Introduction
In the course of the past century, public relations has become a normal part of the promotional environment that surrounds us on a day-to-day basis. It has been integrated into the activities of all kinds of organisations; taken up by individuals to promote narratives of themselves and the world they know through online and digital media; used by high-profile celebrities to manage their public profile; and deployed by governments and terrorist organisations alike to manage public opinion and build alliances. In contrast to the ‘hidden persuaders’ of the past, public relations work is often very visible: new technologies mean that campaigns make use of private as well as public spaces, engage us in ‘conversation’, promote ‘relationships’ with organisations and co-opt our loyalty to maximise their persuasive power. The ubiquity of public relations means that it now has an inescapable influence on us, as part of the resources we draw on both individually and collectively, when we navigate our way through life.
In this book, I argue that understanding the importance and influence of public relations in the contemporary world is best achieved by examining its effects on society and culture. I consciously depart from the functional approach to studying public relations, which tends to focus on its role within organisations. Very little of that approach is reflected in the following pages. Instead, the discussions in each chapter have their roots in the edited collection Public Relations, Society and Culture (Edwards and Hodges, 2011), in which we argued that the body of work adopting a socio-cultural approach in public relations was both burgeoning and important. Then, as now, the point was made that organisational analyses of public relations are essential to understanding what practitioners do, how their work fits within organisational structures and how they contribute to organisational survival. However, organisations are not the only places where public relations techniques have been used, nor do organisational boundaries constitute the limits of public relations’ effects. While contemporary forms of public relations have developed in the context of modernity, the growth of capitalism, the spread of democracy, globalisation and networked societies, they have their roots in a much longer and more variable history of persuasive communication. Institutions and individuals, from churches, emperors and kings to scientists, politicians, army generals, merchants and slaves, have long used public relations-style tactics, even if they were not formally labelled as such. These histories of public relations remind us that it can take many forms and is used for a wide range of purposes, by formally and informally constituted groups as well as individuals. It may be institutionalised and formalised in modern organisations, but its tools and techniques are much more widespread (L’Etang and Pieczka, 1996).
Given the scale and reach of public relations work, there remains a need for more comprehensive analyses of the occupation as a social and cultural practice in its own right. This is not to say that organisations are unimportant. On the contrary, organisations of all kinds play an enormously significant role as an institutional force that influences our lives. Yet, studies of public relations focused on its role within organisations do not generally acknowledge this dimension of their existence. Instead, they tend to examine organisations in isolation from their social, cultural and political contexts, and organisational objectives as unproblematic ends. Public relations is understood as a tool to support organisational survival – and the environment is a factor that must be managed along the way.
Adopting a socio-cultural approach redresses this balance somewhat. It complements the detailed understanding we have of practitioners as organisational functionaries, with a broader and more critical lens focused on the implications of their work beyond organisational boundaries (L’Etang, 2008; McKie and Xifra, 2016). It opens up extensive new territory for public relations research, and there has been a socio-cultural ‘turn’ in public relations scholarship (Edwards and Hodges, 2011), producing creative and interesting work.1 In the following pages, I bring together a number of different areas of interest for scholars adopting a socio-cultural perspective in their analyses of public relations. It is by no means exhaustive and should be viewed as a set of starting points, a springboard for new work that will continue to develop the field.
In this chapter I set out in detail what is meant by a socio-cultural perspective of public relations, to provide readers with a reference point for the arguments made in the rest of the book. I then consider what aspects of contemporary society and culture underpin the socio-cultural research we might do. These themes reappear throughout the book, and I discuss them here as a reference point for readers to use as they delve into other topics in more detail. Finally, I introduce the structure of the book and provide a brief summary of each chapter.
What is a Socio-Cultural Approach to Public Relations and Why is it Necessary?
What does it mean to explore public relations ‘beyond organisational boundaries’? Does such an idea make sense, given that public relations is most often executed by practitioners working on behalf of organisations? It is important to note that socio-cultural research on public relations does not ignore organisations; on the contrary, the point is to interrogate the kinds of influence that organisations have on the way we live our lives. As functional research powerfully illustrates, public relations is a tool through which organisations try to exercise that influence with particular outcomes in mind, but it is also a practice that has agency beyond organisational objectives. It generates change in ways that organisations rarely foresee or plan for, because it has embedded itself deeply in the fabric of our social and cultural practices.
What forms does this embeddedness take? First, public relations draws its tools and techniques from the ways we habitually connect with, communicate with and inform each other about the world around us. Practitioners are encouraged to be in touch with social trends, technologies, communication channels and cultural phenomena, which they use to enhance the relevance and circulation of organisational messages to target audiences. They piggyback off the latest movie or pop sensation, calendar events (Valentine’s day, Mother’s day, Gay Pride parades, other national days of celebration) or the latest news stories to weave topical themes into their campaigns. They follow audience information-seeking behaviour and place stories where they are most likely to be seen – on Twitter or Instagram, via a blogger or vlogger, via mainstream news sites or in offline spaces. Alternatively, they will adjust their communication around cultural norms to make it more powerful (for example, by challenging norms in a dramatic way) or acceptable (by aligning with norms to make a message more easily understandable). For example, Proctor and Gamble’s ‘Touch the Pickle’ campaign aimed to break taboos around menstruation in India (AFAQS, 2017), while in the UK, TV broadcaster Channel 4’s ongoing ‘Superhumans’ campaign for the Paralympics challenges stereotypes about people with a disability (Channel 4, 2016). In the process of doing all these things, practitioners disembed socio-cultural norms and practices from their original context, relocate them into new environments, and repurpose them in communication that serves specific ends. In this way, public relations both intervenes in and instrumentalises different aspects of society and culture.
Second, the pervasiveness of promotional practices means that public relations-style tools and techniques have themselves become woven into our assumptions about the ways we can and should relate to and engage with others. In an ‘attention economy’ (Davenport and Beck, 2002), we expect organisations to communicate with us, explain their actions and persuade us to support them. While we may be sceptical and even cynical about their communication, we are likely to be disappointed if they do not respond to our complaints, or critical if they are unable to deal effectively with a crisis. In our relationships with other individuals, we often adopt techniques of self-promotion in our interactions, working with an implicit understanding that to be successful our identities need to be appealing, to stand out, to act as a ‘brand’ that can generate social and economic benefits – better jobs, greater popularity, more income, greater purpose in life (Lair et al., 2005; Hearn, 2008). We also use brands as resources to build narratives of our own identities – to show our values to others (for example, when we shop for fair trade products, or animal-friendly cosmetics) (Harrison et al., 2005; Arvidsson, 2006; Aronczyk, 2013a).
The integration of promotional thinking into daily life has become so ubiquitous and matter-of-fact that we may not even be aware of it. Nonetheless, it constitutes fertile terrain for public relations to influence the ways in which society and culture are organised, and is the basis for the case that socio-cultural research on public relations is warranted. However, while the idea of a socio-cultural ‘turn’ in public relations is frequently cited, it is often deployed without further explanation. For the sake of clarity, it is worth considering what is meant in more detail. A precise definition of a ‘socio-cultural turn’ is not possible (the potential terrain for research – society and culture – is huge and varied) or desirable (definitions have a tendency to produce ‘habits of mind’ (Margolis, 1993) that can limit the scope of thinking and research). However, the following assumptions about public relations provide a good starting point for understanding the foundations of socio-cultural research and allow us to differentiate it from functional work:2
- Standpoints for understanding public relations are many and varied.
- Public relations is shaped by the cultures and societies in which it operates.
- Public relations has agency; it intervenes in society beyond the organisational context, and generates some kind of change.
- The effects of public relations work must be measured in social and cultural terms, as well as in terms of organisational interests.
- Public relations is value-driven rather than value-neutral; it has the potential to engender both power and resistance.
Characteristics of research based on these assumptions are variable, but there are some commonalities across most studies. First, the focus of empirical investigations is on revealing public relations as a ‘contingent, cultural activity that forms part of the communicative process by which society constructs its symbolic and material “reality”’ (Edwards and Hodges, 2011: 3). The changes it generates will be intentional (built into the public relations strategy) as well as unintentional (unforeseen effects of campaigns on the way we think about the world, our place within it, and our relationships with others). Analyses go beyond whether or not organisational objectives have been met, to reveal the wider social, cultural and political consequences that those objectives might have instigated.
Second, the relationship between public relations and society is mutually transformative. Public relations is shaped by its social and cultural context and is ‘a locus of transactions that produce emergent social and cultural meanings’ (Edwards and Hodges, 2011: 4), where transactions are events that happen ‘across actors who are aspects of a relationally integrated whole … the actors are the continuously emerging meaning in a trans-action’ (Simpson, 2009: 1334) In other words, because public relations stimulates transactions between societal actors, it also contributes to their meaning in relation to each other and over time. The changes to the fabric of society and culture that result are, in turn, integrated back into public relations identities, processes and practices.
Third, research tends to complicate the identity and outcomes of public relations by rejecting simplistic explanations of cause and effect and instead searching for complexity in context and practice. As Caroline Hodges and I have noted, ‘[t]he messiness of day to day practice, with its contradictions and inconsistencies, should not be regarded as a “difficulty” of public relations, but part of its ontology, of the continuous flow of transactions that is public relations reality, simultaneously producing, enacting and feeding back into, social and cultural norms’ (Edwards and Hodges, 2011: 8). Fluidity and change are often at the forefront of analyses, with rigid categorisations less common. Persistent continuities in social and cultural hierarchies remain crucial to explanations of public relations’ impact on society, but they are rarely framed as absolute.
Fourth, socio-cultural analyses of public relations engage in various ways with questions of power. They may focus on the way public relations affects the distribution of power between groups in specific contexts or across society, its capacity to empower or disempower different audiences, its use as a tool for securing or resisting power by different organisations, the ways in which different identities, behaviours and values are represented as more or less powerful in public relations discourse, or the way power operates within the profession. The focus on power is crucial because it reveals how public relations work plays into the struggles between dominant and subordinated groups that mark all societies.
Finally, socio-cultural work on public relations is concerned with how public relations is experienced and understood in people’s day-to-day lives. It ‘shifts the ontological and epistemological focus of the field towards the socially constructed nature of practice, process and outcomes’ (Edwards and Hodges, 2011: 3). Research is most often guided by an interpretive epistemology and qualitative methodologies; questions of meaning, representation and lived experience all take priority over measurement and quantification, although the latter may serve a useful purpose in some studies.
If these are the characteristics of the socio-cultural turn in public relations research, then what kinds of questions do researchers adopting this approach actually grapple with? The short answer is that they address public relations’ role in many of the long-standing analytical challenges that arise when we try to understand how societies and cultures operate. Below, I explore some of these questions in more detail. The discussion here is necessarily brief: many books have been written on each of the areas I discuss, and many different theories ventured. This is not the place to review them all in great depth. However, it is important to introduce them because they are relevant to many of the chapters that follow, and the debates about them reappear in the pages of this book in different ways.
How are Societies Structured and Organised?
Social structures are institutionalised ideological and material systems that provide the parameters for the ways we live our lives and organise ourselves into groups within society (Swingewood, 2000). They are grounded in different aspects of identity, such as our gender, class, caste, disability, ‘race’ or religion, which are constructed as more or less valuable in society (Hall, 1997a).3 In the case of gender, for example, women tend to be normatively viewed as subordinate to men; in the case of ‘race’ and ethnicity, people who are white tend to be privileged over people of colour; for class, higher levels of education, wealth and white-collar employment tend to attract higher status; and LGBT identities tend to be subordinated to heterosexuality and cisgender.4 These categorisations play a role in determining what kinds of opportunities are available to us – for example, employment, healthcare or housing. Consequently, social hierarchies are reproduced through institutional structures such as the education system, the labour market and the housing market (Bourdieu, 2005).
Structures matter because the social hierarchies that emerge from them translate into systemic, institutionalised (dis)advantage (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004; Reskin, 2012): if we have better access to material resources such as education, housing, healthcare and employment, and to symbolic resources such as status and worth, then we are likely to enjoy a life that is marked by greater wealth, privilege and choice about our life course. Good schools and housing, for example, tend to be concentrated in wealthy areas and are therefore more accessible to upper-class groups; access to good healthcare can also be determined by income and housing; senior positions in organisations tend to be occupied by white men, rather than people of colour or women. We also pass on privilege to our children, both through inherited wealth and through the norms, values and attitudes that we communicate to them in their formative years (Bourdieu, 1984). The opposite is true for those whose social position is disadvantageous: their access to material, social and cultural resources that might support social mobility for future generations is likely to be much more limited.
For socio-cultural research on public relations, the importance of structures raises questions about the degree to which public relations plays into the perpetuation of structural inequalities. On the one hand, it may reinforce social hierarchies by presenting them as taken-for-granted realities rather than socially constructed categories. It may also reinforce the legitimacy of material structures – the segregation of education, employment or healthcare by wealth, gender or age, for example – as ideal or appropriate ways of achieving social goals. On the other hand, it may be used to challenge these same things, when marginalised groups use it to object to the categorisation of their identities, or when new groups and organisations attempt to change the institutional status quo.
