History Of Public Relations

The different definitions provided so far show the complexity and difficulty of the term. Everyone seems to believe that public relations is something similar and still different.

The changing emphasizes shown above and throughout history illustrate that public relations is an evolving profession and like the term itself, is being influenced by different factors around the world. Questionable is also the start of the profession. While most scholars argue that public relations as a profession finds it origins in the late 19th century or the early 20th century, others argue that forms of public relations go back to the beginning of mankind and have been influenced by different factors. (Tench and Yeomans, 2017) The origins of public relations are important for the development of public relations theory, but like the definition, there is no unifying public relations theory and still public relations theory are vital for practitioners since they help form and analyse their work.

As mentioned in chapter 8 of Tench and Yeomans edited book “Exploring Public Relations”: “Public Relations is multifaceted and can be interpreted through a number of relevant theoretical perspectives”.

It is important to understand not only

But only a few scholars have studied the measureable function of relationships. Broom, Casey and Ritchey (1997) have analyse relationships with public relations and have stated that a relationship exists when “parties have perceptions and expectations of each other”. Further they argued that relationships will eventually lead to a dependency between the parties. Similar to that, the IPR understood their relationship as part of maintaining goodwill and understanding between an organization and its publics. The given definition slightly agrees with the statement from Broom, Casey and