Making history: Reflections on memory and elite interviews in public relations research

Introduction

This article draws on the experience of analysing interviews with prominent practitioners and educators for a larger research project on Australian public relations education history. I foreground methodological issues in interview research, focusing on the challenges associated with memory and remembering, in order to understand the significance for the constitution of public relations historical narratives. I acknowledge calls for a reconceptualisation of Australian public relations history. However, for this reconceptualisation to occur, a more critical and reflexive understanding of the significance of retrospective accounts is required.

The aim of this article is to identify the methodological implications of using personal testimony and narratives for the constitution of public relations history. I argue that the uncritical acceptance of personal and subjective experiences of senior practitioners has led to an uncritical and unproblematic understanding of the field’s development, resulting in narrow understandings of public relations within a dominant narrative of professionalisation. However, drawing on oral history scholarship, I argue that the ways participants retrospectively structure their narratives of the past offer significant insights into the values and processes that inform current understandings of public relations. This article therefore considers the significance of memory and of professional networks for researching public relations history.

This article is structured into five sections. In the first section, I review recent scholarship to suggest that Australian public relations histories promote a dominant narrative of public relations’ evolutionary development towards professional legitimacy. I then discuss one commentator’s ‘eyewitness’ account in order to illustrate challenges for historians who seek to use ‘remembered’ personal experiences. In the third section, I introduce the concepts of memory and retrospectivity, drawing primarily on oral history scholarship to understand the significance for public relations historiography. I also consider the significance of snowball sampling and elite interview participants. In the fourth section, I use extracts from my interview research to illustrate the dominance of particular narratives and their influence on how participants remember their experiences. Finally, I discuss the implications for historical research in public relations.

Researching public relations history

Public relations history tends to be presented somewhat uncritically as a linear, progressive narrative of development, or, in the words of Lamme and Russell (2010): as ‘a progressive evolution from unsophisticated and unethical earlier roots to planned, strategic, and ethical campaigns of the current day’ (p. 281). For example, the establishment of a professional institute, the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) following World War II is considered significant in textbook histories and in practitioner accounts in the transformation of the Australian public relations industry from primarily a publicity function to a profession (see, for instance, Flower, 2007; Harrison, 2011; Zawawi, 2009). While scholars call for a reconceptualisation of such historical narratives (Lamme and Russell, 2010; L’Etang, 2008b; Macnamara and Crawford, 2010), a more critical and reflexive approach to the use of personal accounts in public relations history research is required for this to occur.

The history of public relations in Australia has largely been defined through information in textbooks (see, for example, Harrison, 2011; Potts, 1976; Quarles and Rowlings, 1993; Tymson et al., 2008; Zawawi, 2009) and in memoirs and speeches (Flower, 2007; Potts, 2008; Turnbull, 2010) or published interviews and profiles of ‘pioneer’ practitioners (Morath, 2008; Sheehan, 2010). In many ways, this history is a history of PRIA and its prominent members. Clicking on the PRIA website’s ‘history’ tab (see http://www.pria.com.au) offers a record of high-profile contributors who shaped the field in the post-war years with links to biographies for Fellows, the most senior invitation-only membership category, past presidents, and ‘in honour’ (i.e. obituaries for prominent figures associated with the professional association, including founding members). Interviews with prominent practitioners offer engaging insights into their experiences. Although Morath (2008) acknowledges she ‘was not trying to record the history of public relations in Australia’, in the absence of other historical evidence, her book Pride and Prejudice: Conversations with Australia’s Public Relations Legends offers the ‘stories’ of prominent practitioners that ‘colour our understanding of how public relations grew up in Australia’ (p. 20). Morath (2008) acknowledges her deference to interviewees when she describes her experiences of writing the book: ‘Interviewing some of the early Australian PR legends and some latter-day industry leaders was, for me, like sitting down with rock stars’ (p. xxxiii). But, Atkinson and Silverman (1997) warn of ‘an untheorized and uncritical endorsement of personal narratives’ (p. 322). Avoiding this danger demands considerable reflexivity on the part of the researcher, particularly around the highly subjective processes of interviewing and historical interpretation.

Some scholars have called for Australian public relations history to be reconceptualised, arguing it is incorrect to attribute the origin of public relations to war-time public information campaigns and the post-war period (Crawford and Macnamara, 2012, 2014; Macnamara and Crawford, 2010; Sheehan, 2007). These scholars suggest that such understandings are based on a narrow conceptualisation of public relations and argue that authors have focused primarily on public relations consultants and ignored other public relations activity (Sheehan, 2007) or relied uncritically on ‘the subjective experiences of practitioners’ (Crawford and Macnamara, 2012: 45). The dominance of practitioner perspectives contributes to a lack of consideration of the broader social context for the development of public relations, by focusing instead on individual achievement (L’Etang, 2008b). The result is a history of public relations that is framed within a professional narrative focusing on its development towards professional status and emphasising its contributions to business and corporate sectors and its status as a strategic management function. There is a need, therefore, to better understand the influence of this professional discourse on how practitioners remember and narrate their experiences in the public relations industry in interviews, in memoirs and in other personal narratives. Given the absence of more critical histories, many of these personal accounts are perceived to offer authentic insights into the development of public relations in Australia.

‘I remember it well’: Eyewitness accounts and personal testimony

Prominent Australian practitioner and industry commentator, Dennis Rutzou (2012), offers in his blog an ‘eyewitness account’, stating that 2012 was the 40th anniversary of public relations education in Australia:

The year was 1972 and I remember it well as I was a young, and probably brash, President of the Public Relations Institute of Australia (Victoria). There were many discussions about the need for graduates to work within the industry and learn how it all works rather than be captives of academia … David Potts was the driving force as the first Senior Lecturer in PR Studies at the then Mitchell College, Bathurst and we were also guided by his experiences from his time at San Jose University in California.

In fact, Potts did not visit an American university until much later and there is some confusion around the date of the first public relations course in an Australian university. It is also unlikely that the Mitchell College of Advanced Education course was the ‘first’ course, although it is frequently attributed as such. For example, scholars state the first Australian university course was a Diploma of Arts (Public Relations) at Mitchell College of Advanced Education (now Charles Sturt University (CSU)) and that it was offered in 1969 (Australia and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), n.d.; Hatherell and Bartlett, 2006; Zawawi, 2009), 1970 (Quarles, 1993; Quarles and Rowlings, 1993) or 1971 (Gleeson, 2012; Starck, 1999). Much of this information is based on the testimony of David Potts, who developed the Mitchell College course. Even Potts acknowledges in various interviews that the course was offered ‘around 1970’ and alludes that it may have been contemporaneous with a Queensland Institute of Technology course (Potts, 2008; Starck, 1999). Gleeson (2012), drawing on PRIA records, asserts the course commenced in 1971. The CSU archivist identifies that the first record of Diploma of Arts (Public Relations) graduates is in 1974, suggesting that the 3-year diploma course commenced in 1971, and that the Diploma became a Bachelor-level course in 1974 (P. O’Donnell, 10 September 2012, personal communication). Potts (1976) states that the first students graduated at the end of 1973 (supporting a commencement year of 1971), but, confusingly, states in the same text that the students began in 1970. On the balance of available evidence, it is likely that the Mitchell College course was first offered at diploma level in 1971.

However, it is not simply the date of the Mitchell College course in question. Gleeson (2014) found that the public relations industry and the professional association were interested in university-level public relations education as early as the 1950s. Gleeson’s investigation of South Australian and Victorian PRIA state council archives confirms that widely accepted historical narratives that identify the Mitchell College diploma as the first course in higher education are inaccurate. Gleeson (2014) identifies a number of courses that were established earlier than 1971, including a 3-year, part-time certificate course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s (RMIT) School of Management, introduced in 1964, and a 3-year diploma course at the South Australian Institute of Technology, introduced in 1967. ¹ The RMIT course, in part modelled on one offered at the Boston College’s School of Communication, was upgraded to an Associate Diploma in Management (Public Relations) in 1967 (Gleeson, 2014). The existence of these courses points to an earlier history of Australian public relations education than is usually acknowledged in the literature. The 40th anniversary of public relations education identified by Rutzou is therefore not confirmed by other sources of evidence. Yet, the claim that Mitchell College offered the first tertiary course in public relations in Australia is widely accepted. In the following section, I consider the significance of memory for personal narratives and for conceptualisations of both public relations and public relations history.

On memory and remembering

Memory is problematic for historians as it is widely recognised as unreliable and highly subjective. In contrast, historians traditionally rely on what they see as more objective sources of evidence (although the objectivity, and indeed stability, of archival collections, as one example, is increasingly challenged (see Cook, 2001; King, 2012; Steedman, 2002)). Davis and Starn (1989) point to the ‘interdependence’ of memory and history and argue that the dynamic interaction between, and interpretation of, ‘what actually happened and received narratives about the past’ can be significant (p. 5). The public relations historian, then, needs to understand the significance of personal testimonies, be they written memoirs or information obtained through interviews, for historical understanding, given the prominence of practitioner accounts in Australian history. In addition, there are challenges to researching a field that struggles for professional legitimacy as histories promote an ideal conceptualisation of public relations that both justify and defend the industry (L’Etang, 2008b).

Personal narratives can be significant for historical research as long as they are recognised as retrospective and public relations historians understand how memory works. There is no doubt that personal accounts and memoirs potentially offer ‘rich and beguiling historical evidence’, but, as my earlier example illustrates, they cannot be relied upon to provide ‘a direct, unmediated and uncomplicated access to the past’ (Thomson, 2012: 101, 102). That is, the historian must recognise that such accounts offer ‘a constructed and selective representation of experience’ (Thomson, 2012: 102). Furthermore, oral historians are aware of the danger of ‘collapsing into nostalgia with recollections treated as self-evident, empirical truths rather than socially constructed representations of the past that were being made in the present’ (Smith, 2011: 441). Thomson (2011), however, argues that interviews encourage ‘active remembering and meaning-making’ (p. 88) and – precisely because of their subjectivity – offer important insights into ‘the relationships between past and present, between memory and personal identity, and between individual and collective memory’ (Thomson, 2007: 54). The act of remembering ‘make[s] new sense of the past’, and ‘an event becomes a remembered and meaningful experience through narrative’ (Thomson, 2012: 103). Therefore, the stated and retrospective ordering of participant experiences can contribute alternative perspectives to widely accepted historical narratives. That is, the ways participants construct a narrative that mediates between the past and their present understandings can offer useful insights.

While many public relations scholars recognise the impact of the dominant Grunigian paradigm on theoretical developments, framing mainstream understandings and concepts and structuring public relations knowledge (see, for example, L’Etang, 2008a; McKie and Munshi, 2007), there is less recognition of how this paradigm may influence the ways in which individual practitioners remember their experiences. In her interview-based research with Australian practitioners, Byrne (2007) revealed the profound influence of the dominant paradigm and found that ‘respondent definitions are normative and do not describe public relations as per their personal experiences and beliefs’ and concluded that the industry’s preoccupation with professional status resulted in ‘this normative, two-way symmetrical stance’ (p. 32). Yet, according to oral historians, it is precisely this kind of mediation between the past and present that is significant. Experiences become meaningful through the act of remembering. The danger for the public relations historian is the failure to recognise the meaning making that occurs through this mediation between past and present and the ways in which other stories and discourses influence the ways individuals recall their experiences. Avoiding this danger demands considerable reflexivity on the part of the researcher.

The motivations of participants in historical research are also significant. Some participants wish to have their achievements recognised while others choose to share their experiences with researchers anonymously. The first participant in my research was David Potts, who suggested to PRIA someone ‘write a history of PR Education in Australia’ (J. Kenny, 10 May 2010, personal correspondence). I relied on snowballing to recruit the next 10 participants. I was referred to participants who held senior roles in PRIA at state or national level, the majority of whom were Fellows. Scholars recognise that early participants act as gatekeepers in that they do not refer participants from outside their network and are likely to refer participants who confirm their accounts (Browne, 2005). Furthermore, critical scholars acknowledge that ‘professions form a powerful, self-interested and often intersecting elite’ (L’Etang, 2004: 17). L’Etang (2008b) warns of the danger of conducting ‘elite’ interviews, noting that prominent practitioners are ‘likely to be masters and mistresses of impression management and also keen to leave their mark on the historical records’ (p. 324). It is widely recognised among political scholars that ‘elites’ highlight, and possibly exaggerate, the significance of their role in historical events in interviews (Berry, 2002; Kezar, 2003; Mikecz, 2012; Tansey, 2007). Public relations scholars, for example, point to inconsistencies in Asher Joel’s claim to be the first public relations consultant in Australia (Crawford and Macnamara, 2014) and Edward Bernays’ ‘self-promotion, evident in his account of how Creel’s US Committee on public information almost won the First World War single-handedly with Bernays playing an inspired role’ (McKie and Munshi, 2007: 123). Indeed, one researcher who interviewed Bernays later wrote that the ‘entire visit had been orchestrated by a virtuoso’ (Ewen, 1996: 17).

The definition of an elite interview participant is not precise, but it can be used to refer to anyone who is an expert in their field (Leech, 2002) and ‘hold[s] social networks, social capital and strategic positions within social structures because they are better able to exert influence’ (Harvey, 2011: 433). However, elite interviews differ from other interviews for a number of reasons. They can be used to confirm information from other sources, to obtain new information in relation to the values and beliefs of a set of people, and to help reconstruct events by gaining insights into processes and deliberations, which may not be readily obtained from primary sources and archival documents (Tansey, 2007). Typically, elite interview participants present their account and the data they perceive as relevant (Kezar, 2003), may be prone to exaggerating their role and influence on historical events (Berry, 2002), and control access to information (Mikecz, 2012). Their accounts may nevertheless offer valuable information, but the researcher should be wary of simply accepting this information at face value and instead seek to understand the significance of narrative accounts and the retrospective ordering of experiences and information. Although these challenges apply to all interview participants, they are exaggerated with elite participants. In the following section, I offer three examples to illustrate the ways in which I think the elite status and intersecting professional networks of participants in my research influenced their remembered experiences in interviews.

Remembering through interviews

From 2010 to 2012, I interviewed senior practitioners and educators regarding their personal experiences in the public relations industry and in public relations education in Australia. My university granted ethics approval for this research, and I reported the findings in this journal (Fitch, 2014). Participants acknowledged the fallibility of their memories in terms of dates, names and even the sequence of events. Although I identified that the majority of participants, as senior PRIA members, understood their experiences within the framework of the growing professionalism of the industry (Fitch, 2014), in this article I explore how and why this particular understanding proved to be so prominent in participants’ narratives recounting their personal experiences. I develop the discussion regarding the way interview participants offer ‘actively structured narratives’ of their remembered experiences (Silverman, 2010: 45). I discuss in detail extracts from the transcript from the first participant in this study, David Potts, as I think they illustrate some important challenges of remembering for interview research and the ways in which they influenced this study. This discussion is not designed to undermine Potts’ considerable achievements but to illustrate the implications for the narratives Potts and other participants constructed, and in doing so, framed their understanding of public relations education and their own experiences in particular ways.

First, I use extracts from my interview with Potts to illustrate how elite participants understand the development of public relations, their role in this development, and the implications for the narrative they construct. Potts recalls his longstanding involvement with the public relations industry and with public relations education, from joining Eric White Associates, ‘the leading public relations company’ in late 1961; ‘design[ing] the courses in both PR and journalism’ at Mitchell College ‘about 1970’; editing ‘the first real Australian PR book’; ‘help[ing] appoint the first PR lecturer at the Sydney Institute of Technology’ and in response to concerns that ‘people could enter the profession and join PRIA, without any formal qualification … rais[ing] the bar in terms of the quality of practice and the knowledge and so on’. Indeed, Potts’ understanding of the development of public relations, a development of which he has arguably been at the centre, confirms an ongoing tension between ‘where we started from – an outgrowth of publicity’ and ‘true public relations – the two-way process of communication and influencing the way in which organisations behave’. The progressive paradigm may be due to the influence of US public relations scholarship and education as Potts acknowledged a significant debt to American textbooks and curricula. What is interesting about Potts’, and indeed many participants’, perceptions of both their experiences and the development of Australian public relations is the profound influence of normative, two-way symmetrical approaches to understanding public relations, confirming Byrne’s (2007) findings. Participants perceive the history of public relations in Australia as a steady and progressive development towards an ethical profession and a strategic management function.

Second, on reading the transcript of Potts’ interview, conducted in 2010, I am struck by how similar his account is to other published material, such as a speech he gave to the PRIA College of Fellows (Potts, 2008), an interview reported in Starck’s (1999) thesis, and an interview published in Morath (2008). I offer here some specific examples, relating to Potts’ experience of developing the communications course at Mitchell College:

I based the course on my expectations as an employer … what I would want people to be able to do immediately when they came out. (Potts, as cited in Starck, 1999: 37)

I set my benchmark around what I would expect someone to be able to perform if they worked for me in practice. (Potts, 2008: 3)

There was no model in Australia for it so I based it on what I would expect a potential employee to be able to do. (Potts, as cited in Morath, 2008: 52)

I very much drew on my experience in the workplace … I used to complain as an employer that I couldn’t get people who were qualified. (Potts, 2010, interview transcript)

The similarity in Potts’ various accounts confirms L’Etang’s (2008b) remarks on the challenges of interviewing communication professionals; certainly, Potts stayed ‘on message’, to use a public relations term. I am not suggesting that these memories are ‘wrong’ but rather that researchers need to adopt a critical approach to interviews with elite participants and recognise the significance of what the participant perceives as relevant (Kezar, 2003). Potts had a clear and indeed fixed understanding of the history of public relations education in Australia and his role in its development. To offer another example, Potts disagreed with the relevance of my question regarding contemporaneous marketing courses in higher education and suggested it was irrelevant for understanding public relations education, confirming Kezar’s (2003) assertion that elite participants are likely to correct interviewers’ understandings. Furthermore, it is widely recognised in psychological literature that the retelling of stories leads to ‘stereotyped and stable memories’, that is, the stories stabilise and are even frozen in time (Redman, 2010: 189). Rather than revealing unique insights, Potts therefore shared in the interview a familiar narrative. I should acknowledge that I found similar instances occurring with other participants, where I could access published accounts of their experiences. For example, the transcript of Kevin Smith’s interview offers very similar information and wording to both the profile provided by the author and another produced for the occasion of a testimonial lunch where Smith was awarded a PRIA Life Fellowship (PRIA, 2007).

Finally, Potts’ experiences differ from other participants’, because of his ‘pioneer’ status and his significant involvement in establishing greater regulation of public relations activity through the professional association. I therefore consider the impact on this study of Potts as the first participant, and note that other participants frequently referred to Potts in discussions around the themes of education and professionalisation. Given the dominance of Potts’ perspective – reproduced in PRIA histories, textbooks and in the recollections of others – it is worth reflecting on the significance for the findings. Potts was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2012 for his service to the public relations profession; his contributions span more than 50 years (PRIA, 2012). According to the citation for this award, Potts taught at Mitchell College in the 1970s and 1980s; Ku-ring-gai College of Advanced Education (1988–1989); and CSU (1997–2004) and was instrumental in establishing many PRIA strategies aimed at raising the professional standing of the field (PRIA, 2012). Potts was the PRIA’s National Examiner for both practitioner accreditation examinations (introduced in 1986) and later, senior professional assessments, introduced in 1990 (Oral Examination, 1990).

In the context of discussions about the public relations industry, its professional status, and education, 6 of the 14 participants referred to Potts unprompted, informing me, ‘David Potts would know a lot about it … he used to do the examinations’ (Smith); ‘you should talk to David Potts, because he would have a lot better memory in all this than I would’ (Tymson); ‘As state president … I brought David Potts in for education’ (Anderson); ‘[Potts] became our first professor and at that time he ran the only course in Australia’; and they chose textbooks for the courses they taught ‘because I knew David Potts had used that as well as his own textbook’ (Smith). B. Mackey described the significant role played by Potts in establishing professional structures in the industry, through the development of public relations education and more rigorous membership criteria including practitioners’ examinations: ‘But Pottsie was a god, he really worked at it and he probably knew more about it at the start than anybody else and was more deeply committed’. Another participant described Potts’ role in raising professional standards as ‘absolutely critical’ (Participant 10). Smith even responded to the summary feedback provided to participants by asking if I had interviewed David Potts for this study. Potts was the reference point for public relations education and for the professional status of the industry for these participants.

It is important to note that this referencing of Potts highlights his achievements within PRIA, and also the pivotal role Potts played in participants’ socially constructed representations of the past. That is, for many participants, the recent historical development of public relations in Australia is largely a narrative of Potts’ work, not just as an educator but in terms of introducing greater regulatory structures aimed at establishing the field’s professional status. This observation may be in part an effect of Potts being the first participant in this study, and the use of snowball sampling led to referral within a social network where subsequent participants are likely to confirm the achievements of the referring participants (Browne, 2005). However, it also points to the dominance of the narrative created by Potts. The extensive involvement of Potts in the development of Australian public relations, through PRIA and through higher education, is well documented. The significance is that Potts’ narrative constrains the narratives provided by other participants, who are likely to accept and/or adopt Potts’ understanding of the development of public relations in Australia and indeed reconstruct their memories through Potts’ lens, effectively shutting down alternative perspectives and understandings.

Implications for public relations research

This article attempted to develop a nuanced understanding of how participants remember and recreate their own experiences through more dominant narratives and frames, and the significance for historical research in public relations. At face value, participants offered strong ‘evidence’ of the development of public relations from a publicity function to a profession. However, in my discussion of memory, oral history and elite interviews, I acknowledged the significance of retrospectivity and ‘insider’ social networks in participant accounts. The profound influence of the dominant paradigm, which suggests a historical and progressive evolution for public relations from asymmetrical, unethical practice to ethical communication based on two-way symmetry between an organisation and its publics, has led to ‘eyewitness’ histories of public relations that tell the same story. The challenge for the researcher, therefore, is to recognise that the interview does not offer an objective and authentic rendering of history, but may still offer rich and valuable insights and perspectives. Indeed, the positioning of public relations within a professional discourse and the attempt to establish public relations as a unique management function offer important insights into contemporary understandings.

These reflections contribute to the development of critical insights around the significance of particular methodologies for historical research into the development of public relations in a national context. I noted that the use of snowball sampling resulted in referral to elite participants within the small network of the senior ranks of PRIA. That is, the majority of participants were members of an organisation whose mission was to establish public relations as a profession. The dominance of Potts, for instance, as PRIA’s National Examiner, as pioneer public relations educator and as senior PRIA member, is revealed in the retrospective accounts offered by other participants. Potts played a significant role in establishing professional structures in Australia, and his perspective significantly informed the perspectives of others. As such, it is not surprising that the dominant understanding of public relations education that emerged constructs its role in developing the professional legitimacy of the public relations industry. That is, the dominance of Potts’ perspective appears to constrain other narratives of the development of public relations education and indeed Australian public relations history. For example, the broader social context – such as the massification and marketisation of Australian higher education and the corresponding growth in communication and media studies – is ignored in accounts of the development of public relations education.

Conclusion

This study reflects on the constitution of public relations history through research interviews with prominent practitioners and educators and, more broadly, with other personal accounts of practitioner experiences. It offers a number of theoretical insights into public relations historical research. The first insight confirms that public relations historians cannot assume that the perceptions and memories of prominent individuals offer an ‘authentic’ and unproblematic history. The public relations historian, therefore, needs to understand personal testimonies, be they memoirs or interviews, within their historical context through triangulation with archives and other evidentiary sources (Thomson, 2012). The second insight highlights the subjective nature of memory, suggesting that although interviews may not offer hard evidence, the ways interview participants narrate their experiences are significant and offer valuable insights. A related point, then, and the third insight, is the need for the researcher to adopt a critical approach to avoid constructing an evolutionary history of public relations. The final insight demands that researchers carefully consider the status and selection of interview participants and recognise the limitations of these choices. Unlike many oral history projects, my study did not investigate a marginalised group but rather high-profile participants whose perspectives were mediated by their professional success and their elite status within the professional association. Research which identifies public relations ‘pioneers’ and relies on interviews with senior practitioners who strongly identify with the professional project therefore requires careful interpretation.

Interviews and personal accounts can offer rich insights, but only if a critical stance and authorial reflexivity are adopted. The perceptions reported by participants in my research reinforce the need for a critical approach, particularly in relation to ‘eyewitness’ accounts, and for scholars to interrogate the constitution of public relations history. To date, Australian public relations histories, in their reliance and uncritical acceptance of practitioner experiences, are problematic in their focus on practitioner perspectives framed within a professional discourse. The ways in which participants remember and reconstruct their memories and perceptions of public relations education are significant, as they offer evidence of the discourses, which informed – and, I argue, continue to inform – public relations in Australia. These findings contribute to global scholarship on public relations historiography in that they highlight the significance of personal accounts of prominent practitioners for understanding public relations history.