David McKie

Public relations and nation building : influencing Israel

1. Explaining the Nation: Israel, Hasbara and Public Relations 2. Public Relations, History and Nation Building 3. Shaping Communication: Diaspora Life and the Jewish Public Sphere 4. Determining Identity: Zionist Leaders as Forerunners 5. Shaping Factors: The Political and Media Environment 6. Early Zionist Institutions and Communication Practitioners 7. Emissaries, Fundraising and Nation Building 8. Economics, Market Changes and Major Campaigns 9. Speaking on behalf of Government (1): Government Practitioners and Hasbara 10. Speaking on behalf of Government (2): Other Civil Servants and Military Spokespeople 11. The Emergence of Private Consultants 12. Conclusion: Representing Nations and Influencing Israel

Desolidifying Culture: Bauman, Liquid Theory, and Race Concerns in Public Relations

This article examines approaches to race in public relations and seeks to reframe them through the work of Zygmunt Bauman. After a brief survey of recent race-concerned interventions in the literature, I contend that the mainstream field still tends to avoid anxieties around race in 3 main ways: by considering race from a functionalist business orientation rather than a social equity perspective; by embedding, or freezing, race in relatively static, quantitative, and unemotional conceptualizations of culture and ethnicity; and by acting as if race is no longer an issue in a multicultural, or postrace society. I find these approaches inadequate to the task of comprehending a swift-moving and unsettled present characterized by massive population movements. To improve the fields engagement with the cultural and demographic fluidity of contemporary conditions, especially in relation to race, I open up possibilities for public relations by drawing from Baumans concept of liquid society and his methodological creativity.

Pumpkins, kiwi fruits, and global hybrids: A comparative review of 21st century public relations scholarship in Australia/New Zealand and the United States

In attempting this review essay, we agreed that its commissioning editor’s terms of reference were at once impossible and irresistibly challenging: “a comparison of approaches to the study and practice of communication by scholars in the United States and Australia/New Zealand” preferably through “three to five books . . . published in 2003 and 2004” (Chesebro, March 26, 2004, personal email communication). From the outset we want to make clear that this essay is not, and cannot make any claim to be, a disinterested piece (in fact many of our disagreements with the work under review is that it presents itself as impartial, scientific, and uninfluenced by its origins). Although one of us taught in Australia for 10 years, and neither of us was born here, we are proud to be New Zealand-based academics. That background not only colors our point of view but, as the review goes on to argue, it also influences our intellectual allegiances and attitude to power, both within and outside the academy. Given the enormity and complexity of the task, we have postponed a broader communication analysis to a second review and restricted this initial review to the narrower field of public relations. For that field the following selection focuses on two types of books: those that serve as benchmarks (e.g., Grunig, Grunig, & Dozier, 2002; Heath, 2001) and those that are representative of main currents (e.g., Johnston & Zawawi, 2004; Lattimore, Baskin, Heiman, Toth, & Van Leuven, 2004; Mickey, 2003; Tymson, Lazar, & Lazar, 2002).

Threshold Concept Theory as an Enabling Constraint: A Facilitated Practitioner Action Research Study.

Abstract International interest is growing in how threshold concept theory can transform tertiary teaching and learning. A facilitated practitioner action research project investigating the potential of threshold concepts across several disciplines offers a practical contribution and helps to consolidate this international field of research. In this article we show how a focus on threshold concept theory enabled tertiary teachers to work collaboratively to investigate tertiary pedagogical practices. The purpose of the article is to argue that threshold concept theory can serve as a guiding principle of pedagogical design. The article draws on findings from a research study conducted over two years by a team consisting of five practitioner researchers in four disciplines and two educational researchers who facilitated the inquiry. The act of constraining the research to thresholds, both in and across different fields, enabled the team to intensify discipline-specific insights and to explore wider cross-disciplinary links and differences. A threshold-constrained focus entailed making specific discipline, knowledge management, and pedagogic practices explicit to ourselves as individual practitioners and comprehensible enough to enable conversations with colleagues from other disciplines. As a result of the research, we argue that threshold-concept thinking enables three processes: usefully unsettling the meaning of being a disciplinary expert; providing a structured framework for both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge and learning; and intensifying insight into curricular content and teaching methods. We also provide an account of how the collaborative action research sparked fresh experiments, searches for new data, and reflections on the impact of threshold concepts on individual disciplines and beyond.

Personalisation possibilities: A plea for subjective transparency through science, action research, and strategic communication

This chapter suggests that, in seeking the status of a conventional science, public relations has suffered collateral damage by foregrounding outmoded approaches, assumptions, and methodologies. In particular, it contends that, because the main impact of science stems from notions of quantitative rigour and impersonal knowledge (often assumed to be overlapping), public relations marginalises issues around personalisation. In this, the field lags behind other disciplines, which from the early 20th century, have adapted to changing protocols around objectivity in post-quantum science and have followed feminism’s lead in accepting the personal as a valid part of scholarship. Indeed, rejecting views of subjectivity as an “impure” feature that must be excluded from pure research, scholars in certain fields (e.g., knowledge management; sociology of science) situate it as central to knowledge construction. Public relations, however, still lacks explicit engagement with such open acknowledgement of personal desires, personal interests, and personal investments, or what might be called subjective transparency. In conclusion, building on recent writings in action research and organisational communication, we propose future directions less inhibited by implicit claims to objectivity, and more open to acknowledging personal interests (including explicit commitments to justice issues declared upfront).

Connecting Hemispheres: A Comparative Review of 21st-Century Organizational Communication in Australia/New Zealand and the United States

As May and Mumby (2005b) usefully remind us: “all theories are partial, perspectival, political, and contested” (p. 278). This essay, which attempts to address the vast array of intellectual territory suggested by its title, and is written from spatially and politically peripheral perspectives, is perhaps more partial and contestable than many others. So let us start with an overreaching claim: Communication with a capital “C” lies at the core of organizational communication scholarship in the United States; communicating with a lower-case “c” is a preferred approach in Australia and New Zealand. While U.S.-based scholars have largely been confined within the oftencontrived disciplinary boundaries of what constitutes organizational communication, Australasian researchers have tended to thrive more on interdisciplinarity. In fact, as Simpson and Zorn (2004) argue, much Australasian work in organizational communication “treats organizational boundaries not as cut and dried structures, but rather as permeable, fluid, and dynamic” (p. 14). This interdisciplinarity allows researchers in the region to align research agendas in communication with research in critical management studies (e.g., Hatcher, 2000; 2001), cultural studies (e.g., Rizzo, 2004), and critical discourse analytic studies (e.g., Henderson, 2003). Between the poles of relative disciplinary insularity and interdisciplinarity, however, are several complex points of similarities, differences, and overlaps which are extremely difficult to place on a continuum. As we observed in the case of public relations (McKie & Munshi, 2004), comparing books published in the U.S. and in Australasia is like comparing pumpkins with kiwifruit—one abundant, large, mainstream, and easily available and the other more fragile, smaller, and much scarcer (especially outside of producer regions). While the publishing world is inundated with organizational communication books from the U.S., only a handful surface from