Public relations theory: An agonistic critique of the turns to dialogue and symmetry

Introduction: ‘Public relations democracy’ and the dialogic turn

The longstanding stream of debate on how to establish theories for understanding and testing public relations’ impact on democratic societies has revolved around the question of to what extent it has escaped from what Coombs and Holladay (2013) describe as its ‘wicked roots’. The global growth of public relations has prompted academic and public anxieties as its reputation is tarnished by historical associations with propaganda and other forms of unethical communicative practice. In recent decades, several paradigms of public relations scholarship, despite their vastly different starting points and epistemological assumptions, have converged on advancing dialogic forms of communication as representing the best normative theories for shifting practice towards democracy-friendly norms. A core objective of this article will be to apply agonistic theories of democracy to critique this apparent stampede towards embracing dialogue or symmetrical communication.

Public relations theorists who have clustered around the systems theories work of James Grunig have defined and categorised propagandistic communications as not constituting authentic practice. But for scholars working within critical and political economy frameworks, modern-day practice is still equated with deceptive communications that enable the extension of corporate power by dominating decision-making environments (Dinan and Miller, 2007; Miller and Dinan, 2008). Awareness of this external critique has provided an impetus for normative theorising. While it may be said that communication ethics has been a constant, almost existential, theme in public relations scholarship, inside the field’s corpus the incorporation of hegemonic notions of power has been a road less well travelled.

If we assume and accept the significance of promotional cultures as being central to the development of contemporary democracies and their associated media systems (Davis, 2013), then there is a clear imperative to theorise public relations’ normative roles from a desire to embed democratic principles into both scholarship and practice. Situated within what Davis (2002) once termed public relations democracy, the rationale for this article recognises that, aside from journalism, public relations is the one form of communication practice that self-consciously understands its objectives as influencing the structures and content through which issues are mediated. This function of public relations in constructing discourses led Motion and Leitch (1996) to categorise its practitioners as ‘discourse technologists’, while Somerville (2011) identifies their role in strategically deploying the rhetorical devices of framing and storytelling, with Hallahan (1999) suggesting that practitioners have developed the role of ‘frame strategists’. While journalism and public relations create discourses, the balance between the two has begun to shift significantly (McChesney and Nichols 2010). In 1996, Ewen was already describing American society as being public relations–saturated while Moloney’s (2006) UK study argued that public relations was embedded into society determining the style and characteristics of civic discourses.

At this point, it is important to clarify that although public relations may have popular associations with publicity and promotion, and these are certainly widely practised, as L’Etang (2008) has argued the distinctive features of public relations relate to how it has been characterised by communication that involves ‘… exchange of ideas either in response to, or to facilitate change. It entails argument and case making. It is thus intrinsically connected to policy initiatives … and responses to these by organisational actors …’ (p. 18). Incorporating the totality of the phenomenon also requires going beyond the typical critical research focus on corporate public relations recognising that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charities, professional associations, trade unions, social movement and protest groups are all prolific producers of public relations content and employers of practitioners.

In its formative stages as an academic field, public relations was dominated by functionalism which oriented towards researching how public relations might help organisations achieve their goals, motivated by a desire to provide an evidence base for public relations’ acceptance as a senior management discipline (Edwards, 2012). The dominance of this paradigm has meant that peer-reviewed publications have rarely privileged civic-democratic concerns (Davidson, 2015). When researchers have sought to build models for public relations’ constructive contribution to civic society, both functionalist and more critical scholars have tended to converge on advocating forms of dialogic communication. Indeed, Pieczka (2011) has argued that dialogue has been at the centre of three decades of public relations theory and observed as ubiquitous in public relations scholarship by Theunissen and Wan Noordin (2012). As a consequence, normative theorising has emphasised compromise (Dozier et al., 1995), consensus (Burkart, 2007) and engagement (Taylor and Kent, 2014) which Lane (2014) has observed combine to put pressure on practitioners to demonstrate their ability to adopt ostensibly non-partisan styles of communication. In some ways, the shift to dialogue in public relations scholarship mirrors the trends in related academic fields. In political philosophy, there is a long tradition of the advocacy of deliberative forms of democracy that posit the value of dialogic communications and consensus seeking in the interactions between institutions and citizens (Dryzek, 2000; Gutmann and Thompson, 2009). In contrast, agonistic democratic theory elevates the value of permanent contest, dissensus and performance in vibrant public spaces which expose and test the legitimacy of those who hold power and privilege.

The etymology of agonism comes from the ancient Greek word agōn which was used to indicate a contest or struggle. In introducing agonistic theories of democracy, it is useful to draw on Wenman’s (2013) construction of its basic elements. First, agonism builds on constitutive pluralism, that is to say that there not only must be recognition of the difference between groups but also the difference in circumstances that forges the identities of groups and individuals. Agonists to varying degrees assume that no transcendent measures or rational thought frameworks can be universally applied to adjudicate between conflicting values. A tragic vision of the world is another of Wenman’s basic elements of agonism, a disposition of political realism that envisions conflict, suffering and strife as inevitable. Central to this article’s critique of the dialogic turn in public relations theory is how agonism accepts conflict as a democratic good. In Mouffe’s (2000) work, conflicts and confrontations are healthy indicators of a democracy animated by pluralism in contrast to hierarchical or authoritarian modes of governance that seek to shut down public spaces or becalm civic discourses. Agonism provides a conceptual framework for understanding a constructive role for forms of public relations practice that enable transparent rhetorical rivalries as well as acting as a catalyst for tangible contributions to the public good.

This article examines two dialogic models in public relations theory. Unlike other academic fields to date, public relations scholarship has not benefited from the incorporation of agonistic theory to test the limits of dialogue, or to develop alternative models that embrace the ethos of agonism. This article makes its original contribution by demonstrating the value of an agonistic framework for critique, but also for building new theories and models for understanding the forms of public relations that would support democratic practice. The next sections of this article explore classical and more emancipatory forms of contemporary agonism before applying these frameworks to critique how Habermasian and symmetrical models of dialogue have been applied to public relations. The final section will advance a discussion of how agonistic theories can be synthesised with existing models to provide a new paradigm for understanding public relations’ role in democratic theory.

Classical and contemporary forms of agonistic democracy

An agonistic critique of how Habermas has been applied to dialogic models of public relations

An early and significant attempt to incorporate Habermas came from Pearson (1989) who believed it offered a solution to what he saw as the problem of ethical relativism in public relations practice. At this early stage, Pearson made explicit links between Habermas and the concept of symmetry being developed by J. Grunig, believing these were couched in same language of a process where source and receiver become indistinguishable when they are equal participants in a dialogue. For Pearson, the focus of research needed to move away from attempting to judge right and wrong policies, but instead develop processes of dialogic communication that would elevate ethical norms and privilege compromise. Pearson’s approach resonated with Leeper (1996) who also agreed that the work of Habermas could be linked to symmetry through the emphasis on dialogue and coorientation. This was because there was a shared focus on the importance of communications seeking to develop understanding between organisations and publics. These assumptions found a new extension when Burkart (2007) attempted to use them in developing a model of ‘consensus-oriented public relations’. Burkart drew on Habermas’ theory of communicative action to explore how truth claims could be introduced and then contested by the public. This consensus orientation would be supported, Burkart claimed, through practitioners conducting evaluations of the levels of consensus achieved in terms of the communicator’s trustworthiness and the level of consent on proposed project goals or values. Burkart endorsed the value of this approach through how it might be used to avoid escalation of conflicts in a process that sought to move towards a rational consensus of ‘responsible citizens’. A more critical application came from Holmström (1997) who drew on Habermasian concepts to categorise public relations as emanating out of the systems world of technocratic goals that orientate to the vested interests of those who hold money and power. This was problematised if public relations goals become functionally detached from the lifeworld of family and culture. Holmström argued that the normative task for public relations under these assumptions is the difficult task of reconciling logics and re-establishing the coupling between the lifeworld of family life and personal needs and the system world of institutions and their administrative needs. The approach taken by Pearson, Leeper, Burkart and Holmström was to assume the ethical superiority of rationality, understanding and consensus. They were also concerned with designing out dissensus and persuasive rhetoric from the norms of public relations practice.

One of the most valuable applications of Habermas has been Meisenbach’s (2006) attempt to apply discourse ethics as a moral framework for organisational communications. Meisenbach is notable for attempting to provide a practical template for applying Habermas to public relations practice. It is worthy of further consideration, but to do so we first need to establish Mouffe’s agonistic critique of Habermas. Mouffe is frequently cited and her work used to deconstruct Habermas (Karppinen et al., 2008; Thomassen, 2013). However, caution is required as there is often an exaggeration of the differences between them. Nonetheless, Mouffe’s radical democratic writing also provides a framework for dissecting the problems in the dialogic turn in public relations theory.

A key starting point is Mouffe’s contention that Habermas’ work is built upon fundamentally flawed assumptions. In contrast to Habermas, agonism assumes that universal rational consensuses are a conceptual impossibility. Mouffe insists on the abandonment of all hope of finding democracies that exist beyond social division and hegemonic power, with every order predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Orders are neither natural nor objective, but the results of hegemonic practices with democracy are understood as a struggle between opposing projects presenting their views of the common good (Mouffe, 2005, 2013). Political questions are not merely technical issues to be solved by experts and always involve choices between conflicting alternatives. Mouffe is critical of liberalism’s inability to fully envisage the social conflicts that pluralism entails. This necessitates a questioning of the assumptions made when the espousal of ethical public relations is equated with the seeking of consensus and the smothering of difference:

… pluralism is not merely a fact, something that we must bear grudgingly or try to reduce, but an axiological principle. It is taken to be constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of modern democracy and considered as something that we should embrace and enhance. This is why the type of pluralism that I am advocating gives a positive status to differences and questions the objective of unanimity and homogeneity. (Mouffe, 2000: 19)

Mouffe constructs a distinction between the political and politics. Mouffe (2005) defines the political as ‘the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’, while politics is ‘the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created’ (p. 9). She contends that the antagonism inherent in the political is often ignored by dialogic and deliberative models of politics. This explains why Mouffe has stated that it is wrong to ask whether we can seek consensus without exclusion, as this would require that us can be constructed without them. Mouffe uses Derrida’s concept of the constitutive outside, whereby the creation of individual or group identities always implies the establishment of difference. These differences may not necessarily be antagonistic, but there always remains the possibility that us/them relationships can be converted into a friend/enemy relationship (Mouffe, 1993). So, Mouffe suggests the real challenge is how to construct us/them in a way that is compatible with pluralism. Others must not be seen as enemies to be destroyed but as adversaries whose ideas must be fought. Not encouraging antagonism which is a struggle between enemies, but instead agonism which is struggle between adversaries. The communicative dimensions to this agonistic assumption are drawn out by Tully (2008). Tully agrees with Mouffe that agreements are always to some extent non-consensual, as disagreement will always remain; this means participation can be considered as a strategic-communicative game. But, ‘what shapes and holds individuals together as “citizens” and “peoples” is not this or that agreement but the free agonistic activities of participation themselves’ (Tully, 2008: 146). To apply this point to public relations, this means that forms of practice that serve democracy are not centred on compromise or consensus, but on the facilitation or cooperation with the mobilisation of participative spaces and actions. Where consensus is required is on the ethico-political values of liberty and equality, but this will be a conflictual consensus as there will be tensions in regard to their interpretation (Mouffe, 2005).

In contrast to the manner in which Habermas’ work has been applied to public relations, it is not detached rationality upon which we build models for supporting democracy. Instead, we need to consider the possibility that it is the passionate attachment to collective identifications that motivates participation. People must care about an issue and they must also have some hope that at least some progress might be achieved if they participate (Mihai, 2014).

The critique of Habermas provided by Mouffe in many ways echoes in the reflective discussion provided within Meisenbach’s (2006) attempt to apply Habermas’ discourse ethics to public relations. Meisenbach developed a five step procedure for communicators to enact a discourse ethic in order to apply the assumption that dialogue is required for organisations to understand if their valid norms can be universally applied. When discussing the final stage of this process that follows after all parties discursively debate the consequences of an initial utterance or potential norm, a judgement is made about the validity and acceptability of these statements. Meisenbach shares the uncertainty from Habermas on how disagreements over validity can be resolved, aside from the implication that if all information is shared by all participants, it is likely that rational interlocutors will converge in their conclusions. While the problem with this assumption is appreciated, Meisenbach still argues the value of discourse ethics as a process of improving mutual understanding and identifying unreconciled differences. A process that generates improved degrees of mutual understanding is assumed to hold intrinsic value, but raises ethical problems of practitioners engaging marginalised publics in a dialogue under the false pretence that a non-hegemonic consensus will result from the process. As Mouffe (2005) argues, it does not matter how rational the discourse or how ethically correct the procedures, a moment of decision must arrive, and at precisely that moment an ongoing or new hegemonic arrangement will be put in place.

Meisenbach also recognises the problem that it is the organisation itself which is deciding who might be affected by its behaviours or values, with the inevitable influence on the process of imperfect knowledge and subjective bias. This problem alone calls into question any claims to universal inclusivity of the dialogue, not least because better resourced groups are the most likely to be taking action in defence of their vested interests. This problem is identified in empirical studies on public deliberation by researchers who largely apply agonistic assumptions. Stratford et al. (2003) after detailed evaluation of public consultations on environmental issues in Tasmania concluded that there was a particular problem in achieving ideal speech situations which may produce socially unjust outcomes. This problem was echoed in Karppinen et al.’s (2008) study of local government dialogue initiatives in Helsingborg, where they observed that citizens’ complaints that did not come within the organiser’s definition of future-oriented rationality were frozen out and exclusionary practices were present. Again in the local government sector, Williams (2004) was able to identify five methods that dialogue facilitators with pre-conceived project objectives were able to use to marginalise contributions from citizens who sought to articulate alternative agendas. Meisenbach’s defence of the more modest potential of discourse ethics for public dialogue initiatives, mutual understanding and identification of unreconciled differences could equally be achieved through the creation of agonistic public spaces, but without the ethical peril of forcing practitioners to adhere to, and enforce, objectives and conditions of participation in the dialogue which are not realistically achievable.

This section has already stated the need for some caution when exploring the differences between Habermas and Mouffe. This is because it has often been the case that it has not been Habermas himself, but rather scholars who have drawn upon Habermas and the concept of the public sphere who have over-emphasised rationality and consensus (Karppinen, 2007). Indeed, this is the evaluation of this article, that Habermas’ work has been applied to public relations without sufficient regard for the contingent tensions in every consensus or the underlying hegemonic power relations that shape the construction of dialogic encounters. There appears to be potential for exploring the possibility of synthesising certain elements of the deliberative and agonistic frameworks. Dahlberg (2013) has argued that the most significant disagreement between Habermas and agonistic scholars is how to theorise exclusion from the deliberative public sphere. While agonists advance the importance of addressing the tension between democracies’ functional need for areas of consensus while incorporating dissent and allocating value to any initiatives that widen social access to public debate (Karppinen, 2007), Habermasian-influenced research has moved towards embracing the role of spaces for counterpublics that can nurture excluded voices (Dahlberg, 2013). It is notable that Brady’s (2004) paper that seeks to defend deliberative models against agonistic critiques, while generally endorsing the value of an interaction between the two theories, identifies the use of strategic communication to secure acclaim through exploiting demobilised citizens as a significant problem.

The work of Habermas, despite the potential flaws and dangers when translating into normative public relations theory, is arguably more theoretically rigorous and plausible than the weaker strategic advocacy of dialogue contained within the concept of two-way symmetrical communication. However, symmetry has been widely adopted in public relations theory and teaching, and as such is an important constituent part of the dialogic turn in public relations, which necessitates an examination which takes place in the next section.

An agonistic critique of two-way symmetrical communication

This section moves the focus to the other major dialogic theory that has influenced public relations research and teaching. A model which its proponents have claimed provides a paradigm, generalisable across cultures, of ethical non-propagandistic communications practice. While Excellence theory and its advocacy of two-way symmetrical communication as the apex of ethical public relations practice are highly familiar to scholars and students in the field, as McKie and Munshi (2007) have established, it is a paradigm that has failed to generate recognition and citations in other academic fields. Therefore, for readers who are not already immersed in academic public relations texts, its key tenets need some explanation. The initial concept of symmetry can be found in Grunig and Hunt’s (1984) text book; ¹ after publication, it quickly rose to enjoy a period where it could be considered the dominant paradigm in public relations scholarship.

In a disputable act of historiography, Grunig and Hunt (1984) constructed four models of public relations, starting with the least and culminating in the most ethical forms of practice. Early forms of public relations practice were categorised as one-way forms of communication such as publicity/press agentry where practitioners sought attention for their organisation through any means with little regard to truth and accuracy, and so in turn is associated with propaganda. The other one-way model was titled public information, where practitioners consciously strove to disseminate accurate information about their organisation, although often with a selection bias towards positive affirmations. The third model, two-way asymmetrical, was the application of scientific persuasion, where organisations would research audiences so as to better understand how to improve the efficacy of their public relations in order to affect attitudinal or behavioural change (Grunig et al., 2002). However, in the two-way symmetrical model, ‘practitioners use research and dialogue to bring about symbiotic changes in the ideas, attitudes, and behaviors of both the organisation and its publics’ (Grunig et al., 2002: 38). In operationalising this model, practitioners are encouraged to equate ethical communications with a planning process that posits dialogue as a vehicle for seeking and enacting cooperation that in turn leads to the achievement of consensus and harmony between the organisation and its environment (Lane, 2014). Over time, the meaning of symmetry in public relations scholarship has settled around a process of seeking consensus; indeed, ‘discussion so far has demonstrated that the ideas and practices of dialogue in the field of public relations have been mediated primarily through discussion about symmetrical communication’ (Pieczka, 2015: 83).

It is important to note that the Excellence project from the outset was oriented to the needs of management elites. Its original research questions addressed the role of communication in achieving organisational objectives and the characteristics of public relations that would increase the likelihood of organisations achieving their goals. The worth of effective public relations was not to be evaluated by any indicator of civic engagement or citizen empowerment, but rather by improving communicative relationships in order to advance principal bottom line economic metrics. Two-way symmetrical communication was endorsed on the basis that it was a strategy that would enable organisations to identify and neutralise factors in their external environment which restricted their ability to pursue their goals. When successfully implemented, this was valorised as reducing the costs of litigation, regulation and legislation (Grunig et al., 2002: 136). Economic gains for organisations were the primary objective, but Excellence theory argues that inseparable from these gains are improved levels of organisational social responsibility as only high-quality relationships with active groups of citizens make symmetry a possibility.

Before applying an agonistic critique of symmetry, we should note that Habermasians would consider symmetry as unethical communication because the founding motivation is not a desire to form a mutual understanding with the lifeworld or to yield to the force of better arguments, but instead to advance strategic interests. Habermasian communicative rationality is a deeper, much more difficult form of dialogue to enact than the dialogue represented by Excellence theory. Two-way symmetry can be achieved without solving any policy problem, or the improvement of any social conditions, although these outcomes are not precluded. Instead, it can be achieved through a shallow dialogue that offers concessions by organisations, purely in the expectation that they will reduce levels of critical civic activism that impede the realisation of management goals. Furthermore, Excellence theory explicitly recommends that engagement should take place with ‘strategic constituencies’, defined as publics who hold the power to constrain an organisation in its ability to achieve its goals, mediating the possibility of conflicts occurring between management and its strategic publics (Grunig et al., 2002). This is another profound divergence in starting points between Habermas’ discourse ethics and Excellence. Rather than entering dialogue as notional rational equals, symmetry prioritises the contributions of particular publics if they are believed to hold the potential ability to restrict the organisation’s freedom to pursue its goals. In the previous section, we noted the agonistic critique of Habermas frequently centres on arguing the impossibility of any rational, and fully inclusive, consensus that exists beyond hegemony. Excellence theory itself also distances itself from being attached to Habermas’ ideal speech situations or Pearson’s (1989) attempt to link symmetry to Habermas (Grunig et al., 2002). Symmetry was also adjusted to incorporate elements of game theory; a mixed-motive model accepted that organisations will try to achieve their original objectives while simultaneously trying to help the public satisfy theirs. Symmetry was now emphasised as rejecting pure cooperation in favour of reconciling the interests of each party (Grunig et al., 2002: 309). However, the mixed-motive model of symmetry far from satisfying an agonistic critique raises new, potentially more concerning, problems in developing paradigms for understanding how public relations can serve democratic societies.

Mouffe’s critique of rational consensus equally applies to Excellence theory. Grunig et al. (2002) contend that ‘to be symmetrical means that organizations have the worldview that public relations practitioners serve the interests of both sides of relationships’ (p. 11). For agonists, this is a naïve omission of how power and hegemony constitute social relationships. It does not matter how the procedures of the dialogue are arranged, or how ethically correct they might be considered, there will be a moment of decision that will put into place a hegemonic arrangement (Mouffe, 2005). At that moment of decision, it is not possible to satisfy all publics, identities or claims to recognition. Symmetry does not incorporate the levels of natural antagonism present in the political. Therefore, when considering communication and democracy, agonists argue that any form of consensus is seen as a hegemonic articulation and that there will always be an outside that blocks any full realisation (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001).

The implication that organisations can equally serve managerial and civic needs has arguably meant that scholars and educators who have enthusiastically adopted this paradigm have, as part of this process, internalised an assumption that it must be in some way unethical to communicate in support of the dominant side in any hegemonic order. This has often rendered invisible the productive aspects of hegemony; politics needs hegemonic settlements in order to develop coherent administrations. Without hegemony, there would be no order or shared understandings. The task for public relations theory is to develop the tools for scholars and practitioners alike to be better able to evaluate the democratic implications of any given hegemonic order. As Mouffe suggests,

power is constitutive of the social; there is no social without power relations. Now, any form of order is a hegemonic order … a democratic society in which there is accountability is a form of order and it is a better form of order than an authoritarian regime. (Mouffe quoted in Carpentier and Cammaerts, 2006: 4)

To scope the distinction between the forms of hegemony that support democratic practice and the forms that damage radical democratic projects, Mouffe draws on Gramsci. In this interpretation, public relations can support democracy by nurturing expansive hegemonies which consciously link and build alliances between publics, particularly those who may struggle socially or economically, and to mobilise these chains into democratic directions. In contrast, public relations will ill-serve democracy if it acts to support hegemony by neutralisation, in which organisations take account ‘of the demand of some group, not to transform society so as to resolve the antagonism it expresses, but only so as to impede the extension of that demand’ (Mouffe cited in Harper, 1994: 99). Symmetry includes in its measures of success the degree to which organisations have achieved autonomy from their strategic publics; indeed, complete autonomy is noted as an idealised goal. So within this paradigm when an organisation stimulates activism, it will be in order to ‘mobilise publics that support their goals and thus increase their autonomy’ (Grunig et al., 2002: 10). This is uncomfortably close to representing a strategy for hegemony by neutralisation, particularly if deployed by already powerful organisations, and certainly runs counter to the agonistic ethos.

Grunig et al. (2002) decided to anonymise the many examples and case studies that they cite as examples of Excellence. One notable case study that appears in the index on 44 different pages was a ‘chemical association’ that ‘scored at the very top of the Excellence scale’ (Grunig et al., 2002: 458). However, one reference to this case study (Grunig et al., 2002: 137) provided a link to an article in the trade journal Chemical Week (Begley, 1993), which once consulted reveals that the association that was endorsed so strongly by Grunig et al. was the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), which changed its name to the American Chemistry Council in 2000. Grunig et al. cite the CMA’s use of citizen advisory panels as one key feature of their symmetrical communications. This allows some critical scrutiny for the claims that the CMA was a compelling example of a balancing of the interests of the public with those of the chemical manufacturing companies. As Grunig et al. (2002) acknowledged, this was an industry with what was then a reputational challenge presented by the public memory of the Bhopal disaster. Public concern also centred on the CMA’s lobbying in this period against the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change (Center for Responsive Politics, 2000), and they were documented by Beder (1998) as engaging in the faking of grass roots support for their positions. The citizen panels that were strongly endorsed were part of a voluntary industry code of conduct titled Responsible Care. As part of the public relations programme, citizen advisory panels attached to over 300 chemical plants were established as a vehicle for dialogue between company representatives and local communities.

Studies that have examined the conduct and results of Responsible Care suggest that this public relations programme contravened the ethos and aims of both deliberative and agonistic forms of engagement. Givel’s (2007) analysis of CMA documents to examine the goals and objectives of Responsible Care noted the publicly stated motivations were to meet the needs of activist and community stakeholders. However, the study concluded that, in fact, the primary goal of the communications was to reduce public concerns in regard to the industry’s environmental and public health practices, helping the CMA oppose new environmental legislation. In terms of the citizen advisory panels themselves, Lynn et al. (2000) surveyed members of the panels. The results of their study led them to conclude that the panels were ‘not perceived by members as successful in serving as systematic links back to the community or in influencing a plant’s environmental operations’ (Lynn et al., 2000: 1886). When asked what members believed were the main goals of the panels, making improvements either to the environment or economic relationships scored the lowest level of agreement, while helping companies understand community concerns and improving their communications scored the highest. Prakash’s (2000) review of Responsible Care noted the continuing low levels of trust of publics living close to chemical facilities, but also argued that citizen groups saw the wider significance of the strategy as seeking substitution of environmental regulations for voluntary codes. Such codes would place the industry into private regimes beyond public scrutiny, in the process reducing the possibility that adversarial relationships could shift to legal or legislative arenas – in line with the aims of Excellence theory reducing economic costs to the industry.

The CMA was an organisation that was identified as actively engaged in attempts to block the implementation of global agreements to tackle climate change, and yet the presence of some symmetrical communications initiatives could be pronounced as being at the ‘very top’ of the Excellence scale that purportedly satisfy both the interests of active publics and the organisation. For debates in public relations theory, this suggests the need for new critical examinations of the methodology and claims of the Excellence project, with a particular focus on exploring the communicative behaviours of organisations that Grunig et al. (2002) endorsed as being the most ethical.

While symmetry has been developed and articulated as sitting within dialogic communication, its systems theory roots ground it in a desire for organisations to exercise control of their environments and seek self-regulation of their processes. This conflicts with the requirements of deep dialogue that necessitates acceptance of unpredictability and a relinquishing of control over the final outcome (Theunissen and Wan Noordin, 2012). The use of communication to maintain organisational autonomy suggests that Roper’s (2005) categorisation of symmetry as a strategy for hegemony remains valid. Large corporate entities use symmetrical communications, including concessionary changes to certain processes or policies, in order to maintain their longer-term hegemonic positions. Roper usefully emphasises the need to analyse these strategies at multiple levels. Organisations can attempt to manage and pacify relationships with civil society in order to maintain stable relationships on other forums with more powerful blocs in society. In this way, we can understand that the CMA maintained citizen advisory panels as a part of wider reputation management strategies that sought ultimately to strengthen their lobbying. In this sense, it is not surprising that some activist groups have refused to engage in dialogue with such industry associations because they fear they will be participating in bids to preserve the status quo (Zorn et al., 2006).

Ultimately, the agonistic critique that posits the impossibility of universal consensus does not apply to symmetry, but in many ways symmetry represents a grosser violation of agonistic principles. Indeed, they are almost diametrically opposed in terms of how to evaluate what constitutes successful public spaces. Agonism encourages a proactive search for ways to enliven public spaces and encourage wider participation, but symmetry recommends organisations scan public opinion environments to identify potential hot issues and implement strategies to stop these gaining momentum. Agonism seeks ways in which hegemonic relationships can be transparent and contestable, but symmetry seeks to neutralise and isolate civic challenges to existing power relationships.

Discussion

As detailed in the introduction, the democratic significance of the continuing growth of public relations in media discourses is typically expressed through a perception of a shift in the balance of mediatory power between journalists and public relations practitioners. This is relevant, but when considering the inter-relationship between public relations, dialogic spaces and politics, the global trend of dispersed governance may be even more significant. As Tully (2008) documents, modern governments have increasingly dispersed state powers into outsourced agencies; indeed, this is another structural factor that explains the growth in public relations employment as these agencies invest in communication management, but he argues that publics are not as apathetic as some have thought and have continued to demand democratic participation, expecting to be engaged as citizens rather than just as consumers who hold relationships with brands. Agonists such as Tully see a danger in the belief that agencies dealing with issues of everyday life should be put beyond politics; indeed, the case study exploration of the CMA in the previous section presented an illustration of how the adoption of symmetrical dialogue, to contentious issues such as energy production, resulted in exactly this scenario. The game of freedom and participation should not be restricted to formal democratic institutions, and as with this article, the implication is to understand how public relations can assist in creating public spaces that enable mobilisation of civic passions whenever and wherever they might wish to challenge non-democratic forms of governance – rather than investing in systems of early detection and communication strategies to neutralise, or in practice parlance, kill issues.

This article has drawn on the sharp contrast in ethos of agonism to that of deliberative or symmetrical models of public relations. Agonism holds more potential for conceptualising forms of public relations that support democracy. Habermas’ concept of the public sphere problematises the use of public relations by groups to compete against each other as well as public relations’ influence on media systems. But if universal consensus is rejected as a conceptual impossibility then agonistic contests that deploy public relations campaigns can be seen as holding democratic legitimacy. Indeed, this opens up the potential to build theories of agonistic public relations that could harmonise with critical theorising. As Ramsey (2015) suggests,

It could be argued that the agonistic approach allows us to conceive of ways in which public relations might be harnessed to further the ends of the agonistic approach, rather than being seen as something intrinsically inimical to the establishment of a critical theory. (p. 73)

Hegemonic orders are required for the enactment of democratic will, but this article argues the utility of Mouffe’s differentiation between hegemony by neutralisation and expansive hegemonies. The former would ask public relations, particularly public relations in service of powerful interests, to seek out tactical settlements to de-energise issue publics, whereas the latter would urge public relations to stimulate engagement and empower publics by bridging multiple publics and issues. An application of the agonistic ethos to public relations would elevate contest above neutral deliberation, instil a regard for opponents, an even stronger regard for disadvantaged publics who lack communication resources, an abhorrence of permanent winners and openness to new issues and challenges. It would also entail a fostering of public spaces that welcome emotional, passionate engagement, a commitment to make power transparent and an end to the illusory assumption that policy issues are somehow neutral or technical matters awaiting communicative solutions, but are always choices between conflicting alternatives.

However, there remains a potential for further research that might seek to find pathways of convergence between Habermas’ work and agonistic models. Both deliberative and agonistic models agree on the importance of deepening and widening public participation, both are oriented towards reforming public sphere/public spaces in order to improve social conditions and both place communication as vital and also subservient to democracy. However, the weaker form of dialogue posited by Excellence theory directly violates various dimensions of the agonistic ethos, not least in the way it can be conceived as representing a strategy template for hegemony by neutralisation. Opportunities for areas of convergence between Excellence and agonism appear less likely. The two models are mutually inaccessible to the other. The starting points for Excellence are articulated using a lexicon of business economics that sees democratic contest and mobilised publics as a negative monetary cost, making it able to suggest idealised scenarios that would involve organisations successfully seeking autonomy from enactments of democratic will or control. Furthermore, the motivation of symmetry is to prevent the conditions emerging which would allow counter-hegemonic projects to flourish; indeed, Grunig et al. (2002) are clear that if the public’s interests became dominant in a relationship with an organisation, this would violate the principles of symmetry.

To conclude this discussion, Bäcklund and Mäntysalo’s (2010) matching of democratic theory to planning theory can be amended to be made relevant for public relations theory (Table 1).

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Table 1.

Democracy theory/models of public relations.

Elite	Aggregative	Deliberative	Agonistic
For example, Bernays’ propaganda	For example, Excellence theory/two-way symmetrical communication	For example, Habermas, discourse ethics	For example, Mouffe, radical pluralism
Publics as subjects of expert/elite groups	Publics are organised and become engaged in bargaining and compromise	Publics are rational actors; rules-based dialogue to maximise their inputs into a search for universal consensus	Publics hold conflicting identities and interests, spaces created to ensure antagonisms are converted into agonism, only partial consensuses are achievable

The propaganda model of public relations can be characterised as elites, who consider themselves to hold higher levels of knowledge and wisdom than the general public, using communication to manipulate public attitudes and behaviours in the direction they believe to represent the greater good. Ethics become a secondary consideration in relation to the achievement of the desired objectives. Globally, it is beyond doubt that this model is still widely practised, but it is not endorsed as legitimate in either modern public relations or political theory. The aggregative model can be equated to Excellence theory. In this model, multiple publics and organisations initiate dialogue in order to advocate for their self-interest. The win-win compromise central to two-way symmetry can be viewed as an aggregation of the distributed power between organisations and publics. In these interactions, organisations realise the limits of their legitimacy and autonomy. The exhortation to compromise in Excellence ostensibly assures some kind of satisfaction of mutual needs, but Excellence theory also includes the proviso that the process of aggregation should not proceed so far as to threaten the long-term interests of managerial elites. It is an advancement on the propaganda model, but if privileging democratic concerns it is a weak and flawed model when compared to the frameworks offered by either the deliberative or agonistic models. Deliberative models of public relations require deeper forms of dialogue. The focus of this model is on inclusiveness and rationality. When drawing upon Habermas, it requires both organisations and publics to pool their self-interests into a wider process of seeking settlements that enjoy the widest possible levels of agreement. The legitimacy of the consensus will emerge from the ethical correctness of the dialogue and the ability for all participants to contribute their knowledge and concerns. Through its founding concerns for the quality of public debates and the realisation of socially progressive outcomes, its application to public relations enables the development of a civically grounded sense of ethics and duty, but it is a model that is built upon assumptions that agonists would consider to be flawed and inoperable in real world contexts. The agonistic model by providing a robust critique of deliberative dialogue also in turn provides opportunities to address these problems and build new paradigms of democratic public relations grounded in synthesising the two models. Dialogues can only ever achieve partial conflictual consensus; within this paradigm, the normative role for public relations becomes one where it acts as an agent that mobilises and enables active publics. It demands transparency of power relations and a disposition that accepts interventions in the communicative economy that empower socially disadvantaged publics.

The concept of public relations practitioners as boundary spanners – the manner in which practitioners both represent the interests of the organisation to its publics, but in this process also embed themselves in the interests of those publics and begin to articulate these back to the organisation – remains relevant when considering how to develop agonistic models. There is a particular significance of Holtzhausen’s (2000) postmodern reimagining of the concept if dissensus is seen as the engine which drives practitioners to recognise and respect social and cultural differences. Although initially primarily associated with J. Grunig’s aggregative model of public relations, boundary spanning requires further examination to determine its agonistic utilities. There must be some necessary caution in regard to boundary spanning practitioners who start to see themselves as self-appointed proxy advocates for marginalised groups. More profound impacts are likely to be found through the building of networks and alliances that mobilise chains and empower marginalised groups to advocate for their own interests. Because the model of contemporary agonism used in this article is not anti-foundational, it may present a more promising framework for public relations advocacy than the rejection of human progress, or the associated aversion for campaigners who seek to reform social institutions, that comes with Lyotardian postmodernism. At worst, this form of postmodernism can do nothing to challenge ‘injustice and oppression since it offers no argument, no critical resources or validating grounds for perceiving them as unjust and oppressive’ (Norris, 1993: 287). However, a postmodern post-foundational disposition in public relations theory provides the basis of what might be termed a reflective realism for practitioners, reminding them that the criteria upon which their campaigns are built are always contestable and contingent (Holtzhausen, 2012; Moloney and McKie, 2015).

Developing agonistic models of public relations and seeking synergies with existing paradigms, particularly deliberative forms of public relations will, as with all other normative modelling, inevitably run into practical problems when translating into practice. Pieczka’s (2006) sceptical interrogation of symmetry – why would any powerful organisation adopt this strategy – would equally apply to an agonistic model. Agonism certainly presents a theoretical underpinning to strategies that could be pursued by counter-hegemonic organisations and movements, and there have been significant recent examples in the Spanish speaking world, such as the communicative strategies of recent governments in Argentina or the forms of public engagement adopted by the Podemos movement in Spain ( La Nación, 2012 ; Retamozo, 2014; Tremlett, 2015). It also provides potential as a model for public relations departments who have a mission to mobilise and empower socially disadvantaged groups, as well as for practitioners who are frequently charged with organising public consultations or seeking to encourage civic participation. It offers an innovative alternative for corporate communicators who may wish to find ways of enacting a more progressive ethos, if that is important to the organisation and its brand. For communicators working for corporations with a history of hegemonic strategies by neutralisation, agonism presents a challenge to their existing ethos and values, but it is one that needs to be presented. It would also help them to understand and reflect on why many publics remain distrustful of and reluctant to participate in corporate responsibility programmes. Finally, as organisations are increasingly recognised as producers of media content, as Lunt and Livingstone (2013) argue there is an idealised prospective service to the public sphere, which would be realised through mobilising participation in the production of deliberative news or social media content with the explicit aim of articulating public concerns into intelligible formats to those who administer politics.

In the agonistic spirit, this article has sought to seek out and reveal areas for dissensus and scholarly conflict when considering what should be public relations’ role in supporting democracy. Consistent with the ethos of modern agonism, it does so with a particular regard for understanding how public relations can interrupt power relations in a manner which is biased towards the needs of the socially disadvantaged. The arguments contained within this article, and their implications if developed further, are not value neutral.