Abstract
This issue, the last of 2020, is a collection of five papers that are diverse in their approaches, in questions they ask, and material they work with. Yet, one could argue that there are two themes that run across the issue, sometimes separately, sometimes together; sometimes very explicitly, sometimes less so: trust and discourse.
We open with Anne Cronin’s conceptual paper entitled ‘The secrecy−transparency dynamic: A sociological reframing of secrecy and transparency for public relations research’. Although trust, in the state, for example, is an important reason for the current preoccupation with transparency, the author’s attention is focused on extending public relations analytical reach by changing the way in which the field engages with transparency, rather than trust. Cronin introduces Simmel’s account of secrecy and transparency as related phenomena that together are key to social relations. What makes this such a stimulating paper is precisely its attention to the relationship between these two practices together, secrecy and transparency, as they are taken up in public relations work. The paper draws its critical inspiration from Debord and from the explicit recognition of secrecy and transparency as ideologies crucial to contemporary capitalist societies. The critical position Cronin takes thus places this article in the stream of research on public relations and neoliberalism (see Public Relations Inquiry special issue in May in 2019).
Rice and Taylor’s ‘”What they say peters down”: How non-profit leaders assess the trustworthiness of government – Elite discourse and distrust in post-conflict Northern Ireland’ is an explicit investigation of the relationship between trust and discourse. Specifically, the authors inquire into how the elite discourse of political actors influences perceptions of trust in government amongst Non-Profit Leaders (NPLs), an important group of civic actors in Northern Ireland. Similarly to Cronin, the authors here also choose to work with a pair of concepts: trust and its partner, distrust. These are shown to be distinct but, at the same time, both hinge on the perception of benevolence, or care shown by political actors for others. Rice and Taylor ‘s findings highlight: ‘(1) the value NPLs place on ‘soft’ trust qualities in trust assessments of government, namely benevolence; (2) the importance NPLs place on communicative acts which model trust (e.g. dialogue, compromise, mediation); and (3) the destructive role of divisive political elite discourse within a defective political system, amplified via the media, in NPLs’ distrust of government.’ Although the authors are careful to limit their conclusions to the distinctive Northern Irish context of their study, the parallels of this ‘post-conflict’ society to the post-truth politics and the attending deep political polarization in many countries around the world at this time suggests that the findings have a much wider resonance.
The following two contributions to this issue are explicitly focused on discourse in the context of professional practice. Andersson’s ‘”Being a ‘strategist”: Communication practitioners, strategic work, and power effects of the strategy discourse’ investigates practitioners’ accounts of their work to uncover how strategy understood as discourse shapes both the work they do and their own professional self-identity. In bringing this relatively new conceptualization of strategy into public relations Andersson extends the field’s understanding of strategy, long treated as the ‘holy grail’, the ultimate route to ensuring safe professional status for public relations. His findings help to throw more light on how strategic work is constructed and employed by practitioners, specifically showing that strategy as discourse allows them to ‘claim greater intra-organizational power and power over others’ and to valorize forms of public relations work. In brief, this article demonstrates how a particular form of discourse (strategy) is key to the public relations professional project.
Almutairi, Sharoufi and Dashti also tackle discourse as a way to understand how public relations practitioners work, but their approach is rather different. As the title states— ‘The role of pragmatic cultural schema in analysing public relations communication strategies’, this paper uses a framework from pragmalinguistics in order to unpack connections between culture, speech, and achievement of communicative goals, i.e. culturally situated public relations practice, in a way distinct from other discourse analytical approaches recognised in the field, such as Critical Discourse Analysis. Working with empirical material from Kuwait, the authors demonstrate how cultural schemata, such as obeying one’s elders or social superiors or employing the informal network of connections, wasta, surface in practitioners’ accounts of their work and, consequently, in its logic. The article thus shows that culture is a key element of public relations daily practice and professional performance.
The last article in this issue, Garcia’s ‘Cardinal Mazarin’s Breviary of politics: Exploring parallelisms between the Baroque and public relations in a post-truth society’ uses history to reflect on the present state of the relationship between power and communication. The parallels drawn between Mazarin’s approach to political success articulated in the 17th century and contemporary ‘public relations of the post-truth era’ are broken down to a number of elements, such as: Reputation; media of communication, which the author labels ‘Content’; Dominant Principles in communication; Standard of Truth; Organizations (i.e. those engaged in such strategic communication practices); Research; and Crisis Prevention and/or Management Storytelling. Although the author is very explicit about his polemical aim, and although alternative political ideas and practices existed in the Baroque era as they do now, the similarities pointed out by Garcia are striking and his conclusion that we ‘live in a neo-Baroque era of communication between organizations and publics’ is persuasive.
It is particularly pleasing for me as an editor to be able to show how work that public researches do, following their own particular interests and academic research production routines, nevertheless adds up to a larger reflection, keeping our disciple’s finger on the pulse of the turbulent times in which we live.