Public Relations and Sustainable Citizenship

Representing the Unrepresented

Debashish Munshi, Priya Kurian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000224405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

This book examines how public relations might re-imagine itself as an instrument of "sustainable citizenship" by exploring alternative models of representing and building relationships with and among marginalised publics that disrupt the standard discourses of public relations. It argues that public relations needs to situate itself in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it.

Interlacing critical public relations with a theoretical fabric woven with strands of postcolonial histories, indigenous studies, feminist studies, and political theory, the book brings out the often-unseen processes of relationship building that nurtures solidarity among historically marginalized publics. The book is illustrated with global cases of public relations as sustainable citizenship in action across three core elements of the earth – air, water, and land. In each of the cases, readers can see how resistance movements, not necessarily aligned with any specific organization or interest group, are seeking to change the status quo of a world increasingly defined by exploitation, overconsumption, sectarianism, and faux nationalism.

This challenging book will be of interest to students and scholars of not only public relations but also the broader social and management sciences who are interested in issues of environmental and social justice.

1 Theorizing public relations and sustainable citizenship

Is the ‘public’ in public relations really public? In taking a critical look at the discourses of public relations, we have consistently found a hierarchy of publics ranging from dominant elite publics that are relentlessly promoted to many who are not represented at all (Munshi & Kurian, 2005, 2007). If indeed, as we argue, public relations does not engage with a multitude of publics, or represent the unrepresented, can it ever play a role in grappling with the pressing issues facing global citizenry around the air we breathe, the water we imbibe, and the land on which we live? Each of the immediate issues affecting the wellbeing of the planet and its people revolves around seemingly intractable socio-political conflicts arising out of unequal dynamics of power. This has been particularly evident most recently in the huge gaps between the experiences of well-paid executives and poor migrant workers, the wealthy and the vulnerable, the healthy and those with underlying medical conditions, during the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus, COVID-19, alongside the national lockdowns to control the proliferation of the virus.

To truly live up to the ‘public’ in its name, public relations needs to situate itself “in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it” (Munshi & Kurian, 2016, p. 405). In this book, we look at how public relations might re-imagine itself as the practice of not merely citizenship but of what we call “sustainable citizenship” (Kurian, Munshi, & Bartlett, 2014; Munshi & Kurian, 2015). To do so, we first interrogate current conceptions of public relations and envision an alternative conceptual trajectory for it.

Re-imagining public relations

Constituting a relatively small sub-set of communication scholarship, the academic field of public relations has adopted many different approaches and has been conceived in a variety of ways. These include the pursuit of public relations of functional organizational goals articulated in, for example, ‘Excellence Theory’ (Grunig, 1992; Grunig, Grunig, & Dozier, 2002) and the ‘Comparative Excellence Framework’ (Vercic & Zerfass, 2016). These views live up to Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) widely cited characterization of public relations as the “management of communication between an organization and its publics” (p. 6, emphasis added) and Cutlip, Center, and Broom’s (2000) focus on only those publics on whom an organization’s “success or failure depends” (p. 6). Much of the organization-centred public relations revolves around corporate interests, including building a corporation’s reputation and minimizing risk to this reputation (Hutton, Goodman, Alexander, & Genest, 2001; Bailey, 2018) by lobbying government and other policy-making agencies, facilitating stories in the mass media and social media, managing crisis situations, building community relations, and promoting corporate social responsibility. At the other end of the spectrum is a view of public relations that challenges its functional attributes (Heath, Toth, & Waymer, 2009; Leitch & Motion, 2010) and theorizes public relations as a rhetorical and discursive device rather than merely a managerial function. The rhetorical approach sees public relations as symbolic and open to many different interpretations, thereby potentially allowing opportunities for organizations to co-construct meanings with their stakeholders (e.g., Heath, 2001, 2005; Ihlen & Heath, 2018; Ihlen, 2008). However, the centrality of message producers is evident in both functional and non-functional approaches to public relations with an actor or a collective of actors furthering specific interests through a series of messages and relationship-building exercises. As Moloney and McGrath (2020) observe, public relations

is weak propaganda; it is persuasive communication for competitive advantage. This is as true when PR is undertaken by a cancer charity as it is when PR is employed by a global technology company. Public relations is fundamentally about the rhetorical expression of a private self-interest, but it takes place in public life…. Public relations is advocacy and counter-advocacy; it is adversarial rather than communitarian; it is argumentative rather than consensual; it seeks to create influence for its producers.

(p. 148)

This reading of public relations as it is largely played out is very astute. Moloney and McGrath (2020) expose the pretence of public relations about its self-proclaimed attributes such as “mutual understanding, strategic communication, relationships and reputation management” (p. 148). They argue that the fact that public relations has a poor public image generally and is seen by the wider public as mere ‘spin’ is evidence of how far removed it is from either developing trust or conducting two-way symmetrical communication as several scholars and practitioners would have us believe (Moloney & McGrath, 2020).

Critical public relations, which has made rapid advances in recent years, has systematically interrogated public relations’ lopsided power equations (see, e.g., Bardhan & Weaver, 2011; Curtin & Gaither, 2007; Demetrious, 2013; Dutta & Pal, 2010; Edwards, 2014); discussed its ethical deficit (Toledano, 2018); and outlined its insistence on furthering the interests of some publics over others (Munshi & Kurian, 2005). This area of scholarship has been on a continuing path of what McKie and Munshi (2007) call “reconfiguring public relations” to orient critical public relations towards improving the understanding of public relations “through more open approaches” that are not agenda-driven (L’Etang, 2005, p. 523) and are rooted in a variety of contexts, including economic, social, cultural, environmental, local, and global ones.

The diversity of approaches, as Edwards (2011) says, needs to be understood as “positions on a series of continua that address different ontological characteristics of PR” (p. 20). She outlines six “paradigmatic assumptions that underpin the scholarly approaches currently found in PR” (Edwards, 2011, p. 14). The functional ones of these are that the organizational context is very important; that “effective PR equates to ‘well-managed’ communications” that take care of an organization’s interests and reputation; and that publics are defined in relation to the “organization’s strategic communications interests” (Edwards, 2011, pp. 14–16). The non-functional assumptions are that public relations is not just about the organizational context; that it “is shaped by the cultures and societies in which it operates”; and that “it has the potential to engender both power and resistance” (Edwards, 2011, pp. 16–19). In essence, whether functional or non-functional, public relations is largely seen to be about individual or collective actors building relationships to further their own individual, organizational, or social group interests or resist the interests of others they see as adversarial.

It is in acknowledging the resistance of actors to dominant interests that activism is increasingly seen as a form of public relations (e.g., Coombs & Holladay, 2012; Curtin, 2016; Demetrious, 2013; Holtzhausen, 2014; Sommerfeldt, Kent, & Taylor, 2012; Toledano, 2016). Public relations has had, as L’Etang (2016) says, “a complicated relationship with activism because historically activism justified organisational investment in PR services and personnel” (p. 207), with activists seen by corporate managers in oppositional terms. Indeed, three decades ago, Grunig (1989) suggested that “activist groups create conflict between organizations and their environments,” which, in turn, “creates the need for public relations” (p. 4). Since then, as more pluralistic views of public relations have evolved, activism has been described as “modern public relations” with an effort to unearth the “generally unseen contributions of activists to the development of public relations” (Coombs & Holladay, 2014, p. 63); indeed Moloney and McKie (2016) have even noted an “activist turn” in public relations (p. 154). Activism as public relations itself has many layers. These range from Berger and Reber’s (2005) positioning of activism within organizational contexts, where public relations professionals work within corporate institutions to make sure such institutions are guided by ethics and public good, to Adi and Moloney’s (2012) conception of “protest PR,” which persuades policy-makers “via occupations, demonstrations, strikes, public speaking, and other forms of non-violent and violent protest” (cited in Adi, 2019, p. 4) to bring about changes in legal and regulatory frameworks for policy change.

We acknowledge the work of activists and scholars in framing resistance as part of the ethical repertoire of public relations practices. However, unlike both functional and non-functional approaches to public relations, we take the emphasis away from actors who strategically deploy communication to manage their own interests or resist others’ interests. Instead, we focus on the action/s of resistance that spark the organic emergence of alliances among publics fighting for justice and equity as public relations. In this sense, we look beyond public relations as “discourse technology” (Motion & Letich, 1996, 2016) in which “public relations practitioners are … discourse technologists who play a central role in the maintenance and transformation of discourse” (Motion & Letich, 1996, p. 298). By moving away from trying to find the source of public relations discourse – the actor or technologist representing an organization or an activist group – we shift our attention to the enactment of resistance and the discourses that emerge when unrepresented publics make their voices heard. This is not to say that actors are not important – they obviously are, but relationship building is not just about actors looking to centre their own interests in building strategic alliances with some publics and shunning others. In particular, the building of discourses of resistance by alliances and networks that attempt to challenge the exercise of unjust power by elite, dominant publics (often elite, dominant actors) is what we call public relations as sustainable citizenship. This insurgent form of public relations communicates the representation of the unrepresented.

Our focus on action as the embodiment of the collective pursuit of creating space in the public sphere is illuminated by the light refracted through three lenses of political thought: Historian Ranajit Guha’s (1983) representation of the colonial history of India by writing about the acts of resistance of peasants who, though invisible in history, were by no means passive onlookers; Indigenous education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2012) re-orientation of research to be able to tell the counter stories of resistance of colonized Indigenous communities; and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s (1958) assertion that actions of resistance have intrinsic worth – they are not merely a means to an end but also an end in themselves. In other words, the means themselves are an expression of the power of resistance. We blend the rays of these thoughts with our own work in Feminist Futures (Bhavnani, Foran, Kurian, & Munshi, 2016) in which we draw attention to the “movements of determined resistance” (p. xxii), often led by women in conjunction with Indigenous communities and other historically marginalized publics:

Indeed, global and grassroots resistance movements that deeply comprehend women and gender inequalities and discourses remain humanity’s best hope for a future that is inclusive, diverse, just, equitable and democratic, one that is based on a recognition of the dignity of all lives, human and non-human.

(p. xxii)

Addressing imbalances of power has been the locus of study for subaltern historiographers such as Guha (1982, 1983). And there are lessons in their approaches for any project on re-conceptualizing public relations. Just as mainstream public relations tends to be equated with representing elite message producers and helping them build relationships with publics that matter to them, mainstream history presents a record of epochal events through the eye...