This book builds on a lifetime of reading, writing, thinking, dreaming, failing, starting again, denying, confronting, shifting and teaching.

If anyone had told me at the beginning of the year that I’d end up reading for pleasure – make that, devouring – a Jungian book on public relations, I’d have said they were dreaming. That was before I met Blue Mountains resident, writer and academic, Johanna Fawkes.

In her book Public Relations Ethics and Professionalism: The shadow of excellence, Fawkes writes much how she speaks, with intelligence, intuition and poetic flair. As the opening lines quoted above suggest, she is no stranger to nuances of language. She revels in them. It’s a feature of her writing that betrays the fact that she is not only a Senior Lecturer in Public Relations at Charles Sturt University, she is also a prize-winning writer, having completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and won numerous awards for her short fiction.

But public relations? How can a book on public relations be made readable for a lay audience and still provide enough intellectual rigour to be useful as a text book? With enviable skill Fawkes manages to do both. I read the book from cover to cover in a little over a day and was fascinated. Admittedly, I’m a bit of a closet Jung fan. The idea of exploring questions regarding ethics and public relations by teasing out the “shadow” side of the profession appeals to me – if public relations can indeed be regarded as a “profession”, when much of it, from a lay point of view, appears to deal with the art of persuasion in service of a client, at the limit of which is propaganda.

Fawkes’ discussion weaves in and out of these thorny issues in a way that surprised and stimulated me. I found myself thinking back to a unit I studied when doing a Graduate Diploma of Counselling, and the debates that were raging at the time between Counselling and Psychology – the “territory” wars between the two disciplines, and the tensions between which practices might be considered an “art” and which a “science”, and the attendant professional – and remunerative – ramifications. Fawkes’ book invites such pondering, making it relevant to professions generally, not just public relations. Public relations, in some sense, is the case study for the broader ideas she wishes to bring to our attention.

An aspect of the book I especially enjoyed was the way Fawkes introduces her own experience – including her own personal challenges – into the discussion. It’s a technique consistent with the postmodern breadth of her vision, and one I find particularly engaging.

While reading Chapter 7, “Towards a Jungian Ethic”, I began applying some of the ideas to myself personally. What shadow parts of myself do I reject and why? How might engaging those parts be transformative? By doing so, might I be freer to solve problems and limitations confronting me? Engaging further with these ideas since finishing the book has become an exciting journey, promising to open up all sorts of possibilities. All from a book on PR. That’s quite an achievement!

Public Relations Ethics and Professionalism: The shadow of excellence will be launched at the St James Ethics Centre in December. Unfortunately, it isn’t the kind of book you’re likely to stumble across down at your favourite bookshop. It costs too much for that. But you can order it from your academic library. It deserves the widest audience it can get.

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Author: Johanna Fawkes
Title: Public Relations Ethics and Professionalism: The Shadow of excellence
ISBN: 9780415630382
Publisher: Routledge Taylor & Francis Ltd, United Kingdom
Date: June 2014

This review form part of my Australian Women Writers challenge for 2014.
My thanks to the author for the loan of a review copy.