PR Practitioner Roles Revisited

The book chapter discusses the findings of a quantitative investigation into the work roles of European communication professionals. In particular, our research investigates whether the manager-technician typology, developed in previous role research, still captures the reality of modern communication work, and whether there are any differences in the European context compared to the United States, where most research on practitioner roles has been done to date. Based on structural equation modeling, we show that several assumptions from this stream of research do not hold up to the scrutiny of modern statistical methods. Instead, we propose a more modest interpretation, first of which roles modern communication practitioners actually enact, and second how these roles relate to job satisfaction, managerial input and gender differences in the field.