Public Reation Review

 

Public Relations Review 50 (2024) 102428

 

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

 

Public Relations Review

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubrev

 

Capability gap in relation to public relations´strategic issues in

Latin America

Gabriel Sadi a, Alejandro Álvarez-Nobell b, *

a

b

 

University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Universidad de Málaga, Spain

 

A R T I C L E I N F O

 

A B S T R A C T

 

Keywords:

Public relations

Capabilities

Strategic issues

Latin America

The Caribbean

 

This study explores an area that has not been widely researched in the Latin American and Caribbean region: the

identification of a capability gap in relation to key strategic public relations and communication management

issues and activities. To this end, this article presents findings and analysis from a survey conducted in 20 Latin

American and Caribbean countries in 2020. The existence of a capability gap in relation to key issues and ac­

tivities in public relations and communication management is confirmed, which represents a challenge for the

development of the public relations field as well as for higher education institutions across the region.

 

1. Introduction

The public relations field has shown an interest in exploring pro­

fessional roles and competencies for several decades now. This is evi­

denced by pioneering studies such as Broom and Smith (1979) and

Broom and Dozier (1986), both focused on consultancy in the United

States, as well as Gregory (2008), which outlined 10 key competencies in

the British public and private sectors.

Despite those initiatives, the field "has scarcely addressed a complex

framework of competencies" (Moreno et al., 2017, p. 112) and it is only

in the last decade that it has begun to receive special and growing

consideration in both academia and professional associations.

In this regard, the two-year European Communication Professional

Skills and Innovation Programme (ECOPSI) combined data from the

European Communication Monitor (ECM), a longitudinal study in over

40 countries, with focus groups and interviews with professionals from

seven European countries (Tench et al., 2013). Its main contribution was

the proposal of the COMPAS (Counselling, Organising/Executing,

Managing, Performing/creating, Analysing/Interpreting, and Suppor­

ting/Guiding) competence model in an attempt "to develop an under­

standing of the competencies held by senior communications

practitioners and the contributing knowledge, skills and personal attri­

butes that are relevant to their role and that of future managers in a

similar role" (Tench et al., 2013, p. 7).

More recently, the Global Alliance for Public Relations and

 

Communication Management (a worldwide confederation of profes­

sional associations in public relations and communication management)

commissioned two research initiatives related to competencies: the

Global Body of Knowledge (GBOK) and the Global Capability Frame­

work (GCF), respectively. Both research initiatives linked themselves to

the somewhat novel concept of capabilities within the public relations

field. Between 2014 and 2016, the GBOK project analysed 31 academic

sources and competency frameworks in various countries, and produced

a list describing different KSABs (knowledge, skills, attributes, behav­

iours). The KSABs were arranged within the list according to levels of

professional experience, ranging from entry-level to seniority (Manley &

Valin, 2017). Between 2016 and 2018, the GCF developed a framework

identifying the core capabilities of communication professionals on a

global scale, with the intention to be adapted to different cultures,

different functions and different levels. The framework introduced 11

professional, communication and organisational capabilities and 37

sub-capabilities supporting them (Fawkes et al., 2018; Gregory &

Fawkes, 2019). Adopting the same methodology as the global project (i.

e. GCF), three national capability frameworks have been applied so far

in Latin America, focusing on the countries of Argentina, Ecuador and

Colombia.

These Latin American research initiatives are especially valuable

because, as Jain et al. (2014) and Thelen (2021) specify, within a global

academic field characterised by its strong Anglo-Saxon bias (Xifra, 2003;

Jelen-Sanchez, 2018), Latin America is a region lagging behind in terms

 

* Corresponding author at: Universidad de Málaga, Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación, Departamento de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad, Campus de

Teatinos s/n. 29071, Málaga (España), Despacho 2.55, Spain.

E-mail addresses: g.sadi@hud.ac.uk (G. Sadi), aan@uma.es (A. Álvarez-Nobell).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2024.102428

Received 12 July 2022; Received in revised form 29 January 2024; Accepted 30 January 2024

Available online 3 February 2024

0363-8111/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).

 

G. Sadi and A. Álvarez-Nobell

 

Public Relations Review 50 (2024) 102428

 

describe the scope and role of professionals, and that these capabilities

are supported by competencies.

 

competency analysis.

From this perspective, capabilities are broad elements that refer to

the scope and role of professionals. They are supported by competencies,

which are based on more detailed descriptions about what individuals

should be able to do. They include the knowledge, skills and attributes

those professionals should have.

The GCF project worked with this approach and produced a globally

applicable capability framework (as seen in Table 1) in 2018. The

project was realised through a partnership of leading academics working

with national professional associations in nine countries on every

inhabited continent. This collaborative format promoted a global

benchmarking of capabilities while also reflecting the cultural and

regional variations of public relations as a profession. The intention was

to ensure a common understanding of the profession’s scope, as well as

to help raise standards globally. National frameworks were produced for

each of the nine countries involved in the original research; these were

then disaggregated and reformulated to produce an agreed Global

Capability Framework, which the Global Alliance officially adopted in

2018 at its biennial World Public Relations Forum in Oslo.

Informed and framed by this literature review, the study addresses

working professionals’ perceptions of the capabilities required in public

relations and communication management in Latin America. These

perceptions are based on evidence provided by the 2020/2021 edition of

the Latin American Communication Monitor (LCM). In this paper, the

following three research questions are explored:

RQ1. What communication activities and strategic issues do public

relations practitioners consider to be most important in 2020 and by

2023?

RQ2. Which communication channels and instruments are most

important for practitioners to address stakeholders in 2020 and by

2023?

RQ3. What level of capabilities do practitioners say they have in

relation to the strategic issues that are considered most important by

2023?

It should be noted that the original reference to the term compe­

tencies will hereafter be retained where they have been used, although

the concept of capabilities is preferred by this article. This is done, as

previously mentioned, by conceptually agreeing with Macnamara et al.

(2018) that the term "constitute[s] a meta-level because they holistically

incorporate and integrate KSAs (i.e., competencies), competency and

competence". In short, "capabilities are made up of competencies,

competency and competence, plus various enablers to go beyond

existing knowledge and experience" (p. 706). This article stresses that

capabilities are to be understood as broad, holistic statements that

 

3. Methodology

The analysis presented in this article is based on empirical data from

the Latin American Communication Monitor (LCM), the largest survey

of public relations and communication professionals in Latin America

and the Caribbean. LCM is conducted biennially and in conjunction with

the European Communication Monitor, the Asia-Pacific Communication

Monitor and the North American Communication Monitor. The study

uses a set of common questions from the Global Communication Monitor

(GCM) series and adds a number of additional regionally relevant

questions in each edition.

This 2020/21 study explores four constructs. First, developments

and dynamics in the public relations field are identified through longi­

tudinal comparisons of strategic issues, communication channels, and

ethical challenges. Second, regional and national differences are

revealed by breaking down the results into 12 countries representing the

top key markets. Third, a selection of current challenges in the field are

empirically tested: cybersecurity, communication ethics and the role of

women in communications. With the massive expansion of remote work as

a legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity has skyrocketed in

importance, even blossoming into a field of its own. Communication

ethics focuses on identifying the frequency of ethical challenges and how

to face them, as well as ethical aspects of digital communication prac­

tices in particular. Lastly, the glass ceiling regarding the role of women in

communications is of special interest when analysing what prevents them

from developing professional capabilities and reaching high positions.

Fourth, statistical methods are used to identify excellent communication

departments in the sample and later define which aspects make a

difference.

3.1. The instrument

The online questionnaire used in the 2020/21 LCM edition included

47 questions organised into eight sections, two of which are the focus of

this analysis, as explained above. The design of the instrument was

based on research questions and hypotheses explored in previous edi­

tions of this study and of the European Communication Monitor, as well

as other issues highlighted in recent field literature. The instrument used

dichotomous, nominal and ordinal response scales, particularly fivepoint Likert scales ranging from "very high" to "very low" and

"strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". The survey was conducted in

Spanish and Portuguese, and was tested by 18 communication pro­

fessionals in five Latin American countries, who were allowed to make

amendments prior to its operationalisation.. 

(by Dyah Mirza Febriyana)