Public Relations as Emotional Labour

TBC

Liz Yeomans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317417316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Inextricably linked to neoliberal market economies, public relations' influence in our promotional culture is profound. Yet many aspects of the professional role are under-researched and poorly understood, including the impact on workers who construct displays of feeling to elicit a desired emotional response, to earn trust and manage clients. The emotionally demanding nature of this aspirational work, and how this is symptomatic of "always on" culture, is particularly overlooked.

Drawing on interviews with practitioners and agency directors, together with the author's personal insights from observations in the field, this book fills a significant gap in knowledge by presenting a critical-interpretive exploration of everyday relational work of account handlers in PR agencies. In underscoring the relationship-driven, highly contingent nature of this work, the author shows that emotional labour is a defining feature of professionalism, even as public relations is reconfigured in the digital age. In doing so, the book draws on a wide range of related contemporary social and cultural theories, as well as critical public relations and feminist public relations literature.

Scholars, educators and research students in PR and communications studies will gain rich insights into the emotion management strategies employed by public relations workers in handling professional relationships with clients, journalists and their colleagues, thereby uncovering some of the taken-for-granted aspects of this gendered, promotional work.

1 Introduction and guide to chapters

Introduction: ‘It’s PR, not ER’¹

Public relations (PR) is inextricably linked to the zeitgeist of neoliberal market economies. Its influence in promotional culture, linking consumer lifestyles with products through diverse media outlets, is profound; yet the emotional effort, or labour, that goes into producing PR work has received little serious attention. Emotional labour is a global phenomenon (Brooks and Devasahayam, 2011) within the New Economy that requires a high level of social interaction involving workers managing their own emotions and displays of feeling to elicit a desired emotional response in other people. Hochschild (1983) was concerned with the psychologically alienating effects of this interactive, gendered work. Recent studies present complex depictions of how workers negotiate the emotional demands of their jobs. Such demands are likely to become intensified as they seep into workers’ personal lives and are symptomatic of ‘always on’ culture reinforced by ‘tethering’ technological developments (Turkle, 2008) in time-pressured contexts (Wajcman, 2015).

PR scholars are not alone in ignoring emotional labour. For a profession which prides itself on building organisation-public relationships through strategic communication, the PR industry has been reticent in acknowledging the emotional effort expended behind the scenes on high profile, award-winning campaigns. PR is pathologically driven to celebrate success rather than seriously reflect on the emotional effort it has taken to achieve it. This not only suggests a lack of self-awareness about the consequences of PR service work but also a lack of maturity within the profession. In 2017, there were signs in the United Kingdom that PR had belatedly recognised the problems arising from ‘always on’ culture. It is a culture which takes much for granted: at the most punishing end are the spokespeople who ‘are on call’ 24/7, whose every statement and defence is visible through numerous media outlets and platforms. One only has to think of the US President Donald Trump’s beleaguered press secretary Sean Spicer for whom relentless public scrutiny, trolling, and criticism were an ongoing effort in emotion management, albeit atypical of everyday agency experience.

And yet, turning to typical experience, PR is an industry with an annual staff turnover at 25%, according to one UK survey, where PR workers are choosing to leave high-pressured workplaces rather than discuss the problems of coping with the stress of ‘unrealistic expectations’ and ‘ridiculous deadlines’ (Hall and Waddington, 2017). Further evidence of stress experienced within the UK PR industry is offered by a European-wide survey of communication practitioners. In 2018, over one-third of UK practitioners reported ‘serious stress problems’, placing the UK fourth highest in Europe for workplace stress. Among the top reported issues related to stress (across Europe) were ‘constant availability outside working time’ and ‘too heavy a workload’ (Zerfass et al., 2018). The problem of ‘over-servicing’ clients for low fees, a common theme in my research, has contributed to stress. Therefore, despite the ‘enormous’ growth of the PR agency sector, predicted more than a decade ago (Holmes, 2007, p. 22), industry growth has accelerated at considerable cost to those who have entered its labour force. Competition is ‘fierce’ among agencies, according to the former WPP chairman Martin Sorrell. He goes on to say that, ‘as image in trade magazines, in particular, is crucial to many, account wins at any cost are paramount’ (Sudhaman, 2017). Poor mental health in PR is frequently ignored by the industry or regarded as a performance issue (Hall and Waddington, 2017). Indeed, the CIPR (2019, p. 7) concluded from its 2018/2019 annual survey that there was a ‘mental health epidemic’ within the UK PR industry. A mental health crisis, endemic across a range of institutions and occupations, would suggest that people from all walks of life are required to manage their emotions, both in their personal lives and at work; but when the illusion of being ‘in control’, positive and successful, is crucial to an occupation such as PR, then denial of these pressures may prevail. Although the tweet at the beginning of this section: ‘It’s PR, not ER’ suggests humility about the stressful labour of PR work in comparison to the perceived life-preserving and highly expert labour of the A&E or ‘emergency room’ surgeon, it also speaks of denial in this intensive service work.

This book is primarily intended for scholars, educators, and research students, although practitioners may find the title interesting enough to dip into its contents. While much of the book focuses on the UK context, there are some very good reasons why the UK PR industry is important. For example, the size of the UK market is estimated at £13.9 billion (PRCA, 2018) and the United Kingdom has a well-developed agency landscape, based on continuous expansion since the 1980s, based on neoliberal economic policies, as documented by Miller and Dinan (2000) and Davis (2013). In sum, there is rich material for exploration in focusing on the UK agency sector alone. However, to widen the book’s geographical scope and interest, I have brought in international studies for comparison, particularly in examining the phenomenon of emotional labour; gender and feminisation in occupations; as well as relevant international PR studies.

To clarify the scope of this book: it is not about stress in PR work, even though stress and burnout are symptomatic of emotionally intensive occupations and there are many studies that take this line of questioning (e.g. Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002). Rather, this book seeks to examine how, when, and why emotional labour is deployed in everyday PR agency practice, as well as who is typically engaged in this work. My central argument, drawing on empirical data, is that in common with many professional service occupations, emotional labour constitutes much of the PR role. I argue that emotional labour constitutes much of the PR role because PR must repeatedly legitimise itself (Waeraas, 2009) to clients in order for its efforts to be taken seriously, alongside the more established management disciplines such as marketing and human resources. Although there is a high demand for PR services, clients do not always know much about the service they are buying, nor do some clients know what they want from PR, except, for example, positive media coverage and certainly an improved reputation. But the ‘backstage’ work is hidden from view (Goffman, 1959). Therefore, legitimisation of the PR role is partly accomplished through intensive interactions with clients, potential clients, and other stakeholders that serve to instil their confidence and earn trust. On an everyday level, relationships in PR involve complex performances of individual identity management and emotion management of others’ expectations, all of which constitute emotional labour, transformed into an emotional competence, a form of expertise.

I choose to examine PR agency (or PR consulting) practice because it exemplifies the competitive nature of PR service work, where emotional labour could be said to be at its most intense. Agencies operate at the sharp end of PR practice, often vying for a favourable position at the client’s top table alongside the related promotional disciplines of marketing, advertising, and the new specialisms of digital marketing/SEO. Agencies also rely on a largely female workforce to undertake the everyday relationship handling with clients, journalists, and suppliers. Emotional labour is gendered and both women and men tend to enact the gender roles required by the situation. Therefore, gendered performance and ‘identity work’ is a feature of emotional labour in PR (Yeomans, 2013).

In contributing to PR scholarship, my stance is that of a critical-interpretive scholar examining the broader, socio-cultural context of PR as intrinsically linked to market ideology and promotional culture, as well as the micro-level of everyday ‘lived experience’ of agency practitioners whose interactions I view as playing a part in structuring the broader context. However, unlike some critical scholars, the aim of my book is not to condemn PR’s existence, but to examine not only why it has become one of the defining occupations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also to lift the veil on PR practice. By focusing on the micro-level ‘backstage’ emotion work – something that every agency public relations practitioner (PRP) is aware of doing but may not talk openly about – I aim to expose some of the contradictions of this work afforded by emotional labour theory. In other words, we can love our labour, but this comes at a cost when we are engaged in intensive social interactions that impact the bottom line. (‘Love for the job’ also applies to academic work: Charlotte Bloch (2012) writes about the paradox of passion and pressure in academic life.) In nursing, by contrast, there is considerable knowledge about emotional labour as an occupational hazard (e.g. Smith and Gray, 2000; Elliott, 2017). Therefore, the purpose of this book is emancipatory, providing a critical examination of the socio-cultural context of PR labour as well as illustrations of everyday emotion management in PR practice which is used as the basis for theory-building.

The public relations industry: UK context

In their detailed analysis of the rise of the PR industry in the United Kingdom during the 1980s, critical scholars Miller and Dinan (2000, p. 12) argued that within the United Kingdom, a crucial turning point for PR growth was the ‘tilt to the market in government policy’ arising from the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. At the time, PR expertise of various kinds was required: first to support policies that would privatise the national utilities; second to provide promotional support that would enable the newly privatised companies to compete in national and international markets; and third to support deregulation of City financial institutions and their associated professions such as law and accountancy.

During the past 30 years, PR (or ‘strategic communication’) has become institutionalised across business, government, and non-profit sectors. I regard it as an ‘institutional practice that is widely distributed and is based on a set of governing mechanisms, including taken-for-granted activities, rules, norms and ideas that can together be described as a public relations logic’ (Fredriksson et al., 2013, p. 194). In other words, the ‘logics’ of PR (for example, the management of reputation) are embedded in institutional thinking. Furthermore, the PR agency sector is a leading player among the marketing services that sustain ‘promotional culture’, which is defined as the ‘intensive and extensive development of the market as an organizing principle of social life’ (Wernick, 1991, p. viii).

The PR industry is significantly larger and established in the United States and the United Kingdom than in other countries (Miller and Dinan, 2000; Holmes, 2007). The significance of PR services to the UK economy may be judged according to financial contribution, estimated at £13.8 billion (PRCA, 2018). PR firms are known interchangeably as ‘consultancies’ or ‘agencies’ (Verčič, 2012). These firms provide services to a wide range of business sector clients as well as the public sector, health, and charities (CEBR, 2005). In 2018, the majority of PR agency client work in the United Kingdom came from the technology, consumer, and business services sectors (PRCA, 2018). In 2017, some of the top performing agencies achieved growth in revenue of around 10% or more (McKinley, 2018).

An estimated 86,000 are employed in the UK PR sector in total (PRCA, 2018). The sector comprises in-house practitioners, agency/consultancy employees, and freelancers. Fifty-two per cent or 44,720² are employed in agencies or consultancy firms (PRCA, 2018). The agency sector comprises small- to medium-sized enterprises, with the majority of firms employing 11–25 staff (PRCA, 2018). Larger PR firms employ between 100 and 500 staff, reflecting the size of revenues (McKinley, 2018). For example, in 2018, the top-ranking firm was Edelman PR, which generated a revenue of £60,701,000.

Client work involves media relations strategy planning, media relations, and digital and social media duties (PRCA, 2016). Although media relations work is progressively decreasing, digital and online communications is increasing and this has contributed to agency growth (PRCA, 2018). Everyday PR work, therefore, involves fostering good relationships with clients in order to win and keep their business, but also maintaining relationships with journalists and other stakeholders. Although PR is a female intensive profession, only 36% of female PR agency practitioners held board level positions in 2016 (PRCA, 2016). Much of the day-to-day relationship handling is undertaken by White British female practitioners, working in account executive, account director, and associate director roles, a profile which has typified the practice for a number of years (CEBR, 2005; PRCA, 2018).

PR agency work is both competitive and intensive. Agency employees within the communications industry typically work well beyond the standard 35 full-time hours (Clarke, 2013), with around 40% continuing to work out of hours every single day to pick up emails or phone calls (PRCA, 2016, 2018). As already discussed, over 30% of practitioners in the United Kingdom experience ‘serious stress problems’ and this affects job satisfaction, although PR agency workers report higher job satisfaction than those working in non-profit, joint stock, government or private companies (Zerfass et al., 2018). Clients of PR firms, especially small firms, have high expectations concerning the level of interaction as well as of who is performing the service (Mart and Jackson, 2005); therefore the practitioner who embodies such exp...