Relationship between academical worlds and practical worlds in PR

There are three models that the article mainly discusses, which are about the relationship between the academic theories and the practitioners in public relations. Two of the models, the instrumental model and the conceptual model, are based on one-way relationship while the last one, the translation model, assumes two-way relationship. I agree with the translation model because it seems to fit to the current circumstances of public relations as I think. Academic worlds and professional worlds should interact with each other to flexibly cope with a great number of various situations in practice. If academic worlds do not listen to the practitioners, adhering to only scientific studies, their theories could be far from the reality and that means it would not be able to suggest a suitable answer for a problem. Also, if practitioners too much depend on their intuitions or experiences, it would be hard to analyze whether their strategies work well or not. To analyze the strategies, they need systematic methods which academic studies can provide. Also one-way relationship can trigger another problem in practice or even make it hard to deal with the same problem when it happens again. Hence, the two-way relationship from the translation model can suggest the better ways for studies of public relations.

First, two-way relationship can find the better answers for the problems in public relations. Nowadays, it is common that practitioners of public relations carefully observe and consider the trends of their publics. They even hire some people from their public as their promoters. One of the main aims of public relations is promoting themselves to their public. To achieve this goal, practitioners need to reflect what their public want and think. Practitioners are always ready to open their eyes and ears to their public and receive the feedback from their public. They reflect the feedback to their strategies and adjust them to what their public expects and wants. There are various people in the world so that various needs exist. Practitioners can face many different kinds of problems or situations. Hence it is hard to assume that one academic theory can give a perfect answer for a problem without getting feedbacks from the practitioners. If a researcher reflects practitioners’ feedback to the studies, they can more appeal not only to the practitioners but also to public. Also it can help researchers with more practical ideas.

Second, there are barely researchers who never have been affected from the practitioners whether directly or indirectly. These days, there exist many media channels of communications. Specially, the opportunities for two-way communications are increasing. Many people communicate with the world through their social networks. One person can have influence to the world with social networks and people have witnessed the power of social networks. According to this trend, a number of organizations use these social networks as their promotion strategies. For instance, there are a number of organizations that have their Facebook fan pages. The significance of these channels is getting increased. Now people can find many studies are also based on social networks. It can prove that academic worlds are not the exceptions from the influence of practices. Indeed, many researchers of public relations have done their studies about these extents of communications.

             With the other two models, the instrumental model and the conceptual model, it could be easier to estimate the results of academic studies. It would be simple to see whether theories work well or not in practice if it were the two models. However, the one-way relationship, from academic worlds to professional worlds, could be hard to apply to practice when an unpredictable problem occurs because it is less flexible than the two-way relationship. There flows uncountable information in the world every moment and communication channels between professionals and publics are also various. Academic worlds should accord to these fast speed flows elastically. Because it seems that professionals pick up theories which get along with the trends well. Even though it may be hard to estimate the results in practice, researchers can get feedbacks even easily and infer the influence of their studies from the feedbacks.