The Public Relations of Everything

The Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Dramatic History of an Idea

Robert E. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136181023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The public relations of "everything" takes the radical position that public relations is a profoundly different creature than a generation of its scholars and teachers have portrayed it. Today, it is clearly no longer limited, if it ever has been, to the management of communication in and between organizations. Rather, it has become an activity engaged in by everyone, and for the most basic human reasons: as an act of self-creation, self-expression, and self-protection. The book challenges both popular dismissals and ill-informed repudiations of public relations, as well as academic and classroom misconceptions.

In the age of digitization and social media, everyone with a smart phone, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the will and skill to use them, is in the media. The PR of everything – the ubiquitousness of public relations – takes a perspective that is less concerned with ideas of communication and information than with experience and drama, a way of looking at public relations inside out, upside down and from a micro rather than a macro level.

Based on a combination of the research of PR practice and critical-thinking analysis of theory, and founded in the author's extensive corporate experience, this book will be invaluable reading for scholars and practitioners alike in Public Relations, Communications and Social Media.

Part I
The theater of public relations

1
The principles of the public relations of everything

Authors are actors, books are theaters.

Wallace Stevens, Adagia

Almost everyone has an idea of what public relations (PR) is – and almost everyone is half right. But there’s another half. This book seeks to explain it.

The conventional wisdom about PR by its scholars, textbook writers and practitioners isn’t incorrect. But neither is it sufficient. The conventional wisdom about PR is that it exists as something, somewhere and sometime. The thesis of this book is that the conventional wisdom is misleading. Far from the narrow confines of its conventional conceptualizations, PR comprises not only some things but everything, everyone, everywhere and every time. For many scholars, PR is a matter of answers; for me it is a matter of questions. It is not about what’s distinctive, as PR textbooks and PR trade organizations have said, but what’s inclusive. It is as much a product of the imagination as the result of logic. In fact, PR in the twenty-first century is rapidly becoming less and less distinctive as it continues to converge with those strategies from which it was purported to be distinct, such as marketing, advertising and other rhetorically charged strategies.

What follows are principles of the public relations of everything (PRe). Here I omit the definite article, the, to insist that the 20 principles are not meant to be definitive so much as indicative. These principles are intended to suggest ways to understand public relations in what has been called a postsymmetry age (Brown, 2010). An author who can conceive of 20 principles can imagine 20 more. What’s no less important than that number is the number-as-idea of multiplicity, multidisciplinary expansion and connection. It is an idea that challenges the old and ongoing attempt to define PR as this or that, rather than resist the idea that PR is both and more, growing outward rather than narrowing inward.

Principle 1: Public relations is ubiquitous, universal and timeless

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moon, poems.
Like the shark, it contains a shoe.
It must swim for miles through the desert
Uttering cries that are almost human.

Louis Simpson (1963/2001); “American Poetry”

The public relations of everything, or PRe, questions the conventional wisdom that PR is exclusively a phenomenon of modernity, or technology, any more than perception, opinion, reputation and identity were born from the nineteenth century like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Like the shark in the Simpson poem, PR is omnivorous. But unlike the poem’s title, the waters in which PR swims are not American but the oceans which touch the shores worldwide.

PR is new but it’s old. The advent of the Internet, and in the last decade, web culture and social media tools, have made an extraordinary impact on history, culture, organizations, society, individuals, relationships and PR. Historiographically, PRe moves beyond the flawed notion of PR as exclusively and definitively modern.

PRe rejects PR’s conventional wisdom theory of symmetry as a vestige of the mechanical age with its faith that the PR machine, if properly oiled with good will, can balance the needs of unequally powerful parties. That symmetry theory is posited as normative turns out to be a dodge, or a way of insisting that’s how PR ought to be even if it isn’t. By contrast, PRe prefers the is to the ought.

In its obsession with technology, PR has forgotten McLuhan’s (1964) insight that technology is an extension of humanity. (He was, after all, not a professor of technology but of the transdisciplinary humanities.) Technologies, as well as opinion, influence, belief and awe, point to the individual’s relationship with society (Brown, 2004; Gordon, 1997). PR is a social phenomenon, as are the typically cited rationales for PR practices: the creation, management and alteration of perception, opinion and reputation as they, in turn, affect the behavioral, economic and political situations of individuals, organizations and nations. But to posit humanity or PR as technology is the very meaning of “reductive” (Halpern, 2013).

PR has benefited from the insights of the social sciences. Yet despite the aspirations of PR to claim the status of a science, PRe regards PR as a humanity. (Chapter 10 makes this case in detail.) PRe understands PR in broadly inclusive, historical and personal terms. This is PR’s ethos and its legacy, from Homer’s poetry to Aristotle’s rhetoric to Saint Paul’s messianic persuasion to the Catholic Reformation Propagandio, and onward to modernity and the elegance of the algorithm.

PRe sees everything as human and everything as relational.

Principle 2: Public relations is experiential and contingent

The attention lavished by PR textbooks and scholars on planning, strategy, objectives, measurement and results misleads because it fails to account for the situation of PR. PR is no less bound than any other human and social institution by contingency. Indeed, management itself is an art, as the management theorist and ethnographer Henry Mintzberg (2005) concluded after observing managers in situ. Phenomenologically, PR is an art in the service of another art.

Everyday life is contingent, notwithstanding our effort to manage it. Or, as Kierkegaard said, our effort to distract ourselves from what we know. The Big Data we overlay upon that contingency produces statistical answers that are incapable of altering the foundation of our situation or that of organizations and their managers.

The experience as experience of people doing PR has not been an interest of the vast majority of PR scholars. Why has this been so? The project of the previous generation of PR scholarship has been to lift and separate PR from its taint of moral illegitimacy and intellectual unworthiness by building a collection of theories laid upon the putative foundation of science. Meanwhile, the practice of PR has thrived largely unaware of those theories.

In the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, lived, embodied experience is the source of meaning. But quite unlike the PR adage (or enthymeme) that perception is reality, which ignores or trivializes experience, Merleau-Ponty made embodied experience the basis of perception and consciousness, and the starting point for all philosophical explorations (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). What’s missing in much PR theory is the way in which Merleau-Ponty understood perception and experience. PR scholarship has too often been disembodied. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, everyday perception has merged with the aesthetic, in eye of the Cezanne (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/1964).

PRe questions the trope of the rational manager who plans, organizes and controls, which is the classic definition of management. For PRe, the assumptions of rationality run aground in a world of radical contingency, and the notion of management as a science is rebutted by the lived experience of practitioners and their managers themselves. In PRe, the compelling trope is not functionalism or mechanism or balance; it is drama.

When framed conventionally, PR becomes just another mechanical operation in the organizational wheelworks. But even the voluminous and capacious definitions of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA; see www.prsa.org) and the U.K. Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ voluminous and capacious definitions of PR hardly object to the idea of PR as ubiquitous.

Principle 3: Public relations is a matter of places

Life is a matter of people, not of places. But for me life is a matter of places, and that is the trouble.

Wallace Stevens (1969, p. 158)

A PR truism is that the practice attracts “people persons.” From a PRe perspective, places are people, too. The PR campaigns mounted by nations, cities, regions and other geographical entities is nothing new. The long-running I Love New York campaign with its substitution of a heart for the word love was ubiquitous on tee shirts, tabletop tents, buses, trains and taxis. In a world brought closer by cheaper, faster travel and globalized communication, place-branding campaigns are increasingly common.

Among the world’s most popular tourist destinations, the architecturally compelling city of Barcelona has struggled with its branding strategy. Some Catalonians have worried that the reputation and brand of the city has been diminished with the rising profile of the city’s soccer (or football) team’s success. The stunning buildings of Gaudi have been trumped by a sports franchise.

Other cities, regions and nations, challenged by a variety of circumstances, have sought to personalize themselves by putting on a new or familiar face or removing a damaged one. Only recently has the nation of Colombia witnessed the perception of its brand change from a nation to avoid to a romantic destination.

Not that such changes happen overnight. Perceptions linger long on the collective retina of memory. Medical science may have innovated the face transplant; PR has discovered no such operational fixes.

Places have power, agency, glamour and influence. They are themselves actors who are preceded by a reputation that is hard to live up to. As the travel writer Colin Thubron (2012) wrote of a great city:

Jerusalem has for so long incited fantasy that the geographical city may come as a shock. (p. 3)

What visitor to Paris has not wanted to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, the Champs Élysées, Monet’s garden in Giverny, the cathedral of Notre Dame, Shakespeare & Company, the Bois de Boulogne, the Eiffel Tower? Places trail behind them a resonance and incite the thrill of expectation. They have PR mojo. They exude influence.

Principle 4: Public relations is dramatic

PR is largely what its practitioners do. But it is also what we do in what the sociologist Erving Goffman explored as self-presentation in everyday life (Goffman, 1959). What practitioners and the rest of us have in common is our acting. But it is a misconception of acting to conflate it with lying or to reject it on account of its most extreme emotional cost to the actor (Hochschild, 2003).

The necessity to act places crisis at or near the center of PR. (Chapter 2 elaborates.) To reconsider PR as a daily drama is a perspective that offers opportunity for insight into a social institution. Our everyday lives, like the lives of organizations, are less “managed” than intermittently conflictual and, at times, baffling.

Anyone familiar with the operations of PR agency and PR department practices will have little trouble recalling the anxious rhythm of expectation, rejection, skepticism, challenge, problem and crisis. Journalists ignore. Adversaries dismiss. Clients demand. Employees gossip. Voters rage. And this is very often the calling card for crisis communication, rebranding, corporate social responsibility, media relations and other PR practices. Corporate social responsibility has not revolutionized PR; it has become PR’s rationalized shibboleth. But there’s a reality gap between Guth and Marsh’s (2000) “value-driven” PR and the less inspirational asymmetries of PR practice.

Daily life replicates the conflict drama requires.

Life in pressured working environments is theater. Each conflict is a scene the actors must prepare for and then play face to face or in a conference room or supervisor’s or employee’s office. Each performance will be effective or inept. In our daily professional lives we may find ourselves in encounters that threaten our face, our job, our friendships, our solvency.

Anxious or confident, PR paid professionals and everyone else engages in a drama of expressiveness and face protection, of what is said or left unsaid, of gestures that are intended or unintended. When they must, individuals act to protect their faces, as well as the faces of the others, whether they are PR agency clients, organizational colleagues, spouses, siblings or Facebook friends. To understand PR in this broader social or interactional sense is to recognize it as a drama that is ongoing – a term which W. Timothy Coombs (2012, emphasis added) has used to define crisis communication. What is crisis communication but an ongoing effort in a world of contingency and threat? Crisis is what the anthropologist Victor Turner (1988) called a “social drama.”

Principle 5: Public relations is conflictual

Public relations is “a wrangle in the marketplace.”

R. L. Heath

What would drama be without conflict? Aristotle explained conflict’s purpose in theatrical performance. Georg Simmel (1971) framed conflict as a challenging human and social phenomenon. From a micro or macro perspective, the life of the person and the organization is anything but smooth sailing. Things go wrong. Problems arise. Trends become issues, and issues crises. Credibility is questioned. The actor’s gaffe undermines his reputation. To illuminate discredited credibility at its most extreme, Goffman (1961) produced a heartbreaking essay that humanizes the crisis of mental illness from the perspective of the involuntarily committed patient confounded by the apparent betrayal of trusted others.

Exponents of PR have advanced the idea that it is a win–win game, a conversation, a negotiation. But not necessarily or always. The conflictual world of PR is not separate from the violent world of the poet William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” and “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” The experience of the world belies the fairy tale of symmetry (Brown, 2006). Blake knew that the lions rarely lie down with the lambs; usually they devour them.

The asymmetry of social reality is consistent with what the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1942) called the “creative destruction” wrought by the marketplace forces of capitalistic innovation. Leading the charge in the digital–social era are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I The theater of public relations
• PART II The humanities of public relations
• Epilogue: The gist of everything
• Index