Public Relations, Activism, and Social Change

Speaking Up

Kristin Demetrious

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415897068
• eBook ISBN: 9781136154782
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

Winner of the 2014 NCA PRIDE Book Award

Why are some voices louder in public debates than others? And why can't all voices be equally heard? This book draws significant new meaning to the inter-relationships of public relations and social change through a number of activist case studies, and rebuilds knowledge around alternative communicative practices that are ethical, sustainable, and effective. Demetrious offers a powerful critical description of the dominant model of public relations used in the twentieth century, showing that 'PR' was arrogant, unethical and politically offensive in ways that have severely weakened democratic process and its public standing and professional credibility. The book argues that change within the field of public relations is imminent and urgent—for us all. As the effects of climate change intensify, and are magnified by high carbon dioxide emitting industries, vigorous public debate is vital in the exploration of new ideas and action and if alternative futures are to be imagined. In these conditions, articulate and persistent publics will appear in the form of grassroots activists, asking contentious questions about risks and tabling them for public discussion in bold, inventive, and effective ways. Yet the entrenched power relations in and through public relations in contemporary industrialized society provide no certainty these voices will be heard. Following this path, Demetrious theorises an alternative set of social relations to those used in the twentieth century: public communication. Constructed from communicative practices of grassroots activists and synthesis of diverse theoretical positions, public communication is a principled approach that avoids the deep contradictions and flawed coherences of essentialist public relations and instead represents an important ethical reorientation in the communicative fields. Lastly, she brings original new perspectives to understand current and emergent developments in activism and public relations brought about through the proliferation of Internet and digital cultures.

1 What is Public Relations, Where is Public Relations?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203078440-2

Public relations activities are often equated with spin, stonewalling, distortion, manipulation, or lying. The media tend to use the term “public relations” in ways that impugn the motives of the organisation or person. When was the last time you heard public relations referred to in a way that did not imply something negative?

(Coombs and Holladay 2007, 1)

Activism is a critical social site for interpreting the cultural complexity and power relations of public relations. This chapter argues that within the domain of public relations there has not been enough reflexivity or deliberation of activism and its relationship to social change. The valorisation of public relations within its ranks, coupled with its failure to consider the complexities and role of activism in bringing unsolvable social contradictions to light, has led to insuperable problems in theory and practice, particularly with ethics and, as a corollary, its professionalisation project. This failure to consider activism from alternative, interdisciplinary and imaginative perspectives has led to deep and interrelated problems in society both difficult to identify and difficult to resolve. The chapter argues that a complex understanding of activism is central to unlocking meaningful occupational reform in public relations. In scoping this argument, it attempts to move understanding of public relations beyond the marketplace to its relations towards society as whole. This exclusion of activism, and the inflated belief that public relations “knows best” about what is in the public interest, is deeply embedded in powerful driving ideologies that have been discursively embedded and hence difficult to shift. While there are a few scholars who are trying to reposition public relations’ relationship with activism, in the main there are deep structural factors at play, which inhibit any real development in this area. In arguing the case for greater reflexivity and consideration of activism in public relations, this chapter looks at critiques of public relations as a starting point to understand the idea of “PR”. Following this, public relations history and roots will be reviewed, in particular, early encounters with social activism. Social theories to contextualise the place of public relations in modern society, including its political ideologies, will be canvassed, as will discursive structures on which its activities can be understood to be constructed. The chapter concludes that these questions are not radical, but central if public relations is to understand its impact, social reality and potential for meaningful reform.

A core criticism of public relations is that it abuses its power in modern media focused societies, in particular this affects the agency of activists to challenge business activities (Dutta 2011; Beder 1997; Demetrious and Hughes 2004). But in public relations it is not just a cavalier practitioner “expert in the art of vague PR” who is subject to the criticism or even nests of corruption that spring up in certain circumstances—rather it is the unity of “public relations” per se that struggles to convince society it has intrinsic worth. This chapter seeks to understand what public relations “is,” and why it de-legitimises activism, as a starting point for reform. It argues that existing definitions of public relations, fixed to a functionalist worldview of society, describe only an ideal of what is desirable. They ignore public relations’ potent role in relation to discourse and to identity formation, and to agency. At a broad social level, this failure to understand or describe what “PR” is and does, has meant that the extent of its power and the consequences for social life, environment and the development of ideas—have either not been realised or addressed. Acting within these limited constraints, public relations activity and behaviour have been self-serving, overconfident, unscrupulous and ideologically invasive. Hence it has failed to obtain the acknowledgments and privileges that society confers when an occupation is recognised as a specialized professional authority. This is significant, not for status or respectability, but because the establishment of professional credibility in society indicates, more broadly, that the values and ethical standards promoted by an occupational domain’s theorists, institutions and practitioners are working and being monitored and renourished. In a study of professionalism in British and American public relations, Pieczka and L’Etang argue that:

If research interest has been expounded on the study of public relations at the level of career and role (i.e., think individual and institutional levels), then the larger scale interests (i.e., looking at public relations in terms of its engagement with the state and the big social structures of society) has remained a fairly marginal interest. Typically, this has meant that when we engage with knowledge and discourse (rhetoric) in public relations, we link them to improved effectiveness of public relations or, more critically, to the issue of image and presentation. We have not, however, been very bold in looking at the type of “social realities” that professional communication experts construct in their efforts to communicate more effectively.

(2006, 271)

Breit and Demetrious discuss the idea that claims to professional status engage with various intersecting elements: discrete knowledge and expertise; ongoing education; a social benefit beyond profits, professional structures; and rules and conventions. (Shudson and Anderson 2009, 89). They found in a study of the international public relations umbrella institution Global Alliance, as well as the Public Relations Institute of Australia and Public Relations Institute of New Zealand, that: “As an instrument of trade and industry, it seems to have developed a weak ethical culture where high standards are espoused but few breaches are brought to light and sanctions for wrong-doing are rare, with only a few complaints being dealt with each year” (2010, 21). Therefore, the movement from “occupation” to “profession” represents an external validation demonstrating that the knowledge, understandings and values that support the public relations work, normatively articulate to wider social contexts.

In unpacking the argument, the chapter begins with a discussion of the history of public relations and then moves into an analysis of public relations effects and relations to power in modern society. The research trajectory, in an attempt to say new things, will draw on a two-pronged analysis: first an investigation of the surface effects or normative activity of public relations, and second: a deeper investigation of communicative structures on which public relations is founded.

A MONSTROUS INDUSTRY

Despite the fact that it is a growing and highly profitable industry sector—the public relations industry grew by just over 8 percent in 2010 (The HolmesReport 2011)—the reputation of public relations as an unscrupulous practice peddling lies, deceit and “spin” is promulgated frequently in the media. Remarking on this is Darryl Siry, CEO of a software service for PRs and journalists wrote an article called “why is Such a Valuable Industry so Frequently Maligned?” in which he comments:

Nary a week passes without some journalist or blogger writing a screed lambasting PR people or the PR industry as a whole. There are even entire blogs dedicated to bad pitches or embarrassing exchanges between journos and PR. Generally, satisfaction levels among companies using PR agencies is not great either. Yet the PR industry remains a thriving industry, estimated at $6 billion in the US alone ($7.5 billion if you include media relations services). It is also growing … and profitable. What gives?

(Siry 2010)

The schism between the dubious standing of public relations and its clear profitability as a business sector is brought into relief by social theorist Noam Chomsky who in the 2003 Canadian documentary film The Corporation refers to public relations as a “monstrous industry,” lending support to powerful corporations’ intent on reducing citizens to “mindless consumers”:

We have huge industries, public relations industry, monstrous industry, advertising and so on, which are designed from infancy to mould people into this desired pattern.

(Achbar and Abbott, 2003)

This criticism is severe and is anchored to an understanding of the importance of civil society and citizenship in democratic society. Civil society broadly refers to the promotion of citizens’ political engagement and development and “a lively, vibrant space, full of argument and disputation about matter of greatest import to its citizens” (Lyons 2001, 207). It follows then that the more robust the civil society, the more cooperative, fair and productive the society. Thus, civil society, sometimes called the third sector, is integral to the concept of democracy. It centrally positions the social importance of individuals and organised groups acting outside the state and business realms, such as trade unions, charitable groups, associations and activists in nourishing ideas and building the common good. According to Verrall (2000, 191) civil society should be characterised by “openness, overlapping memberships, voluntarism, and democratic internal organisational structures.” Citizenship as a broader concept is concerned with political inclusion, the distribution of resources and participation in democratic society. The sub-concepts of active and passive citizenship are useful to understand individuals’ responses to participation in civil society and its institutions. “Passive citizenship” describes the right or entitlement to be a member of society, without the extended role of making a contribution in public life or creating the capacity to participate or defending the rights of others. “Active citizenship” is the idea of involvement or participation in the public life of a community that nurtures a sense of belonging which in itself is seen as a civic virtue. Examples are environmental or corporate citizenship where citizens have a sense of moral obligation to issues that are important to their global communities and act as bearers of responsibilities, rather than bearers of rights (Kane 2000, 223–224). Thus for Chomsky, public relations transmogrifies the “citizen” into the “consumer” and by deeply offending these democratic ideals, is dangerous on a number of social levels.

However, Chomsky’s view of audiences as passive receivers of mass manipulation engages with the transmission model of communication, which in turn is “closely linked to the popular use of propaganda techniques in the United States and Europe in the early decades of the 20^thcentury. Indeed according to Weaver, Motion and Roper “there is a direct relationship between stimulus-response transmission theories of communication and the beliefs espoused by Lippman, Lasswell, and Bernays” (2006, 10). Moreover, underpinning these early communication research and institutional practices was a strong belief in positivism. For Lindlof and Taylor (2002, 8) positivism as it was used in communication sought to explain behaviour and provide the means for its predication and control, for example in media effects research. Deeply entrenched, positivism is a paradigm which claims that the social world is a mirror of the natural world and that a testable hypothesis will produce a social fact (Deacon et al. 1999, 4). It is associated with structural functionalism, a model of society that views it as equivalent to an organism in the natural world, in which each element, for example, church, business, state, performs a function which ultimately produces a ‘healthy’ or ‘well’ society to one degree or another (Deacon et al. 1999). However, by the second half of the twentieth century, critiques of positivism challenged its “core premises and practices” and as a result, communication researchers looked for other methods (Lindlof and Taylor 2002, 9). For Daymon and Holloway qualitative methods offer the means “To study complexity, power relations and the co-construction of meaning in a holistic or critical sense” (2011, 5). Thus for Weaver, Motion and Roper, critiques such as Chomsky’s are “surprising” given “the discrediting of transmission stimulus-response models and their replacement by transactions models in which there is “acknowledgement of the active receiver, the obstinate and recalcitrant audience” (2006, 11).

Given views like these circulate widely, recent years have seen public relations theorists attempt to “rethink,” “reconceptualise,” “reconfigure” the reputation public relations (Moloney 2006; Macnamara and Crawford 2010; McKie and Munshi 2007). Although these lengthy justifications may lead to theoretical discussion and even a narrow refashioning of ideas, they do not fix the problems in any substantive way and go largely unheard by an impervious and sceptical public. Public relations theorists Timothy Coombs and Sherry Holladay discuss why the disparaging views associated with the practices of public relations are so difficult to sway:

People tend to regard anything labelled as “public relations” with great suspicion. Colloquial usage reflects a lack of understanding of the nature and practice of public relations. We have focused on the media’s (mis)use of the term because most people do not have direct experience of the actual practice, and are dependent on the media in forming their ideas about it. The negative impression given may lead people to wonder if society would be better offentirely without public relations.

(2007, 1)

These statements, from within the domain of public relations, are signifi-cant in a range of ways. Firstly they imply that the very idea of “public relations” as an entity or a thing in the public’s mind is not formed: what it is, what it does, what it looks, feels and sounds like, and why it is of benefit to society. Secondly, they suggest that any ideas that have formed are more akin to doubts, tinged with mistrust. Lastly they suggest that the public has very few direct experiences of public relations, hence the media, largely negative, is the “authority” speaking to uninformed audiences. However, Coombs and Holladay suggest that, structurally, public relations is plainly unable to address this criticism either theoretically or in practice:

There is no magical code of conduct that will solve all ethical concerns experienced by public relations professionals. Anyone who offers the one-size-fits-all ethical solution is viewing the context of public relations too simplistically…. The best advice is that public relations practitioners must listen and utilize two-way communication to be ethical. Two-way communication sets the stage for mutual influence. You cannot be influenced by a group if you never hear it…. Ethics ultimately reside with the individual. People can choose to abuse any public communication, and public relations is no exception. The ethical outcomes of public relations actions are governed in large part by the ethics of the practitioner, not the structure of the public relations practice or well meaning codes.

(Coombs and Holladay 2007, 48)

Kevin Moloney’s book “Rethinking Public Relations” (2006) is another critical assessment of the practice of public relations and its relationship to democracy and with a plea that the domain be rethought. Moloney defines all public relations as propaganda—one sided, selective and manipulative but inevitable because it is “rooted in the pluralist, self-advantaging promotional culture associated with liberal democracy (2006, 168). Moloney challenges as idealistic, the assumptions that underpin the “Grunigian paradigm” (139). His argument reads that rather than try and fit a square peg (public relations) in a round hole (the common good) via such constructions as the two-way symmetric model of balanced communication, it is better to admit its self-serving flaws because “We cannot wish PR away” (176).

Having mapped out this territory—that is public relations is all propaganda but we have to learn to live with it—Moloney argues that with the right approach it should work, on balance, to society’s benefit. This is achieved by people’s greater capacity to practice and the development of their critical abilities to deconstruct public relations in all its forms, in other words, media literacy. These are laudable sentiments, but more work is to b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 What Is Public Relations, Where Is Public Relations?
• 2 Agents of Social Change and the Dispersal of Ideas
• 3 “No Protest Zone”: Public Relations and the Management of Activism
• 4 Worlds Collide: Public Relations, Activism and Late Modernity
• 5 New Social Realities: Grassroots Activism and Public Relations
• 6 Not Public Relations: Sustainable Communication
• Notes
• References
• Index