Content area
Full Text
Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate, George Lakoff, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT., 2004, ISBN 1-931498-71-7, 124 pages, $10.00
Whose Freedom: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, George Lakoff, Picador, New York, 2006, ISBN-13: 978-0-31242647-7, 277 pages, $14.00
Much ink has been used recently in a debate about whether the two-way symmetric model should be viewed as a central part of ideal public relations. This approach requires listening carefully to publics, studying their needs, and convincing clients to change their views and actions as required to accommodate publics.
The widely discussed International Association of Business Communicators Excellence Study, by James and Larissa Grunig, David Dozier and others, purports to show that two-way symmetric communication does work to serve client needs. Further, various philosophical arguments have suggested symmetry should be viewed as a normative practice that serves society.
Recently, support for two-way symmetric practice as normative has come from several disciplines and theories:
* Communitarian thought, associated with Amatai Etzioni, Robert Putnam, Dean Kruckeberg, and Kenneth Starck.
* Analyses of the "permanent campaign" in American politics by Norman Orenstein, E. E. Mann, and J. Heclo.
* Discussions of liberal Christianity by authors such as Jim Wallis.
* Symbolic-interactionist thought in sociology as discussed by this reviewer and Ralph Turner, among others.
Recently, support has also come from George Lakoff, a linguist and cognitive scientist at the University of California in Berkeley and a progressive activist, in the books reviewed here. Lakoff founded the Rockbridge Institute, a center for scholars devoted to progressive politics.
He says we all use metaphors in thinking about and framing problems. Framing, an important concept in contemporary communication theory, has been defined rather vaguely and in various ways. Lakoff sees it basically as a set of beliefs that influence what elements need to be considered in defining a phenomenon and how...