Editorial

In this issue, we welcome our new co-editors: Lee Edwards, Magda Pieczka and Damion Waymer and take a pause for reflection on the raison d’etre of Public Relations Inquiry (PRI). The journal’s aim is to create a space for edgework, a place where risky ventures can be embarked upon and where conventional views about the nature and purpose of public relations scholarship need not be central to the quality or validity of arguments about PR’s place in the world. We aim to provide an interdisciplinary space for authors and reviewers from PR and adjacent areas, such as political communications and organizational communication, to develop issue-based scholarship that recognizes the importance of public relations and promotional activity as they arise at points of societal and organizational change and transformation.

These ambitions are still in the making. The progress made in establishing PRI as an important journal in the field is encouraging. However, there is always more to do. We would like to see more interdisciplinary, critical and reflexive scholarship, including work that engages with communication challenges around major issues of the day such as migration, diversity, poverty and the environment, to encourage debate. We are also aware of the fact that ‘critical’ scholarship has itself become more established and within the public relations discipline, although there are varied understandings of the term, and that this encounter with comfort should not dull the edge that critical work should bring to the field. The healthy self-questioning one would expect of this sub-community within public relations should continue, even if we simultaneously enjoy new-found community and recognition for the importance of our work in the field.

In fact, while the community of critical scholars is growing, it remains small and its impact on paradigmatic interpretations and (perhaps more importantly) the presentation and re-presentations of the field in broader scholarship and textbooks appears still to be somewhat limited. Critical scholars may have a more distinct and recognizable identity than they did quarter of a century ago, but there is still plenty of scholarship that does not acknowledge its existence or role in the field. Scholars at the recent conference, ‘Public Relations: critical perspectives, edgework and creative futures’ held at Queen Margaret University in Scotland, questioned precisely these issues: the centres and margins that continue to exist in all areas of communication, as well as in our own field. The new Routledge Handbook of Critical Public Relations does the same. And yet, while welcome, conferences and handbooks can also signify a degree of established and uncontested power. The prospect of rigidity and orthodoxies is problematic, especially for those who claim the critical terrain. They raise questions, challenges and demands for critical scholars of the kind that perhaps do not trouble instrumentalists. Such challenges not only concern the individual scholar but also raise continual questions for editors and reviewers in terms of what topics, themes and problems matter (Dunne et al., 2008 cited in Parker and Thomas, 2011: 425). From our own editorial perspective, what matters is what kinds of scholarship might not get published in other PR journals, perhaps for reasons of rigidity and orthodoxy, rather than of quality or intellectual creativity. Maintaining that difference between PRI and other journals in the field remains a self-conscious goal of the editorial team.

With this in mind, we turn to some brief introductory comments about this issue in which we highlight a range of work that does something different in terms of topic, theoretical or methodological perspective.

Sissons breaks rather new ground in public relations scholarship by going beyond discourse analysis to tackle an in-depth ethnographically inspired conversation analysis of video-taped client-handling during a financial crisis in the client’s organization. Ethnographic work in public relations work remains something of a rarity and the editors have always been keen to promote anthropologically inflected work, as earlier editions have demonstrated with the publication of pieces of ethnography and auto-ethnography.

Sissons’ article presents a number of critical incidents and key interactions selected as indicative from shadowing a single public relations practitioner as he confronted a particular public relations crisis on behalf of a client. The project is shaped by Faircloughian critical discourse analysis to draw out the political dimensions of the scenarios. The detail of the conversation analysis is supported by photographic images taken in real time. This has the value of at least capturing some of the kinesic dimensions and significant gestures. The granular detail reveals the subtleties of the interpersonal communications that betray underlying power dynamics. Sissons’ work demonstrates the limits of the public relations practitioner’s influence over the client with regard to either strategy or messaging and consequently the ‘service delivery’ as opposed to ‘strategic advice’ function of public relations in this particular case.

Dhanesh problematizes the theory surrounding Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication by categorizing existing scholarship into three paradigmatic approaches: functional, critical and dialogic. In his analysis of organizational actors engage in CSR in India, he takes dialogic and dialectical perspectives to draw out competing discourses of selflessness/selfishness in the construction of meaning of CSR and those of togetherness/separateness in relation to the articulation of boundaries of CSR in India as shared social responsibility. The author explore the tensions experienced by organizational actors and the effect of these tensions on their world-views, discourses and understandings of CSR viewed through a dialectical lens. The study presents rich empirical data from elite interviews that illustrate discursive patterns but also indicates complex constructs of CSR among organizational actors.

The relatively under-explored area of corporate diplomacy is the subject of White’s article, which addresses the role of private sector corporations in public diplomacy – political governmental initiatives in international relations. White considers the potential of CSR initiatives by private corporations to contribute to the processes of public diplomacy – and defines this kind of corporate diplomacy as ‘the role of private sector corporations as non-state actors in public diplomacy’. White’s analysis includes a review of pertinent literature and a discussion of what she terms the ‘soft power role’ of business people, brands, products and CSR in a country’s reputation. She argues that CSR can have the unintended side effect of public diplomacy and consequently analyses intentionality and strategic co-ordination in this context as well as the barriers to action. White concludes by laying out the necessity for a distinctive research agenda that encompasses the academic literature, think tank reports and policy papers in relation to private sector interventions in the processes of public diplomacy.

In the final article of this issue, Thelander and Sawe explore how long established notions of marketing as ‘shared meaning’ have developed in parallel with both symmetrical and dialogic ideas in public relations towards the shared concept of ‘co-creation’. At the same time, they tread the opaque boundaries between marketing and public relations to argue the case for place branding, particularly in the context of public diplomacy, to be regarded as part of public relations, given that brand and identity emerge from dialogue and stakeholder debate. Their focus on urban renewal projects highlights the significance of art in citizen engagement and communication processes and offers readers insights into the role of an internal stakeholder group (managers in municipal administration) in an arts event–based strategy for branding city renewal. The case demonstrates complexity, challenges and – using Bourdieu’s work on polarization – the need to critique assumptions ‘that co-creation means engagement, involvement and alignment, or that it necessarily offers better opportunities’.

Finally, we append to this issue a Call for Papers on the theme ‘Powers of Promotion: Apprehending the Social and Political Impacts of Promotional Culture’.