Popular Culture and Social Change

The Hidden Work of Public Relations

Kate Fitch, Judy Motion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138702806
• eBook ISBN: 9781351788243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Popular Culture and Social Change: The Hidden Work of Public Relations argues the complicated and contradictory relationship between public relations, popular culture and social change is a neglected theoretical project. Its diverse chapters identify ways in which public relations influences the production of popular culture and how alternative, often community-driven conceptualisations of public relations work can be harnessed for social change and in pursuit of social justice.

This book opens up critical scholarship on public relations in that it moves beyond corporate understandings and perspectives to explore alternative and eclectic communicative cultures, in part to consider a more optimistic conceptualisation of public relations as a resource for progressive social change. Fitch and Motion began with an interest in identifying the ways in which public relations both draws on and influences the production of popular culture by creating, promoting and amplifying particular narratives and images. The chapters in this book consider how public relations creates popular cultures that are deeply compromised and commercialised, but at the same time can be harnessed to advocate for social change in supporting, reproducing, challenging or resisting the status quo.

Drawing on critical and sociocultural perspectives, this book is an important resource for researchers, educators and students exploring public relations theory, strategic communication and promotional culture. It investigates the entanglement of public relations, popular culture and social change in different social, cultural and political contexts – from fashion and fortune telling to race activism and aesthetic labour – in order to better understand the (often subterranean) societal influence of public relations activity.

1 Popularity, popular culture and public relations

Judy Motion and Kate Fitch

Introduction

Popular culture enlivens and enriches our everyday experiences in ways that are transient or lasting, pleasurable or distasteful, cool or uncool. It offers a contemporary cultural space where we learn the narratives, images and activities that are popular and meaningful for society. Behind the scenes, public relations efforts create, promote and amplify these popular culture experiences. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, but generally the efforts of public relations, which are organised around profit, remain invisible or subtle. Perhaps, for this reason, the relationship between public relations and popular culture is a neglected theoretical project. We are interested in identifying the ways in which public relations influences the production of popular culture – from covert, shady attempts to insert commercial or political imperatives into our everyday lives to a range of progressive challenges that seek to undermine the existing moral and social order.

Public relations here is conceived of as a complicated and pluralistic communicative and promotional endeavour. It is a set of practices rather than a narrowly defined occupation. Within a popular culture context, public relations can also operate as a transformational catalyst in its role as a socialisation machine, a normalising, legitimising mechanism and a mode of resistance that can be harnessed for resistance and contestation. It is involved in the production of culture and is simultaneously part of culture, and therefore not neutral (Edwards, 2015). Along with other critical scholars, we are interested in the institutional structures and processes through which knowledge is constructed (Pal & Dutta, 2008). We therefore attempt to rethink cultural and social competencies in public relations in relation to popular culture concerns. Such concerns offer insights into the ways in which popular culture may be mobilised to achieve positive social change. Thus, studying the relationship between popular culture and public relations will make a significant contribution to understanding how social and cultural practices take shape and the potential for transformation.

Popularity and popular culture

An exploration of what ‘popular’ means and how popularity occurs is a critical starting point for making sense of the relationship between popular culture and public relations. It is generally understood that if something is popular, it is widely liked and readily accessible. Definitions of ‘popular’ have evolved from notions of social power, political democracy and cultural production to notions of accessibility and likeability (Shiach, 2005). According to Shiach, contemporary definitions of ‘popular’ include: ‘of the general public, suited to the needs, means, tastes or understandings of the general public, having general currency [and] commonly liked or approved’ (2005, p. 61). These definitional shifts suggest a de-politicisation of the concept; however, Hall (1980) contends that ideological messages are encoded into popular texts, which we then interpret through the lens of our existing ideologies. Following Hall’s line of reasoning, popularisation is inherently politicised and culturally constructed during meaning production and sense-making processes. In summation, ‘the popular is political and sometimes pleasurable’ (Jenkins, McPherson, & Shattuc, 2002, p. 23).

Popular culture integrates these notions of the popular, particularly around social power and cultural production. It is a multi-faceted, nebulous, catch-all term applied to the mass consumption of contemporary ideas, values and practices circulating within particular cultures. It is expressed through various modes such as entertainment, music, sports, media, fashion, technology and in our everyday lives. Popular culture counters or stands in opposition to high or elite culture. At the centre of its genealogy, popular culture has a focus on ‘the everyday, the intimate, the immediate’ (Jenkins et al., 2002, p. 3) and a concern with collective and egalitarian imperatives. The significance of insinuating the popular, the ordinary, the things that happen in our everyday lives, according to Stewart (2007) ‘lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible’ (p. 3). She suggests that ordinary affects are more compelling than ideologies and more complex than symbolic meanings. This aligns with Williams’ (1958) contention that culture is ‘ordinary’. For civil society groups and activists, popular culture is an ordinary or everyday site for the production of ‘new language, meanings and visions of the future’ and ‘a place to build community networks, and organizational models’ (Duncombe, 2002, p. 8).

For public relations, popular culture is both a strategic resource for connecting with society and the product of promotional efforts. Gray argues that approaches to understanding promotional culture are too often reductive, focusing on exploitation, propaganda and superficiality rather than recognising its contributions to artistic endeavours (2010, p. 307). The blurred distinctions between popular culture and promotional culture have opened up opportunities for public relations to commodify and popularise our social, everyday practices while simultaneously normalising celebrity and entertainment cultures. However, these public relations efforts to popularise and commodify culture are not without resistance. Like all cultural sites, popular culture is a site for macro and micro politics. Popular culture is therefore a type of nexus, integrating everyday experiences with political concerns about collective, participatory and egalitarian imperatives and mass commodification and consumption. This nexus forms the focus of our interrogations into the relationships between public relations and popular culture.

Much of the scholarship on public relations in popular culture has explored the various ways in which public relations is represented, primarily in television and film and, more rarely, in novels. However, authors variously point to the ‘failure’ of such representations to portray the reality of the industry as if there is an external and stable reality (Fitch, 2015). In order to reframe the debate, we are interested in popular culture because of its potential for transgression and resistance. Precisely because popular culture is concerned with the everyday, and entangled with consumption and production, engaging with the intersection of popular culture and public relations allows us to explore the role of public relations in society in terms of producing, extending, and contesting dominant narratives that frame knowledge and understanding.

Popular culture and social change

This book is about how popular culture is mobilised through both professional and community-orientated public relations activities to influence and/or undermine social change. We acknowledge justified criticism of an assumed association with dissent and left-wing causes (see, for example, Moloney & McKie, 2016), but we are interested in a progressive social change that adopts social and environmental justice perspectives. What we mean by this is that our approach emphasises rights, fairness and equity. The public relations practices we examine here may be institutional efforts in defence of social and environmental progress or deployed by civil society to contest policies and practices that contravene social and environmental justice expectations. These forms of social change embrace activism and advocacy to advance issues of equity and justice.

Popular culture has the potential to be a critical, transformative and emancipatory space (Jenkins et al., 2002), in that it offers a sense-making space for citizens to represent and voice concerns in creative and ludic ways. Cultural forms of social critique are promoted to advocate for social, cultural and environmental justice. In particular, instances of cultural and creative resistance shape our concerns about how public relations can engage with popular and contemporary culture to change dominant political and social structures (Duncombe, 2002; Edwards & Hodges, 2011).

Our intent here is to understand how various forms of public relations attempt to outplay one another by rethinking public relations through the lens of cultural production and primarily focusing on how public relations is mobilised. The task of reconceptualising public relations has fallen largely to critical scholars who attempt to reimagine how public relations may act as a force for positive change in society. Public relations interventions in popular culture may offer an ideal opportunity to think through the complexities of various pursuits of social and cultural authority, integrity and justice; to discern multiple ways in which the dominance of sexism, racism and anti-environmentalism may be undermined and to understand how the importance and value of our everyday experiences may be reasserted within popular culture.

Public relations as hidden work

The work of public relations is often hidden, invisible, marginalised or behind the scenes; for example, Cutlip (1994) called public relations ‘the unseen power’ and Hartley (1992) referred to it as ‘hidden work’ (Fitch, 2017). Bourne (2016) argues that public relations works in the background to manage public conversations through, for example, media training of executives and framing or ‘spinning’ unpopular actions in ways designed to increase public acceptance or at least mitigate the damage. Similarly, Edwards notes that the ‘behind the scenes’ work of public relations, which primarily focuses on targeting journalists, means that there has been limited scholarly investigation into its cultural intermediary role or, subsequently, recognition of its quest for symbolic power, or of the ways in which public relations is intimately involved in meaning making and identity formation (2012, p. 439; see also L’Etang, 2006). Hobbs (2019) has documented the extensive resources lobbyists in the Australian mining and energy sectors draw on to develop emotive and targeted campaigns and manage issues ‘under the radar’. We therefore do not always see the ways in which some public relations activity advances neoliberal agendas and the efforts that go into shaping sense and meaning making.

In a recent Australian Royal Commission, the banking sector was heavily criticised for its heavy investment in ‘marketing their good social deeds’ through glossy social impact, corporate responsibility and sustainability reports as their corporate conduct and governance was held to account (Alberici, 2018). Doing good (in social and environmental terms) did not negate the capacity to do bad. In the Australian banking sector, this included overcharging customers and even charging fees to dead customers. Writing on public relations and environmental risks, Demetrious described ‘activities [that] were subterraneous and unseen by the so called “publics” that PR sought to influence and control’ (2016, p. 101). Some of this activity falls firmly within the domain of public relations, where the banks advance a neoliberal, profit-driven agenda and paradoxically aim to (re)frame their organisations within social and environmental agendas. These agendas co-exist.

We are not seeking to redeem public relations but rather to understand how public relations, as a set of social and cultural practices, is both used and useful for bringing about social change. Public relations, along with media, publicity and promotional industries, plays a significant role in shaping contemporary public culture (Hartley, 1992). We argue that public relations can be activated and/or harnessed for social good, and that this framing of the field is under-studied and under-theorised. We embrace the full range of public relations activity, beyond professional and occupational contexts, and note the techniques of public relations are widely adopted in contemporary promotional culture.

In contrast to the notion of public relations as hidden work, certain kinds of public relations work are highly visible. Publics willingly participate in promotional activity across, for example, celebrity, music, fashion, sport and entertainment sectors. Hartley argues that public relations (he uses the term ‘publicity’) is a necessary social institution that ‘calls the public into being and doing’:

The quest for the public is not, or not only, a quest for a real collective of human bodies or organized populations ‘real’; it is a quest for the discourses, imaginings, and communicative strategies by means of which those populations might be recognized, organized, mobilized, and ‘impressed’, or even congregate to take collective action in their own name, the name of the public.

(1992, p. 122)

Publics, audiences and fans play a significant role in recognising, reproducing and willingly, even passionately, engaging with public relations activity (Hutchins & Tindall, 2015, 2016). They engage in ‘sophisticated interpretative activity’ that demonstrates ‘playfulness’ (Turner, 2013, p. 112). We seek, then, to explore these dynamics and contradictions between visible and invisible work, and how public relations activity might be harnessed by diverse social actors – and not just organisations – for positive social change.

Boundary riding

Popular culture offers an opportunity to learn about and engage with playful and creative forms of public relations in addition to the vital work on social problems and transformation. New modes of theorising public relations that situate it within a popular context require a form of boundary riding that opens up the borders between particular cultural ways of thinking and articulates alternatives. A boundary rider, originally someone who checked fences on sheep and cattle stations, is a term now used by sport commentators who work from the sidelines at Australian Rules Football and place audiences closer to the centre of the action. The act of boundary riding, in this book, is a mode of navigation, enquiry and review – tracing the storytelling that evolves from questioning the boundaries of our thinking about the complicated relationship between public relations and popular culture and its role in social change.

It is necessary to distinguish our notion of boundary riding as a mode of enquiry that allows us to excavate and explore the links between public relations, popular culture and social change from functionalist perspectives that argue public relations offers an important boundary-spanning role, in that practitioners cross internal/external boundaries to allow stakeholder perspectives to inform organisational decision making in order to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes (see, for example, Grunig, 1992). The term boundary spanning is not unique to public relations and has persisted in the business literature since at least the 1970s (Aldrich & Herker, 1977). Even critical scholars such as Holtzhausen (2000) build on this notion to argue that practitioners, alert to the imbalance in power relationships, should be the organisational activist and conscience in representing outside perspectives within.

Our interest is not in a somewhat artificial inside/outside boundary construction between an organisation and its environment. Instead, we are interested in boundary construction generally and, in particular, the role of public relations in that construction. Our boundaries are porous: public relations is not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Popularity, popular culture and public relations
• 2 Public relations in our everyday lives
• 3 Trending … fortune tellers, dream weavers and charlatans
• 4 Undead PR: theorising public relations and popular culture
• 5 ‘The PR girl’: gender and embodiment in public relations
• 6 Fashionable ephemera, political dressing and things that matter
• 7 Public relations, race and reconciliation
• 8 Environmental protest songs and justice perspectives
• 9 Cassolada: communication, protest and the 2017 Catalan Indy Ref
• 10 Critical reflections
• Index