Editorial

This issue brings together five articles and a number of themes: public affairs practice and, beyond that, an interest in probing a micro-level engagement with public relations practice; a critical engagement with some of the concepts fundamental to the field such as public, knowledge and fact, empathy; and finally, the way in which public relations and social change intersect.

The first two articles offer studies of public affairs and, specifically, its legitimacy as it is understood, constructed and lived by practitioners. Davidson and Rowe’s ‘Emerging from the shadows? Perceptions, problems and potential consensus on the functional and civic roles of public affairs practice’ is based on an extensive study utilizing survey data from the United States and the United Kingdom and combining this analysis with a Delphi study of UK practitioners. While the starting point to this research is the gap between the public perceptions of public affairs, and lobbying in particular, and the self-perceptions of practitioners, the study gauges the views of a broader range of those who inhabit the world of politics (legislators and journalists) in order to explore how the field of public affairs constructs its raison d’être: the issues that drive it, the strategies and silences. Kantola’s ‘Cleaning rotten politics, selling exclusive liaisons: Public relations consultants as storytelling professionals between markets and politics’ tackles the same problem, but in a different country (Finland), with a different method (narrative analysis), and with more attention paid to the parallel processes of legitimatization and institutionalization of public affairs (public advocacy) in the consultancy business. The ‘living story’ of public affairs professionalism that emerges, casting the consultant in the role of the political reformer, is then questioned and examined as part of a wider change of the Finnish political system.

The next article in this issue, ‘The establishment of facts in public discourse: Actor-Network-Theory as a methodological approach in PR research’, focuses on public relations theory rather than its practice or practices. The authors apply Actor-Network-Theory to the case of the plagiarisms in the PhD dissertation of the, consequently, former German Defence Minister zu Guttenberg. In their analysis, Scholzel and Nothhaft rethink the public relations understanding of who acts in the world and therefore shapes it (publics) and the nature of action that brings about change: the authors argue that public relations theory over-privileges human agency and is poorly equipped to deal with to the complexity behind its stock concepts – fact and knowledge.

Yeomans’ ‘Imagining the lives of others: empathy in public relations’ pursues the under-researched area of emotion in public relations practice, hereby focusing on the phenomenon of empathy, theoretically legitimized by two key public relations concepts of relationship and dialogue. The study combines a discursive approach to empathy with a small-scale phenomenological element to draw attention to the prevailing instrumental understanding of empathy as ‘a desirable skill for practitioners’. Yeomans concludes by taking a position: she resists the underlying reinforcement of ‘neo-liberal notions of the self-enterprising individual and emotional competence/capital’ by offering alternative routes to empathy – such as role-taking and or social perspective taking – that make it possible to retain ‘feelings of genuine human concern in professional relationships, [and avoid connoting] the commodification of feeling’.

The final article in this issue, ‘The Starbucks Race Together initiative: Analyzing a public relations campaign with critical race theory’ offers a discussion of a rare case of corporate public relations that addresses a sensitive social issue of race. In her analysis of this controversial campaign, Logan focuses on the interplay of the carefully thought-out communication approach with contradictory views of the organization’s legitimacy to launch such a campaign. The equally important contribution her work makes is to address the question of race in public relations itself and to argue for more theoretical and practical engagement with this issue as a way of redefining the traditional scope of public relations and strengthening its moral legitimacy. This article foreshadows the planned Special Issue on activism, last issue in 2016, in which social change, collective action, activism, public relations and communication take center stage.