Mandy Powell

Understanding learning in senior public relations practices : from boundary spanning to boundary dwelling.

Purpose Over the last 50 years the social legitimacy of public relations has improved by standardising and monitoring the education and training of its practitioners. While successful in developing a professional development trajectory from novice to competent practitioner, the profession has struggled to fully understand the development trajectory of its senior public relations practitioners. The diversity of occupational contexts in which public relations is practised, the condition of professional seniority and the knowledge and tools required for working at occupational boundaries is challenging for senior public relations practitioners. It is also a challenge therefore, for the profession to develop and support the learning required for senior practice beyond competency frameworks. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs socio-cultural learning theory and supporting empirical evidence gained in semi-structured interviews with senior practitioners in the field to explore what senior practice entails and how senior professionals learn. Findings Communities of practice is useful for understanding novice practitioner learning but has insufficient explanatory power for understanding senior practitioner learning. There is an urgent need for support for senior public relations learning that moves beyond reified competency frameworks and enables senior practitioners to function autonomously outside the core community of practice. Seniority requires its learners to embrace uncertainty and confront the challenge of creating new knowledges and in the everyday practices of their professional lives. Originality/value “Communities of practice” has been influential in the fields of management and organisations (Bolisani and Scarso, 2014). This paper employs the idea of a learning process that takes place in “constellations of practices” (Wenger, 1998) to offer a view of senior practice as boundary dwelling (Engestrom, 2009) rather than boundary spanning and learning as situated (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the liminal spaces those boundaries provide.

Time to Shine: Scotland's Youth Arts Strategy For Ages 0-25

Creative Scotland’s ten-year plan for youth arts, Time to Shine (2013), was funded to the tune of £5m by the Scottish Government’s Young Scots Fund. When Creative Scotland was formed in 2009, a “Concordant of Intent” was submitted to the new Scottish National Party’s minority government. Produced by four national youth performing arts companies (NYPAC), the National Youth Choir of Scotland, The National Youth Orchestras of Scotland, the Scottish Youth Theatre and YDance (Scottish Youth Dance), the document provided a catalyst for “a national discussion on the youth arts” involving “nearly two thousand stakeholders” (p5). Time to Shine is the product of that national discussion and the object of this review.

‘Nothing Similar in England’: The Scottish Film Council, the Scottish Education Department and the Utility of ‘Educational Film’ to Scotland

Media present and media past in Scotland has been characterised by asymmetrical relations of power in the nexus of the UK policymaking arena (Schlesinger, 2008; Blain, 2009). Following the 1998 devolution settlement, political oversight of media and communications remained with Westminster, but oversight of culture devolved to the Scottish Parliament. This chapter situates itself in the period between the 1930s and 1990s, the period of administrative devolution in Scotland. It will argue that cultural precipitants for political devolution developed in the conjunctions and disjunctions between film and education policy in the 1930s and then again between media and education policy in the 1970s. On both occasions, the argument for an administrative solution to the Scottish problem was felt to be the ‘least revolutionary’ option (Mitchell, 1989). By 1998, however, political devolution was conceded, possibly on the same grounds.