Book Review: Media and Public Relations Research in Post-Socialist Societies,by Maureen C. Minielli,Marta N. Lukacovic,Sergei A. Samoilenko,Michael R. Finch,& Deborrah Uecker (Eds.)

Media and Public Relations Research in Post-Socialist Societies focuses on the birth, development, and current expansion of communication scholarship in post-socialist regions. The book is edited by several international scholars from an American-based scholarly association, namely, the Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER). This basically American perspective explains why the book is strongly related to American research traditions, even as the chapters themselves are written by Eastern European scholars. In fact, the editors clearly state in the introduction that while the chapters focus on regional communication scholarship, they analyze and interpret local characteristics within a framework of American mainstream communication studies. This feature of the book’s conception represents a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because the international readership can easily connect the presented scholarship to the international research agenda. But it is a weakness because most chapters fail to present what is unique in Eastern European communication research in terms of local theories, conceptualizations, and research agendas.

The volume consists of three, loosely interconnected parts. Part I, the longest of the book, contains five chapters with a focus on either public relations or political communication. Beyond offering an historical overview of the development of these disciplines, these chapters discuss the social recognition of communication studies, describe the professionalization of related disciplines, and provide a detailed analysis of communication education. These chapters also analyze how the evolution of communication studies relates to the development of the changing industrial environment that post-socialist countries have experienced over the last two decades. Most chapters in Part I directly address the question of the development of public space in the region, thus broadly contributing to the discussion of how communication practices shape liberal democracies.

The four chapters that form Part II focus on the state of affairs in mass media industries and academia. Three of the four related chapters focus on Russia. Chapter 7 analyzes the impact of political, legal, and economic factors on media trends emerging during the Putin era; Chapter 8 investigates the influence of Russian-speaking media on the Kyrgyz press; and Chapter 9 focuses on Russian media education. In addition to these three chapters, Chapter 6 presents an in-depth analysis of Hungarian communication studies, including the history of its academic development and the international contribution of Hungarian communication scholars.

The last part of the book presents three chapters with different foci that range from linguistics to public service broadcasting and social media. While the other parts are mainly historical and theoretical, this part offers empirical analyses. In different ways, all three chapters are connected to new media research, offering important insights on how post-socialist audiences relate to and use social media, how computer-mediated communication is conceptualized and analyzed in the region, and how user-generated media content impacts political discourse. In the conclusion, the editors attempt to synthesize overarching points that emerge across the chapters and to establish a narrative that would explain the regional features of communication scholarship.

The editors have made efforts to cover a wide variety of topics within post-socialist communication research. However, this mission is impossible, and the reader might have a sense of disappointment when considering that both the representation of related countries and the discussion of potential topics are fragmented. While the chapters in themselves are indisputably of a high standard, the volume in its entirety lacks a clear focus, and it is hard to understand how these 12 chapters come together in a coherent whole.

Several factors account for this fragmentation. First, the geopolitical focus of the book is both confusing and overly broad. The editors and authors refer to the region with different terms that correspond to different geopolitical locations: Eastern Europe, Central Asia, East-Central Europe, Eurasia, and so on. This vagueness makes it impossible to focus on a specific location because these regions consist of more than 30 countries with extraordinarily different cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds. The editors would have done better focusing on a clearly delimited region and providing a more comprehensive representation. Currently, the volume presents an unbalanced picture with a strong Russian emphasis while it misses out on very important countries such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, or the Czech Republic. Of course, the Russian (Soviet) impact on the region is very important. However, this aspect could have been conveyed through the description of individual countries, rather than presenting several chapters with a direct Russian focus.

In addition, the reader can hardly identify a common rule in terms of chapter length, structure, and methodological approach. Some chapters are almost 50 pages long, while others barely fill 10 pages, leaving the reader to wonder whether there were editorial guidelines applicable to the manuscripts. Some writings are chapter-like, making clear relevance to the aims of the edited volume. Yet there are other pieces, especially in Part III, that do not seem directly related to the monograph in that they are structured like journal articles with the usual introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections and an empirical analysis with a narrow focus.

Finally (and perhaps because the book was exclusively edited by, in terms of affiliation, American scholars), the American perspective of communication studies is conceived as normative. This position is reflected in both the approaches and the topics of the chapters. Thus, I fully agree with Grbeša and Bebić in their chapter “Political Communication in Croatia” when they state that their recommendations for future studies is less replication and more imagination.