Commentary: Professionals are from Venus, scholars are from Mars

Though public relations practice everywhere is suffering from low standards of professionalism, practitioners are hardly looking for support from public relations scholars. The question is why. This article argues that this is not because practitioners are reluctant to adopt the scholarly work that has been done, but because, in defining what professionalism is all about, practitioners and scholars live in different worlds. Coherence in views on professionalism can be seen as a prerequisite for development of practice. This article proposes a new model of professionalism in which certain values of previous views are adhered to and, where appropriate, partially integrated.