Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History

Ian Somerville, Lee Edwards, Øyvind Ihlen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429836237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History examines how histories are used to explore how the past is constructed from the present, how the present is always historical, and how both past and present can power imagined futures.

Divided into three distinct parts, the book uses historical inquiry as a springboard for engaging with interdisciplinary, critical and complex issues in the past and present. Part I examines the history of corporate PR, the centrality of the corporation in PR scholarship and the possibility of resisting corporate hegemony through PR efforts. The theme of Part II is 'Historicising gender, ethnicity and diversity in PR work, ' focusing on how gendered and racialised identities have been constructed and resisted both within the profession and through the result of its work. Part III engages with 'Histories of public relations in the political sphere, ' bringing together work on the different ways in which public relations has evolved in changing political contexts, both formally as a function within political institutions and in the context of contributions to broader narratives of nationalism and identity.

Featuring contributions from leading academics, this book challenges traditional PR historiography and contests the 'lessons' derived from existing literature to address the implications of key areas of critically engaged PR theory. This volume is a valuable teaching resource for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates studying public relations, strategic communications, political communication and organisational communication.

Part I

Challenging corporatism and managerialism

1

The contribution of public relations to promotional culture

Taking the long view

Johanna Fawkes

Introduction

Fitch and L’Etang (2017) argue that histories of public relations (PR) are over-directed by the influence of the Excellence approach, leading to its use an incontestable template for practice and theory in the field. Not only has it morphed from a loose description of best practice in the USA to an instruction manual for public relations, but it has also been successfully exported into curricula and professional codes globally (Parkinson 2001).

This chapter suggests that in addition to the voices that Fitch and L’Etang say are excluded from PR histories in this approach – particularly voices of gender, race and postcolonial cultures – whole areas of practice have been underexamined because the Excellence approach deemed them marginal or primarily of historical interest. The placing of persuasion in the sub-optimal, sub-ethical category has impacted scrutiny of promotion, persuasion and propaganda from within the public relations field, though these areas are heavily covered by critical and cultural scholars who see them as synonymous with public relations.

Promotional culture is now being reclaimed by public relations scholars who offer a more nuanced perspective than is often found in cultural studies literature. A less demonised, more measured view of the role of public relations in society in many ways carries a heavier ethical punch than the bogeyman caricatures. This emerging scholarship is broadly located in critical, political economy and sociological frameworks, of which more below.

However, I want to introduce a different note, employing the concepts of Persona and Shadow from Carl Jung to re-examine texts that concern public relations and promotional culture, from within and outside the field. A culture dominated by display has psychological as well as economic drivers and effects.

The chapter offers conceptual insights and the approach is broadly hermeneutic (Riceour 1981; Gadamer and Linge 1977), interpreting text against text. This values the subjective experience of text and encourages deeper reflection on commonalities and divergences. I do not claim to be an impartial observer here, but a story-teller.

The chapter is organised as follows.

• The historical impact of Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) Four Models on the study of persuasion and promotion;
• Reclaiming the neglected terrain of promotional culture;
• Re-casting promotional culture in Jungian terms as collective Persona function;
• Listening to Shadow voices.

The chapter concludes with reflections and questions for further research.

The historical role of the Four Models

The starting point for this chapter is Grunig and Hunt’s (1984:22) Four Models of communication, which offers a typology of public relations roles: (1) Press Agentry/Publicity, (2) Public Information, (3) Two-way Asymmetric and (4) Two-Way Symmetric. Each model is given a description of its purpose, nature, an appropriate communication model, associated research, historical figures, location and percentage of practice. Models (1) and (2) are forms of one-way communication; models (3) and (4) are two-way flows. Persuasion is seen as two-way asymmetric communication (3) and only the final model (4) is based on two-way exchanges to achieve mutual understanding.

This typology has two implications for historians. First, it is itself an historical document, produced at the earliest stages of public relations theory development, just as public relations was expanding as an educational field in search of texts (Moloney 2006; Davis 2013). As such, it is a product of its time, and in particular of its place of origin, the United States, which raises its second historical role: as an apparent summary of the historical development of the field itself. In their section on the models in history (1984:25), Grunig and Hunt offer a clear timeline from 1850 to the time of writing, with the fourth model as the apogee of the trajectory. The impression of a moral arc, culminating in the fourth model, was reinforced by the assertion (Grunig and White 1992) that the final model represents a normative ideal for public relations in most situations. This position was modified by Grunig (2001), who offered the notion of continua rather than discrete categories.

The merits of the Four Models have been argued over since publication on the grounds they are normative, functionalist and, while appearing to be a universal framework, only represent the US experience, an observation made by many critics (Pieczka 1996; L’Etang 2004; Pfau and Wan 2006; Holtzhausen 2012; McKie 2001; Davis 2013; Moloney 2000, 2006). In particular, the implication that persuasion (the third model) is inherently unethical has been widely criticised (Pearson 1989; Pfau and Wan 2006; Porter 2010; Fawkes 2015a; Brown 2015). The volume of scholarship, supportive and critical, that follows from this work and subsequent developments (Grunig et al. 1992; Grunig et al. 2002; Grunig et al. 2007; Sriramesh and Vercic 2009) has earned it the status of paradigm (Botan and Hazleton 2006), reinforcing the sense that these concepts have historical force, albeit a distorting one, as Fitch and L’Etang argue (2017).

The historical distortion is amplified by subsequent writers who have relied on Grunig and Hunt’s historical overview to construct what Jansen (2017) calls a ‘useful fiction,’ one that emphasises the moral development of the field over time, at the expense of its failings. Another consequence, of course, is that the field came to be seen as sharing the specific US histories, ignoring what Davis (2013:24) calls ‘alternative histories’; L’Etang (2004) has demonstrated the very different origins of public relations in Britain and the series edited by Tom Watson has started to include other development stories from around the world – although, as Fitch and L’Etang (2017) point out, it is still a narrow canvas.

Neglected terrains: promotional culture and public relations

The emphasis on public relations as a management function, using strategic communication to contribute to and shape organisational purpose, has, as suggested above, become the dominant narrative for public relations theory and practice (Fawkes et al. 2018). To be clear, I am not disputing the accuracy or usefulness of this description as part of the professional project, to gain social status and organisational power. Only that it is a partial image, not the whole story.

Moreover, as a result, dissenting or alternative perspectives have become marginalised. Rhetorical scholars, such as Robert Heath (2001, 2006, 2009) have maintained a strong argument for public relations as rhetoric. The engagement with advocacy as at least a potentially ethical practice offers an important counter-balance to the ‘impartial’ counsellor lauded in Excellence. Critical scholars have also worked for several decades to resist Excellence becoming the only available framework for public relations (L’Etang, McKie, Snow and Xifra Heras 2017; Botan and Hazleton 2006; Pfau and Wan 2006; Moloney 2006). However, this work has remained, until recently, largely invisible to those writing about public relations from outside the field, such as cultural or media scholars. While Excellence stresses best practice and the contribution of public relations to wider society, these writers excoriate its detrimental effects on democracy, social justice and human flourishing.

In a mirror-image of public relations’ self-presentation, academic study has often been left to those who lump PR in with advertising and marketing as producers of promotional content, often with little understanding for the workings of the respective industries and certainly no respect for strategic functions (McKevitt 2018). Here public relations is seen as wholly malign in regard to its pernicious effect on democracy, consumer choices and collective welfare. Its operation in political and corporate propaganda is exposed, often in the context of electoral manipulation, lobbying on fossils fuels, climate change and pharmaceuticals (see Sussman 2011). This group of scholars is broadly located in the political economy approach, founded in the Frankfurt School and Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) Propaganda Model (Stauber and Rampton 2004, Miller and Dinan 2008, Sussman 2011).

While most of the above treat public relations as synonymous with corporate capitalism, Sue Curry Jansen (2017) recognises that non-profit and socially responsible enterprises also require professional communication services. Unlike many of the above, she also recognises the critical scholarship undertaken by PR academics, whom she terms ‘insider’ critics. Nevertheless, her explorations of PR as propaganda (Jansen 2017) frame the field wholly in corporate terms. From the opposite starting point, this has the same effect as the Excellence approach: disallowing advocacy as a legitimate practice.

In a slightly different corner, other scholars of the promotional aspects of our culture, including Wernick’s (1991) Promotional Culture and Marshall’s (2014) Celebrity and Power, interrogate what Fairchild (2007) calls the ‘attention economy.’ This view conceptualises society, and particularly digital society, as a ceaseless competition for the consumer’s glance, click or credit card (Wu 2017). It argues that the commodification of goods, services and institutions is a requirement of neoliberal market economics in which every provider must compete for custom by demonstrating its compliance with market standards, or at least appearing to, making promotion ‘an axial principle of social life’ (Wernick 1991:186). Institutions, including hospitals and universities, not only have to operate as sites of healthcare or education, but have to ‘perform’ these roles to secure funding and approval. All entities are can be seen as inherently promotional under this gaze, in a permanent state of self-advocacy. This summarises the broadest interpretation of promotional culture as a term and it is his approach that informs this chapter.

Davis (2013:2) defines promotional culture as the practices undertaken in the promotional industries: ‘public relations, lobbying, advertising, marketing and branding – and related professions (pollsters, speechwriters etc)’ (1). These in turn employ ‘promotional intermediaries’ who share the following characteristics: ‘Their products may be ideas or objects; They access communication media; [and] They are self-organised in professions’ (2). This definition is more applied than Wernick’s approach, but this suits Davis’ exploration of promotional practice. Like Curry Jansen, Davis (2013:7) acknowledges differences between and within promotional industries and takes an historical perspective to the competing narratives around the development of public relations and the consequent divergences in claims of the field’s social value. The perspective is similar to the critics cited above, but demonstrates much closer attention to public relations as work. This subtler approach is echoed by sociologist Anne Cronin (2018), who argues that public relations deserves greater, more nuanced scrutiny because of its importance to contemporary culture, in what she calls public relations capitalism.

Davis, Jansen and Cronin are primarily scholars from outside the field of public relations but their insights provide a contrast to the broad amalgamation of promotional industries found elsewhere in the above-cited literature (for example, Wu’s 2017 The Attention Merchants has only three index references to public relations, two of them concerning Bernays). This inattention is surprising, as Edwards (2018) points out. Public relations work involves shaping, reflecting and communicating identity for organisations and individuals, and is in turn shaped by the professional identity both of the field and individual public relations practitioners (Fawkes 2015b; Brown 2015; Edwards 2010; Daymon and Surma 2012; Jeffrey and Brunton 2012; Thurlow 2009). The question of appearance is central to the public relations industry, which defines itself as being about ‘reputation, what you do and what people say you do’ (Edwards 2018). Media and political media relations concern the ‘optics,’ the impressions formed in the minds of viewers and reade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Public relations, society and the generative power of history
• Part I Challenging corporatism and managerialism
• Part II Historicising gender, ethnicity and diversity in PR work
• Part III Histories of public relations in the political sphere
• Index