گسترش ایجاد روابط عمومی
Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Defining politeness
3. Pragmatic failure
4. Politeness and relationship-building
5. Conclusion
References
Abstract
For more than thirty years, relationship-building has been recognized as central to public relations, and yet, exactly how practitioners go about building and maintaining relationships at the micro level has been insufficiently explored in public relations scholarship. Politeness, or a lack thereof, is ever-present in all communicative interactions, affecting the formation and development of relationships. There is therefore value in extending our understanding of how these relationships are impacted by (im)polite communicative acts. Principally, politeness attempts to balance participants’ face needs or needs for self-esteem through employing various strategies, and this article attempts to explicate the theory of politeness for public relations work. It concludes that an understanding of the fundamentals of politeness theory and strategies enables practitioners to be more effective at building relationships within and across communities, avoiding potential pragmatic failure.
Introduction
For more than thirty years, relationship-building has been recognized as crucial to public relations. Scholars such as Zaharna (2016) asserted that in public relations, “‘relations’ is literally the latter half of its name” (p. 1), and, indeed, there has been recognition in scholarship that knowledge of, and skills in, relationship-building are key success indictors for practitioners at all career levels (Global Alliance, 2018; Manley & Valin, 2017). However, a thorough conceptualization of ‘relationships’ in public relations is still missing (Huang & Zhang, 2015), and exactly what relationship-building may look like at a practical interpersonal level in public relations remains largely under-explored. One of the few studies that attempted to shed light on the nature of public relationships at an interpersonal or micro level (cf. Ihlen & Verhoeven, 2015), is a study by Theunissen and Sissons (2018). In their video ethnographic research of the practice of public relations in New Zealand, Theunissen and Sissons identified not only that relationshipbuilding was integral to practicing effectively, but that politeness strategies were explicitly employed to build and maintain these relationships. They subsequently proposed that politeness was integral to the development and maintenance of public relationships. Effective public relations practitioners, they argued, are well-versed in applying these strategies during their interactions with clients, colleagues and journalists. This paper aims to broaden our understanding of public relations work by discussing politeness theory and its applicability to public relationships. It proposes that, contrary to popular perceptions of public relations practitioners being overtly confident and at times arrogant, pompous, even brash (Dennison, 2012), effective practitioners employ ‘softer’ or politer approaches in developing and maintaining relationships.