Book reviews

Essay: Kissing Up and Looking Out

You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of FlatteryRichard Stengel; New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000, hardbound, 316 pp., $25.00

God, as the anxious Old Testament Israelites grasped, could be praised. In fact, it wasn’texactly an option. As the composer of Psalm 65 sings: “Praise is due to thee/O God, inZion/and to thee shall vows be performed.” As Richard Stengel seems to suggest in his witty“history” of flattery, the ancient Jews recognized that praying to their wrathful God was anact of strategic communication – the rhetorical marriage of devotion and public relations.(Let there be no Opinion Leaders before thee!)

If Jehovah’s delight in hearing kind words makes him only human, it also reveals anotherside of the Deity: the C.E.O. Reverent Jews were practicing the principles of upwardcommunication many millennia before theWall Street Journalwas counseling its readers to“manage up” to their bosses.

In his “brief history of flattery,” journalist Stengel considers a long list of strategiccommunicators from the Pharaoh’s slaves to Bill Clinton’s publicists. Among Stengel’stheses is that not only may humans be hard-wired to flatter and promote – apparently so arethe great apes. PR may be a more Darwinian matter than we’ve suspected. Public relationsteachers, scholars and practitioners will find many provocative analogies between Stengel’snotion of flattery and what we know about public relations.

While Stengel spends little time speaking directly about public relations, his analysis ofthe calculations of praise and flattery encompass what public relation people know aboutaudience analysis, reputation management and euphemism. As principle and practice, publicrelations has always benefited from what could be called marginal recontextualization – theeffort to reimagine a subject using ideas imported far from the orthodox center of ouracademic galaxy.

As for definitions, few would disagree that public relations has already spawned far toomany of them. They range from the ignorant, trivializing and malicious to the exhausting,self-serving and disingenuous. In l975, under the auspices of the Public Relations Society ofAmerica, a committee of well-intentioned practitioners and scholars attempted to clean theAegean stables by synthesizing no less than 472 definitions of public relations. Unsurpris-ingly, the group produced an 88-word monster. It is marked by all the stylistic grace onewould expect from the authorship of a committee:

“Public relations is a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain

Pergamon

Public Relations Review 27 (2001) 241–245

0363-8111/01/$ – see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation between anorganization and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps man-agement to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes theresponsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management to keep abreastof and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends;and uses research and sound and ethical communication techniques as its principal tools.”

Indeed, public relations is all that – and less. Despite, or perhaps because of, its laboriousearnestness, the synthetic definition manages to leave out much that is essential for anyrealistic understanding of public relations – starting with the field’s notorious image.

By contrast, Stengel’s book on flattery is anything but laborious. Its tone of amused irreverencecould magnify the book’s credibility for media-savvy, precociously cynical students and otherhardened audiences. In the classroom and the boardroom, “official” definitions of public relationsare often regarded with justifiable skepticism by audiences impolite enough to express it. But indemonstrating the universality of flattery, Stengel underscores the ubiquity of public relations.Here is Stengel’s “working definition” of flattery:

“Flattery is strategic praise, praise with a purpose. It may be inflated and exaggerated orit may be accurate and truthful, but it is praise that seeks some result, whether it be increasedliking or an office with a window. It is a kind of manipulation of reality that uses theenhancement of another for our own self- advantage. It can even be genuine praise.”

Strategic praise. Is this not a succinct description of the tools of the trade: ghostwrittenspeeches, corporate annual reports, sales brochures, fact sheets, position papers, whitepapers, media alerts, company newsletters, quarterly earnings press releases, pitch letters,conference calls, trade show exhibits, video news releases and product placements.

As Stengel observes, strategic praise is in part Aristotle’s subject inThe Rhetoric,whichcould with justification be called the first great textbook of public relations. In Section Fourof hisRhetoric,Aristotle analyzes arguments capable of persuading an orator’s audience thatsomeone or something is praiseworthy, or noble. Few public relations textbooks would dareto leave out a chapter on that subject.

Lessons from the margins

The study of rhetoric – from Aristotle to Kenneth Burke – is widely considered essential to anunderstanding of public relations. But many texts of value to our field are created light years fromthe concerns of practitioners and scholars. Like Stengel’s treatise on flattery, these marginal textswere never intended for us. But without them, we would lack the principles, theories and thelanguage so useful to manage the challenging tasks required of modern public relations – fromexplaining new technology to promoting safe sex. What would we do without McLuhan,Maslow, Freud, Margaret Mead, Peter Drucker? What would our discipline be?

In recommending Stengel’s book, I must make it a point not to flatter the author: Thebook’s virtues are its weaknesses. A formerWall Street Journalreporter, Stengel paints witha very broad brush. He’s a popularizer, not a scholar, and his book isn’t so much analysis asdiscussion. But for all that, it’s a serious and intelligent discussion, which is certainlypreferrable to the tedious, trivial and unimaginative discourse that too often masquerades as

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analysis in public relations literature and trade publications. Stengel’s “history” is aimed atan educated general audience. (The book jacket makes the point obvious: blurbists includeGeorge Stephanopoulos and Jay Leno.)

But if I won’t flatter Stengel, I will give him his due. His book is not for intellectuallightweights. Stengel’s cultural references will surely be foreign territory to an unsettlingnumber of today’s undergraduates. Students who’ve never read the philosopher MichelFoucault on deconstruction or the sociologist Erving Goffman on “face management” willsurely not suffer from Stengel’s thumbnail analyses. Public relations scholarship is enrichedby the work of these social scientists and historians. They enrich our discipline withtheoretical perspectives on such communication staples as persuasion, propaganda, interper-sonal communication and nonverbal communication.

In our academic geography, praise, flattery and public relations may not be located in thesame ZIP code – but they are surely to be found in the same region. If, like the narrator ina story by Jorge Luis Borges, we were to imagine public relations as a city, it might resembleLos Angeles – a sprawling metropolis whose circumference is everywhere and whose centeris nowhere. Like L.A., public relations is a roughneck, capacious city without boundaries,where the social sciences rub elbows with the liberal arts. Perhaps a more accurate metro-politan analogy might be to Constantinople: a venerable, intriguing, somewhat helter-skeltercrossroads. Stengel’s tour through the history of strategic praise reminds us that publicrelations is, to use the sociologists’ term, a boundary-spanning discipline. It keeps a weathereye on the margins and, like a diplomat, makes a good many border crossings. Therefore,when we want to refresh our understanding of the sprawling city of public relations, we willfind it useful to leave it. Stengel’s book is a train out.

When public relations scholars seek to “build theory,” we frequently peer outside ourdiscipline – to the work of game theorists, psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, histori-ans and economists, as well as to the scholarship of management, organizational behaviorand ethics. That is why the most sophisticated public relations textbooks are studded withintellectual marginalia, like the ideas of Durkheim, Maslow, Lippmann and Plato and thenovels of Frank Norris and Salman Rushdie. (The list is from the index of the 7th edition ofThis Is P.R.,by Newsom, Turk and Kruckeberg.)

True to his popular intentions, Stengel ends his 5,000-year sprint with a winking appendix onhow to flatter without getting caught. (Be specific. Be a little esoteric). He also includes a glossaryof more than 150 euphemisms for flattery (apple-polish, blow smoke, curry favor, kiss up,kowtow, laud, puffery, schmeer, toady, snow job, stroke, suck-up, sycophant and yes-man).Ironically, Stengel’s last entry is also his weakest: Rhetoric. He manages to dismiss the subjectin a couple of paragraphs, evidently weary of traveling through history at warp speed. But publicrelations scholars are likely to profit from a bracing ride on the flattery express.

Robert E. BrownProfessor of English and Communication,

Salem State College,Salem, MA 01970, USA

E-mail address:d28man@mindspring.comPII: S0363-8111(01)00083-2

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