Power, Diversity and Public Relations

The article examines communication and public relations (PR) consultants as storytelling professionals, who legitimate their professionalism by telling stories in everyday encounters as they occupy new fields. I draw upon 26 interviews with communication and PR professionals working in communication and PR consultancies and show how they legitimate their expertise in political advocacy and lobbying. The analysis finds that they use four clusters of antenarratives to challenge the existing political order and traditional practices of political advocacy and to populate the political field with new actors and identities. In toto, the stories create a 'living story' of professionalism which is nevertheless hampered by contradictions between the logics of market and politics. While the consultants claim to be reformers of a closed political system, at the same time, they promote hidden practices and resist the effective regulation of openness.

Section: Conclusion: Storytellers Between Markets and Politicssupporting

confidence: 62%

Cleaning rotten politics, selling exclusive liaisons: Public relations consultants as storytelling professionals between markets and politics

Kantola

2016

“…PR researchers have an important role to play here in re-mapping existing work on diversity in public relations (e.g. Daymon and Demetrious, 2014;Edwards, 2015;Tindall and Waters, 2013;Waymer, 2013) AI platforms are not 'neutral' technologies, their design is purposeful, exhibiting bias and eroding human rights (Noble, 2018). These are spaces that PR must intervene in, if the profession truly commits to voice as value (Couldry, 2010).…”

Section: Conclusion: Voice and Influence In Ai Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

AI cheerleaders: Public relations, neoliberalism and artificial intelligence

Bourne

2019

, the PRCA, a trade body for UK public relations, debated the following motion: "The workforce in public relations will considerably reduce as a result of Artificial Intelligence and automation". The lecture theatre was small, but full. The audience was invited to vote on the motion before the debate began: 9 for, 29 against. The proposing team used hard facts and figures to sound a warning over job losses. The opposing team cheered on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a bright future filled with opportunity. The audience voted again after the debate: but the numbers scarcely moved. As the audience filed out of the lecture theatre, a senior in-house practitioner confided in me that despite agreeing with the sober tone of the moot, he had still voted against it. I asked why. He replied that he felt a duty to be optimistic about the future of the public relations (PR) profession. A similar collective confidence drives much of the industry discourse about AI in Public Relations; in particular, the rose-tinted dream that AI will free-up PR practitioners to focus on strategic counsel, even if this means the loss of many junior and technical PR roles, once they are delegated to robots. PR's professional habitus: optimism and futurity PR's professional habitus is defined by a relentless focus on optimism and futurity (Bourne, 2017). This professional habitus renders PR indispensable to the corporate 169). Such reinvigorated neoliberal sensemaking has, in turn, given companies new motive to put PR on speed-dial. This paper combines scholarship on PR and neoliberalism (e.g. Roper, 2005; Surma and Demetrious, 2018), with recent interrogations of neoliberalism in the political economy (e.g. Davies, 2014; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2017) to explore PR's latest efforts to legitimise neoliberal discourses. The discussion is further interwoven with recent communications and PR scholarship on AI and automation (e.g. Collister, 2016; Guzman, 2019; Moore, 2018; Noble, 2018) to consider how PR's own efforts to normalise AI into everyday life could, in turn, change the shape of everyday PR practice. PR on behalf of AI is understood here to be a form of discourse work (Pieczka 2013), encompassing public affairs and political communication by government ministries and departments, political lobbying, corporate communications by global technology firms, Business-to-Business communication by global management consultancies, as well as Business-to-Consumer communications by tech start-ups. As part of discourse work; PR, in its different forms, is expected to privilege certain voices over others in order to legitimise AI technologies. However, unlike some of the discourses PR has been called on to legitimise in the paste .g. free trade, financialisation, outsourcing or extractive technologies-naturalising Artificial Intelligence as a way of life has direct implications for society, for democracy, and for the future of public relations itself.

“…There is an interest in politics and the lack of transparency in political practices (Cave and Rowell, 2014; Davis, 2002; Lloyd and Toogood, 2015); analysis of PR ethics including truth-telling (Jackson and Moloney, 2019); interest in (a lack of) transparency in corporations (Miller and Dinan, 2008) and in CSR reporting (Coombs and Holladay, 2013). There have been attempts to measure stakeholder perceptions of organisational transparency (Rawlins, 2009), analyses of stakeholder-driven transparency measures (Albu and Wehmeier, 2014), and accounts of the PR industry’s own transparency in terms of employment, for example in relation to diversity (Edwards, 2015) or the ways in which feminism may be co-opted and reformed in PR firms to bolster neoliberal principles of individualised competition and entrepreneurialism in ways that obscure and distract from persistent inequalities (Yeomans, 2019). There are also studies of specific practices relating to non-transparent information management, whether historical (L’Etang, 2004) or contemporary, such as ‘off the record’ briefing (Dimitrov, 2017).…”

Section: Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

The secrecy−transparency dynamic: A sociological reframing of secrecy and transparency for public relations research

Cronin

2020

This article offers a sociological account of how we might analyse the relationship between contemporary practices and discourses of secrecy on the one hand, and those of transparency on the other hand. While secrecy is often framed in popular and political discourses as the antithesis of transparency, in reality, their relationship is more complex and co-constitutive than may initially appear. The article argues that understanding the interface between secrecy and transparency as a socially embedded dynamic can offer public relations scholarship productive avenues for both theoretically oriented research and empirical studies. In its role in the management of the secrecy−transparency dynamic, PR plays a significant role in actively creating social relations. This article aims to provide resources for assessing the strength of this dynamic in acting to structure social, political and economic relations, and offers new perspectives on how techniques employed to manage the secrecy–transparency dynamic – including public relations – are both embedded in such relations and act to shape them.