from an understanding of what is really happening to organisations?