Strategic Silence

Public Relations and Indirect Communication

Roumen Dimitrov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317329299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Mainstream public relations overvalues noise, sound and voice in public communication. But how can we explain that while practitioners use silence on a daily basis, academics have widely remained quiet on the subject? Why is silence habitually famed as inherently bad and unethical?

Silence is neither separate from nor the opposite of communication. The inclusion of silence on a par with speech and non-verbal means is a vital element of any communication strategy; it opens it up for a new, complex and more reflective understanding of strategic silence as indirect communication.

Drawing on a number of disciplines that see in silence what public relations academics have not yet, this book reveals forms of silence to inform public relations solutions in practice and theory. How do we manage silence? How can strategic silence increase the capacity of public relations as a change agent?

Using a format of multiple short chapters and practice examples, this is the first book that discusses the concept of strategic silence, and its consequences for PR theory and practice. Applying silence to communication cases and issues in global societies, it will be of interest to scholars and researchers in public relations, strategic communications and communication studies.

Part I
Introduction

Introduction

Theoretical significance

Silence is one of the most undervalued problems and concepts in public relations. The discipline has kept silent on its silences. This has partly been because others have defined silence for it from outside – and mostly negatively. Silence as hiding something from someone. Silence as not telling the truth. Spin doctoring. There is a widespread bias against silence. Either it is considered the opposite of communication or the bad side of it. Breaking silence is good. Silencing is bad.

This book takes a different position. Silence is neither the opposite of communication nor of any of its modes such as language. Silence is neither bad nor good. It could be both. But so non-silence, speech for example, too. Communicative silence is a carrier of meaning. Structurally, it makes communication possible. Strategically, it makes indirect communication efficient. Strategic silence is the extreme form of indirect communication.

There are mounting and compelling reasons for public relations to face silence as an important professional issue, articulate it as a concept, and put it openly where it belongs in theory and practice. Because its place is not in the periphery. It is actually right in the centre of PR theory. Silence has always been there, although tacitly, in PR practice. Understanding silence is essential for our grasp of strategic communication.

Scott Cutlip named his history of public relations in the US, The Unseen Power. With that title, he wanted to uncover the hidden roots of the ‘influential role of public relations in our society’ (Cutlip, 1994, p. xi). In Public Relations Democracy, Aeron Davis discusses evidence from the UK: ‘Within the industry, public relations is considered to be most effective, when acting invisibly’. He cites a Director of Corporate Affairs: ‘Over the year, it is 50 : 50. [Fifty] percent of the job is keeping stuff out of the press. I had ten years in Whitehall, and 70 percent of press relations there was keeping stuff out of the papers’ (Davis, 2002, p. 13).

We need a PR theory, which informs the practitioner and public about the enormous power of silence. We need controlled knowledge, which harnesses that power – which provides guidance about how to recognise and use it strategically and, at the same time, deal with its social, political and moral implications.

There are theoretical and practical reasons to start the discussion today. The theoretical reasons are old and new. The older one is that nearly all public relations approaches do not adequately reflect its silent practices, including its silent tactics and strategies. Do not try to find ‘strategic silence’ or ‘silence’ in the index of any PR book. On this topic, PR theory has not caught up with a relatively recent but intense development in other disciplines – such as ethnography, anthropology, functional linguistics, political geography, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, semiotics, feminist and education studies – which have redeemed and elevated silence as a fundamental issue of human being and interaction (Dimitrov, 2015).

But the main theoretical reason relates to the profession. PR has always been more strategic than other professional communications, including marketing and advertising. This is so because its true domain is indirect communication. Strategic is when we instrumentalise one thing for another – when we are silent about the means for our goals or the goals of our means or both. Either way, it is the elephant in the room – the unsaid that is meant.

The advantage of PR in the promotional mix has always been strategic – of grand design to retail, of telling to selling. But the disadvantage of strategic work is that it is ideal, intangible and immeasurable. PR practitioners are at the strategic heart of the communication process, where there is nothing else but imaginary in flux. They are only indirectly related to financial information, customer numbers, retail figures and other empirical data, which marketers, for example, can demonstrate and impute to themselves (Dimitrov, 2008).

Silence only doubles that ethereal and ghostly shape of PR strategy. But a main argument in this book is that there is no understanding of strategy without understanding silence. And vice versa. The legitimacy and reputation of PR hinge on an informed conversation with stakeholders about the silence in PR strategy and strategy in PR silence.

Practical significance

Although silence is the most radical form of indirect communication, this does not mean that its practices are extremist and at the fringes of society. Far from this, some of the most silent, multilayered and entangled processes of communication take place right at its centre.

The book argues that this is not just a fact but also a trend. In the current and future society, the centrality of indirect, including strategic and silent communication, is on the rise.

Communication campaigns are increasingly fought not on what is said but on what is not said.

If this is true, then the role of public relations as the most indirect, including most strategic and silent of all communications will become even more critical. But then we have to learn how to deal with the implications of that trend.

Let us stop by two examples. The first is from the media industry. Content creation, which includes content marketing, native advertising and marketing journalism, is a new intermediary that has emerged between business, media and the public relations people (Hallahan, 2014). It is a response to the increasing inefficiency of advertising interruptions, paid by business. New content marketing must look like editorial content, paid by the audience.

Utilising forms of editorial policy for promotional content is strategic. That move from hard sell to soft sell is basically a move from direct to indirect communication. It is ‘stealth marketing’ (Goodman, 2006), advertising which ‘does not speak its name’ (Bednarski, 2014). The more indirect and strategic marketing becomes – utilising storytelling for pitching – the more invisible and silent, but also more irresistible and efficient, its message becomes (see Chapter 12).

This poses a double challenge to public relations. Marketing and advertising encroach on what it used to do best (publicity, telling rather that selling). And they also pull it out of its comfort and push it to compete with them in direct production and retail of content (where PR has never performed best). It is important that in their response, public relations people do not trade off their strengths for their weaknesses.

The other example is from politics. In France, the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, has rebranded the National Front. She has been at pains not to be seen as the political heir of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Strategic silences, politics of unsaying have helped her to secure continuation of the ideology without the continuation of its ideologue. The logo of the National Front and even her family name are conspicuously absent from the documents of the party. A main field of reframing her image has been anti-Semitism. Her father was notorious with his direct assaults on Jews. He once referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a ‘detail of history’ in a country that deported about 76,000 Jews during the Second World War. Marine Le Pen, in contrast, publically condemned anti-Semitism. When a party official recently denied Holocaust on camera, she instantly sacked him (Willsher, 2017).

Yet anti-Semitism is still constitutive for the National Front – as it is for any nationalist right-wing movement. But it has become more indirect. Its strategy has shifted from the said to the unsaid. In her 2017 Presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen used the silent strategy of dog-whistle anti-Semitism. She used, for example, hints and insinuations she did not have to explicitly define. She frequently evoked, for example, a Franco-Israeli telecommunications magnate, alluding to international financial conspiracies (of you know who). She also kept reminding the voters that her principle opponent, Emmanuel Macron, was a former investor banker at Rothschild, founded by the famous Jewish family. The new strategy was to attack not what Macron used to do but where he used to do it¹ (McAuley, 2017). The more mainstream the National Front has grown, the more indirect – silent that is – its communication strategies have become. More frequently it frames its messages not as outright denials but as implicit assertions.

I have conducted over 20 semi-standardised interviews with professional communicators about their use of strategic silence. I discuss most of the findings from those interviews in Parts V and VI. A striking outcome has been the importance of silence as communicative capacity – as both strategy and skillset. The career pathway of a PR practitioner starts from the entry level of learning how to talk. It only completes, gets crowned (if at all) at the advanced level of knowing how to shut up. It takes lots of professional experience and practical wisdom to evolve one’s communication skills from ‘making your voice heard’ to ‘noise curation’ and ‘not giving a story a leg’. Only few communicators reach that highest level of professionalism.

This is not only a problem of biography, of personal learning as climbing the ladder of indirect communication up to the mastery of silence. It is a historical, generational problem too. The professional cohorts have changed. The interviewees shared that 20 years ago their main concern was to teach their clients how to talk. And most of those clients proved to be quick learners. Today, the problem is rather the opposite one. Communicators are now trying to educate their clients about when to stop and how not to talk.

In the PR industry the ability to do nothing and credibility to say ‘No’ to bosses and clients has become the most valuable – and highest renumerated – professional asset.

Strategy is proactive, not reactive. Strategy ponders many steps in advance, not only the next move. Strategy influences the questions, not the answers in the public consciousness. Influencing the answers is a noisy battle. Influencing the questions is fought in silence.

Overview of the book

The book is divided into five distinctive parts, separated from the Introduction (Part I) and Conclusions (Part VII).

Part II (Chapters 1–3) critically examines the silence of public relations about its silences. How does the European and American culture influence professional choices in PR? Why is silence banned in the positivist tradition? How do new media developments relate to silence? Why is silence not a product that PR can easily pitch and sell? And who is silent and who is not in the collaboration and conflict between journalists and communicators? What happens when we include the public in this equation? It concludes with an analysis of the media-source relations in story-telling, where the PR silences are only a small fragment of a bigger picture of silence and invisibility within the communications professions. PR practitioners and journalists, for example, are more visible to each other than to their publics.

Part III (Chapters 4 and 5) explores elements of a theory of strategy and silence in the works of the scholars whose ideas have mostly influenced this book. They are Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Norman Fairclough and, to a lesser extent, Jürgen Habermas. None of them has formulated an explicit theory of silence, let alone strategic silence. But all of them have detected and, to a degree, conceptualised the intrinsic – if not identical – relation between strategy and silence.

Part IV (Chapters 6–10) builds a model of indirect communication, which, like a ladder, moves from lower to higher steps of complexity. The ladder of indirectness does not put any universal claim. It only suits the particular goals of this book. Yet it conceptually prepares the discussion of selected strategic silences in Part V. The ladder of indirectness visualises, among others, two critical ideas. The first is that any degree of indirectness is mediated by silence, although of a different type. And the second idea is that the higher the degree of indirectness, the more silent – but also richer and polyvalent – communication becomes. The paradox of silence here is that more talkative and eloquent it appears at the top of the ladder, the more difficult it becomes to identify it as such. But exactly this makes silence most efficient and strategic.

Part V (Chapters 11–18) defines strategic silences in plural, not in singular. There is no single silence or taxonomy of silences. Silences are relational categories, which we can only define relative to non-silences. As strategies, silences are highly situational and contextual. They usually work in package with other, more or less complex strategies. There are many strategic silences such as discursive and non-discursive, engaging and disengaging, explicit and implicit, complicit and defiant, and normalising and transforming. From my initial picks, I have selected only those, which – at various rungs on the ladder of indirectness – are trending and perhaps indicative of future developments in PR strategy.

Part VI (Chapters 19 and 20) interrogates silence beyond strategy – as communicative capacity. Strategies, of course, are also part of that capacity. But other, equally important elements are the inter-organisational system of knowledge and professional skillset. In the new communication environment, which is crowded with agents clambering for public attention, not shouting louder but noise curation is increasingly the way of making it possible to be heard. In the digital 24/7 media cycle, PR as choreography of public attention involves not only attracting and keeping but also deflecting and diverting the attention of publics, an increasing...