Public Relations
                        Practitioners

Hodges, Caroline E.M.; Edwards, Lee

doi:10.4135/9781473912281.n9

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Nierob emphasized the importance of mediation through Jenner’s transition, working to shape favorable discursive environments for his client, a process that depended on his personal and professional associations. Much of Nierob’s work centers on media relations, partnering his client with the right media personalities and platforms, emphasizing the ‘transactional nature’ (Hodges and Edwards, 2014: 97) of celebrity public relations. Publicists operate at the point of transaction, a sentiment emphasized by Nierob:100% of what [publicists] do is public relations.…”

Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The man behind the woman: Publicity, celebrity public relations, and cultural intermediation

Ciszek

2020

Public Relations Inquiry

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Since the early 20th century, public relations has been implicated in the production and sustainment of celebrity. Celebrities rely on the work of publicists to strategically cast, produce, and place discourses within spheres of popular culture. Through an extended interview with Alan Nierob, publicist of transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, this article is an analysis of celebrity public relations as a site of cultural intermediation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, capital, and fields, this article sheds light on the practice of celebrity public relations to understand how publicists leverage cultural and social capital to construct legitimacy for their clients. This study contributes to a broader sociological understanding of celebrity public relations and opens new avenues for research in considering how publicity might translate into broader socio-political impacts.

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Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The man behind the woman: Publicity, celebrity public relations, and cultural intermediation

Ciszek

2020

Public Relations Inquiry

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“…This project was initiated in 2006 because little was known about everyday interactions within the PR consultancy environment (see also Pieczka, 2002; Sissons, 2015). In adopting an interpretive phenomenological approach, this study addresses research into ‘PRP’ lifeworlds to discover the meanings that practitioners assign to their practice (Hodges and Edwards, 2014: 98). From this interpretive phenomenological study, empathy emerged as a recurrent, salient theme of emotion management in PRP relationships with clients and journalists.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining the lives of others: Empathy in public relations

Yeomans

2016

Public Relations Inquiry

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This paper asks how we might theorise empathy in public relations (PR) in the light of a widespread 'turn' towards emotion in the academy, as well as in popular discourse. Two distinct notions of empathy are explored: 'true' empathy as discussed in intercultural communication, is driven by a human concern for the other in order to understand experiences, feelings and situations that may be different from our own; whereas 'instrumental' empathy, reflecting a self orientation, is said to characterise much neoliberal market discourse in which corporations are urged to understand their customers better. Thus, while empathy may seem highly desirable as a means to enter into dialogue with an organisation's publics, particularly during times of social upheaval and crisis, it is important to pay attention to empathy in public relations discourses including whose goals are served by empathetic engagement; and the type(s) of empathy called upon within a PR context. A literature review identified a socio-cultural definition of empathy as 'imaginary effort'. A review of the public relations literature, however, found that while empathy is considered an important principle and personal attribute, notions of empathy, with a few exceptions, are under-explored. Nonfunctionalist, socio-cultural research which examines the meanings that practitioners associate with empathy is distinctly lacking; therefore in order to gain further insight into empathy, two sources of data were explored. The analysis of a popular online practitioner blog showed that other-centred empathic skill is discursively framed as instrumental in achieving clients' business objectives. The analysis of three empathy statements drawn from 12 in-depth interviews with practitioners revealed complex empathic discourse in practitioner-client relationships. While the findings are limited to illustrative analyses only, this paper challenges researchers to develop conceptualisations and perspectives of empathy as imaginary effort in public relations.

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“…While research has produced expansive bodies of literature analyzing promotional texts and the effect these texts have on audiences, the labor of promotion is often treated as a banal constant or an external variable. These actors, however, perform as promotional intermediaries, brokering relationships between elites and their publics (Hodges & Edwards, 2014; Kantola, 2016). As with publicity itself, this brokerage is not neutral: Intermediaries create, shape, and influence discourse by framing markets, organizations, and subjectivities in ways that appear commonsensical while reinforcing vested interests and existing structures of power (Edwards, 2012).…”

Section: Perspectives On Organized Publicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Publicity and Transparency

Wood

Aronczyk

2020

American Behavioral Scientist

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Publicity and transparency are two foundational ideas about the proper structure of democratic communication. In a context of utterly transformed public discourse, it is time to rethink the value of these concepts and especially their relationship to one another. This special issue aims to test prevailing assumptions about these terms as they are reshaped in the present era of organized promotional culture. To begin, the present introduction recasts the concepts of publicity and transparency as tools for analyzing and organizing communicative power rather than as normative ideals in their own right. To this end, we present three core arguments for rethinking transparency and publicity today. First, all acts of transparency entail a redistribution of communicative power but not an inherently egalitarian or democratic one. Second, publicity is the central means by which transparency distributes communicative power. And third, scholars must analyze transparency, like publicity, as a professionalized and industrialized field. By centering questions of power and practice, this special issue aims to animate a research agenda attentive to the relational character of both transparency and publicity in hopes of foregrounding the ways the concepts might be used in service of more equitable political alignments.

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Public Relations Practitioners

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

The man behind the woman: Publicity, celebrity public relations, and cultural intermediation

The man behind the woman: Publicity, celebrity public relations, and cultural intermediation

Imagining the lives of others: Empathy in public relations

Publicity and Transparency

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