Challenging Aspects

Challenging aspects When we heard the word “persuasion,” most of the times we see people associating it with a negative connotation. However, this word may have more positive meaning than we might think. Like every choice we make in our lives, persuasion also involves pros and cons. Thus, it is people’s decision, especially in the case of Public Relations practice, to make persuasion worth for good. Relationships are always based on persuasion. That is, whenever is necessary to make someone understand one’s point of view, the discourse needs to be shaped, by choosing the right words and/or the right symbols, then, from this point persuasion is already happening. For this reason, the way this intrinsic characteristic of social behavior is used by organizations and Public Relations practitioners as one some important factors that determine if organizations and PR professionals have a long or short life in the marketplace. The more Public Relations’ place in society has been clarified trough theoretical and practical research, the more pluralistic this profession is presented. It is agreeable, for example, that the two-way symmetrical model of PR is not the model that would describe completely what covers PR function (4-5). In other words, PR practice is not just about an opened channel through which publics interests are made known to organizations and vice-versa. It is more than that. According to 4-5, PR practice is complex since it depends of a variety of elements – “antecedent conditions, current pressures and opportunities,” for instance – to legitimate its function among different publics. Hence the Contingency Theory has been creating a more complicated scenario to try to describe what PR practice stands for. As the complexity increases, the external public perception about an organization and a Public Relations practitioner becomes a challenging aspect. In order to build more reliable persuasive tactics of interaction, it is necessary for an