Book review

Kōtuitui

New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online

Book review

The Handbook of Public Affairs edited by Phil Harris and Craig Fleisher. Sage Publications, London. 2005. 616 p. NZ$329.99 (hardback) ISBN 0761943935.

The publication of a Sage Handbook often marks a significant stage in the development of a discipline. This particular one is clearly signalled as such by a selection of quotes, by no less than five writers, on the back of the dust jacket. The claims, and the authority of those making them, offer a useful guide to the strengths and weaknesses of this volume. For a start, four out of the five stress themselves as professionals rather than academics. One, by Brian Hawkinson, Director, Center for Public Affairs Management/Public Affairs Council, Washington, DC, USA, asserts:

“Excelling in the practice of corporate public affairs in the twenty-first century will necessitate bringing together two competencies: possessing a solid professional foundation based on time-tested principles, and having the ability to reach beyond the basics by adapting the best current thinking, practices, and models available. Professionals can enhance both competencies by reading The Handbook of Public Affairs.”

Hawkinson’s promotional blurb emphasises the Handbook’s usefulness to practitioners and underpins utility through the language of competencies.

His emphasis is echoed in three other practitioner tributes on the dust jacket. The first, by Randall Pearce, General Manager, Ipsos Mackay Public Affairs, Sydney, Australia, similarly sees the Handbook as “a text that will surely support the development of new programmes and new careers for the public affairs practitioners of tomorrow”. The second, by Tom Spencer, Executive Director, European Centre for Public Affairs, predicts “the next generation of public affairs practitioners” looking back to the start of the 21st century “will recognise The Handbook of Public Affairs as the cornerstone text on which global practice came to be based”, while the third, by Chris Benedetti, President, Public Affairs Association of Canada, offers a more short-term forecast that as “more and more people in business, government, NGO and not-for-profit sectors are seeking out the services of public affairs practitioners, this handbook will help readers gain a better appreciation of strategies and tactics that comprise successful public affairs campaigns”.

All this emphasis on functionality for the practice sounds alarm bells for the scholarly status of public affairs. These are not quietened in the one blurb by an acknowledged academic, Professor Andrew Lock, Dean, Leeds University Business School. In calling the Handbook “a landmark development … [that] offers a comprehensive overview of the field for the first time and is an essential reference book to underpin practice, teaching and research in the discipline”, Lock, despite his academic credentials, also positions practice before teaching and research.

This is problematic in relation to a handbook said to landmark the field. Moreover, the editors themselves, Phil Harris and Craig Fleisher, while clearly two of the best-qualified people to put together such a volume, seem to be somewhat unsure about the status of public affairs. Their introduction is titled “The Development of a Sub-discipline and Major Area of Research”, but the opening sentence calls it “this rapidly growing and strategically important management discipline” and the second sentence refers to public affairs as “this rapidly growing area of strategic management”. If it is a sub-discipline then the lineage from its parent disciplines should be more clearly charted. Notably absent from most of the book is public relations, which is odd since both editors have publications in the area and see fit to print Patrick Shaw’s chapter on “The Human Resource Dimension of Public Affairs”, which uses public affairs and public relations practitioners as almost interchangeable; in addition to Leder, Lomba, and Scheucher’s chapter on “Emerging Markets: Public Affairs in Germany and Austria”, which uses public relations data to account for public affairs employment, and Duane Windsor’s genealogical chapter on “‘Theories’ and Theoretical Roots of Public Affairs”, which explicitly assigns origins in an academic family featuring political science and public relations. However, Harris and Fleisher seem keener to emphasise a legacy from business and strategy rather than political communication, political science, and public relations. The outcome is a relatively thin theoretical superstructure for the emerging (sub)discipline.

The book’s contents further reflect the emphasis on the practical rather than the scholarly. Of the four sections amounting to around 560 pages, around 100 pages are devoted to “The Environments of Public Affairs”; and almost 300 pages, or over 50% of the volume, to the two middle sections on the “how to” of “Tools, Techniques and Organizing” and “Case Studies”. Only after so much space describing contexts, applications, and cases, do the remaining 165 or so pages (or around 30%) cover scholarship, theory, and education.

For Harris and Fleisher, this business-oriented sense of practicality can sometimes stretch credibility. They may casually assert that the “need to lobby and influence government policy as the world internationalises is increasing rather than decreasing” (p. xxxvi) with some credibility, but that does not hold when the same sentence’s conclusion, even in the wake of the Enron-induced Sarbanes-Oxley Act, couples the word “invariably” with “ethical”: “lobbying is becoming a highly professionalized, invariably ethical, and increasingly regulated part of business strategy” (p. xxxvi). A similar sense of excessive corporate friendliness seems to lie behind one of their core reasons for writing the Handbook, namely, that the “growth of international and transnational government is generating substantial legislation affecting businesses, for example on the environment” (p. xxxiv). The Handbook has no space for critical considerations, such as how global warming has been accelerated by the success of the global warming denial industry and its lobbyists.

Overall, however, even if their aspiration to act “as the core reference point … for Europe, North America, and the wider world” is stronger in Australia, Austria, Britain, and Canada than New Zealand and the new Europe, let alone South America and Africa, Harris and Fleisher do a competent job of introducing their fledgling area across national borders, inside the edges of academic studies, and into professional studies.

DAVID MCKIE

University of Waikato

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