Experiencing Public Relations

International Voices

Elizabeth Bridgen, Dejan Vercic, Dejan Verčič

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138632431
• eBook ISBN: 9781351803090
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Experiencing Public Relations examines the everyday experiences of PR practitioners in order to better understand how public relations is perceived by those outside and within the field. The book aims to provoke debate around the nature of public relations by looking at how it is defined at a theoretical level, compared to how it is lived and represented in the real world.

Chapters feature work from some of the world's leading public relations scholars. They cover a diverse range of subjects, such as representations of PR in fiction and film, terrorist use of public relations, the impact of social media on this medium and a study of 'dirty work' within the PR industry. The book also explores international PR practices, presenting analysis from contributors based in Australia, Germany, India, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, UAE, UK, USA and Venezuela.

Experiencing Public Relations goes beyond the 'frontstage' scholarship of public relations to bring together stories of PR in daily life, revealing how influential theories work out in practice and translate into different cultural and social contexts. This book will provide researchers, professionals and students with a vital perspective on the inner workings of public relations today.

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INTRODUCTION

Experiencing public relations

Elizabeth Bridgen and Dejan Verčič

Public relations defines itself as a strategic management function – that is how it wants to perceive itself and how it wants others to see it. Public relations managers are generally knowledgeable and experienced; they understand how communication fits into broader leadership behaviour and, for that reason, they belong to the dominant coalition in their organization – in other words, they are among those people at the top who make the real decisions. This is the picture students get from their public relations textbooks, this is how practitioners tell their ‘war stories’ at conventions and how they grade their best cases for public relations awards and competitions. But this is, in the words of the sociologist Erving Goffman, the public relations frontstage.

In his book Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman developed a metaphor of theatrical production to describe social behaviour. We all live in a duality of frontstage and backstage behaviour:¹ we wear comfortable clothes at home, and dress up when we leave the house. We have parts of our houses which are presentable to our guests (and usually tidy) and we have rooms which are generally messier and into which we usually don’t invite guests (unless we are or we want to get intimate with them). We talk, behave and interact differently in backstage than in frontstage. Frontstage is a public place, backstage is private.

The difference between frontstage and backstage is the foundation of impression management processes at the level of individuals, and of reputation management at the level of organizations. Goffman describes these actions as the creation of ‘working consensus’ – with social actors deciding how to present themselves among each other and to the world at large. By the same token, there are public images of public relations as an aspirational profession, and there are privately experienced practices of public relations. The vast majority of public relations practitioners are not strategists; they don’t hold managerial positions and they don’t belong to the dominant coalition.

It is part of growing up to understand these differences, and recognize the nuances between what is shown and thus seen, and what is absent or hidden. In traditional crafts and professions, there is a process of apprenticeship and specialization on which trainees and students spend years, not only to complement their knowledge with practical skills, but also to see ‘how things are done’ in ‘the real world’, often meaning that there are dirty details to every big endeavour. It takes time, experience and inculturation to fully appreciate the importance of backstage in any theatrical production, public relations included.

At the 2015 EUPRERA (European Public Relations Education and Research Association) autumn congress in Oslo, where the concept for this book was conceived, a quick and unscientific count of the papers presented revealed that over 80 per cent of them focussed on the frontstage of public relations – the theory, practice and benefits of public relations. At the conference academics and postgraduate students presented new business models and theories exploring management behaviour. They discussed the strategic development of major corporations, critiqued business school curricula and presented their analysis of what organizations said and did. The focus was on ‘big events’ (such as crises or change) or the work carried out by senior management (or by anonymous junior staff on their behalf). All this scholarship, while often thorough and well-intentioned, only discussed public relations or communications as a ‘thing’ or in the abstract; its worth or value was taken for granted. The lives and experiences of those carrying out the work of public relations, the negative or problematic side of public relations, the obscure and the unusual (from a Western perspective) and the everyday work of the practitioner was hardly discussed.

So after listening to, writing about and contributing to articles, journals, conferences and books about the frontstage of public relations, we decided to ask our colleagues to write about the backstage of public relations. This would not only be at the individual level (for instance, what work looks like at the bottom of a hierarchical pyramid), but also on an organizational and institutional level and from both a national and international perspective. We were interested in finding out about some of the practices that are constitutive parts of public relations and that are usually unseen or (even purposefully) hidden.

Falconi (2006) estimates that between 2.3 and 4.5 million people work in public relations worldwide, with 83,000 in the UK (Public Relations Consultants’ Association, 2016) and 400,000 in the United States (Falconi, ibid.). All these individual practitioners experience public relations in different ways and carry different understandings of the work they do. They also have their own strategies and models – not the grand models of academic papers but models and strategies which give them a way of surviving the workplace or carrying out the work they are tasked to do (something which both Williams and Willis discuss in their chapters).

The stories of these people remain largely untold in favour of the ‘big theories’ or the frontstage of public relations. However, these are the people who try to bring these ‘big theories’ – and the everyday plans and campaigns that accompany them – to life. They are also the people who are told to carry out the unpleasant side of public relations or who carry out the everyday, the trivial or irrelevant within the industry.

If you, as a reader, want proof that the backstage is rarely discussed in scholarly work, as an experiment, we ask you to look at the programme for a public relations conference or the table of contents of a public relations textbook. Essentially, everyday life in public relations is largely ignored in favour of the scholarship that attempts to position public relations as a ‘serious’ discipline. There will be many chapters and papers on public relations strategy and crisis communications but few on ‘stunts’, consumer public relations or everyday office life. Furthermore, you are unlikely to hear a non-judgemental paper or read a neutral chapter on unethical public relations or public relations for a controversial organisation. But there are junior and senior public relations practitioners carrying out communications roles within these ‘unethical’ companies, often trying to do the best job that they can. Why do we never think to write about their lives?

The ‘turn’ towards a more critical style of public relations scholarship over the last two decades has increased the number of articles, papers and book chapters exploring the experience of individuals in public relations (this has often been from a feminist perspective – e.g. Tsetsura, 2012; Fröhlich and Peters, 2007) but as Jelen-Sanchez observes in Chapter 2, quantitative research dominates in key public relations journals and therefore overlooks individual experience or that which cannot be explained in numerical form.

As lecturers in public relations, we were aware that students entering the field still had little idea what to expect from a public relations workplace. Essentially, they knew what they were meant to do but not how they were meant to ‘act’ or how their colleagues would behave. Who prepared them for the brainstorming sessions described by Willis which were routed in anarchy and ‘inappropriate’ behaviour? How did they navigate the demands of their employers and the need to act as a ‘professional’ when the tasks they were asked to do were impossible? How would the ethical models they learnt by rote for exams help them when faced with an ethical dilemma? And what can we learn from the fictional accounts of public relations life described by Young and Fitch in their chapters? Potentially, these are the only representations of ‘backstage’ public relations that practitioners (or their family) will ever see. The problem is that when these representations are inaccurate, we believe that this affects how people view public relations practice. But what we need to ask ourselves is this: Are such fictional representations really inaccurate or do they simply show the part of public relations life that we don’t want anyone to see?

But everyday life in public relations goes beyond the lived experience of practitioners. The less-than-palatable side of public relations (which is also rarely discussed in public relations writing) forms a major part of the lives of some employees. Public relations practitioners carry out the work that is ‘dirty’; they work for unpalatable organizations and on dubious campaigns and they use language to manipulate, which is something Bridgen discusses in her chapter. The fact that this puts the new and rather fragile business of public relations in an unfavourable light doesn’t mean that this aspect shouldn’t be discussed. Is the ‘unpleasant’ side of public relations and the communication devices described by Dhanesh and Simons too horrid to write about? Or does it simply not tally with the ‘professional project’ of public relations? While public relations scholarship has moved on, making radical public relations writing more acceptable (as described by Ihlen in his chapter), radical subjects are having a tougher time breaking through.

Communication, and thus public relations, constitutes organizations and societies. Similar to lecturers and writers, practitioners select what to show to each other and to the world at large as ‘proper public relations’ (frontstage). Organizational and societal observers are generally blind to the essential functions performed by public relations in organizations and societies worldwide; we are illiterate when it comes to understanding what public relations means to, and in, our contemporary media and networked environments. Spokespeople, as Rensburg discusses in her chapter, talk to us for and instead of organizational leaders, often creating parallel communicative realities to those we experience in everyday life. Post-truth and post-factual worlds can only exist in communication, and no matter how much professional societies try to dissociate the practice from these neologisms, the fact is that the practices they denote are more often than not produced by active engagement of public relations people. Movements from literal to visual, from rational to emotional communication are driven by research showing that – it works!

The totality of world politics, from terrorism to the rise of China, is incomprehensible if we don’t recognize the role of public relations in these processes and that is why the chapters by Molleda, Suárez, Athaydes, Sadi, Hernandez and Valencia, and by Hung-Baesecke and Xu, are so valuable as they discuss public relations in particular countries from an ‘insider’s’ point of view, rather than relying on an ‘outsider’ to give their perspective. No wonder public relations has entered fiction and popular culture, giving public relations practitioner characters the leading roles and their own movies and TV series (e.g. Absolutely Fabulous, Scandal, Sex and the City, Thank You for Smoking, The Candidate, The Queen, The West Wing and Wag the Dog) – although many commentators from within public relations protest that these cultural artefacts falsify the reality of the ‘profession’ and give it a bad ‘image’. Public relations is all this and much more. With Facebook and Google developing technology for augmented reality, we as practitioners, academics and students are prepared to be that public relations community that will be one of the first to exploit new opportunities to mould human lives.

In developing this book and inviting authors to contribute, we were not trying to be ‘objective’ and present a totality of experiences in public relations; something like that would be impossible anyway. We were looking for colleagues who are interested in the hidden and overlooked parts of the practice. We envisioned that this edited volume would be interesting to graduate students in public relations, corporate communications, marketing and strategic communication, and related disciplines like organizational behaviour and management. It could also help inexperienced as well as seasoned practitioners make sense of their personal feelings about their jobs and what they see at work. We were, therefore, working towards a complementary reading to the mainstream public relations literature which is predominantly about the good side of public relations; we find it to be a sign of the maturity of a practice that it can also confess and articulate its darker and muddier sides. Humans and our actions are not perfect, and telling people that they can expect only the best in their lives may make them miserable later down the road. So, to be clear: public relations, like any human endeavour, is also a bullshit job, business function and social practice.

But as lecturers and teachers, we are meliorist by definition: we believe that by empirical and theoretical investigation we can better understand and interact with the world around us. By digging into the dirt, you can obtain valuable insights into how things operate. This knowledge is useful for orientation in the universe, not only in its physical landscape, but also within our heads. Students and practitioners alike will be better off being familiar with the different features of public relations, and it is by admitting the not-so-palatable ones that we can aspire to improve them. It is areas such as this – truth, post-truth and information warfare (subversion included) – which are discussed by Nothhaft and Samoilenko.

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans (sang John Lennon in Beautiful Boy). This book is about the public relations that happens while managers are busy making their strategic plans.

Notes

1.Goffman also talks about ‘off-stage’, but we can forget about that for the purpose of this introduction.

Bibliography

Falconi, T.M. (2006) ‘How big is public relations (and why does it matter)?’ http://www.instituteforpr.org/wp-content/uploads/Falconi_Nov06.pdf [Accessed 25 February 2017].

Fröhlich, R. and Peters, S. (2007) ‘PR “bunnies” caught in the agency ghetto? Gender stereotypes, organizational factors, agencies and women’s careers in PR’. Journal of Public Relations Research, 19(3), pp. 229–254.

Goffman, E. (1959) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Public Relations Consultants Association (2016) ‘PR census reveals that the PR industry is worth £129bn’, http://news.prca.org.uk/pr-census-2016-reveals-that-the-pr-industry-is-worth-129bn [Accessed 1 February 2017].

Tsetsura, K. (2012) ‘A struggle for legitimacy: Russian women secure their professional identities in public relations in a hyper-sexualized patriarchal workplace’, Public Relations Journal, 6(1), pp. 1–21.

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EXPERIENCING PUBLIC RELATIONS AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE

What do scholarly views and published research tell us?

Alenka Jelen-Sanchez

Int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: experiencing public relations
• 2 Experiencing public relations as an academic discipline : What do scholarly views and published research tell us?
• 3 Dealing in facts
• 4 Confessions of a public relations practitioner: Hidden life in the open plan office
• 5 Personality in practice
• 6 Public relations as ‘dirty work’
• 7 The anatomy of a spokesperson in South Africa: Sometimes a lie is kinder than a truth (African proverb)
• 8Babylon
• 9 Public relations in fiction
• 10 Social media and the rise of visual rhetoric: Implications for public relations theory and practice
• 11 From propaganda to public diplomacy: The Chinese context
• 12 Influences of postcolonialism over the understanding and evolution of public relations in Latin America
• 13 Fanning the flames of discontent: Public relations as a radical activity
• 14 Subversion practices: From coercion to attraction
• 15 Analysing terrorist use of public relations: ISIS and Al Qaeda
• 16 EPILOGUE: How people experience public relations: Applying Martin Buber’s phenomenology to ‘PR tree’
• Index