Editorial

This issue marks a parting of the ways as one editorial team moves over to make way for a new editorial team, a new team with new blood and fresh ideas. This editorial therefore serves as a moment of reflection in terms of considering the reasons behind the journal’s launch and the present state of public relations research.

At the time the journal was proposed and going through the lengthy process of peer review, it was still the case that critically focused work in public relations had no natural home. Historically, in fact, critical work within the field (and the methods associated with such approaches) had been denigrated or dismissed with various scholars resorting to publication outwith the field of public relations (see Waymer, 2022). Even with the successful publication of public relations-related scholarship in disciplines outside of the field of public relations, there still existed issues for critically-oriented public relations identified academics – as scholars in those disciplines and the journals where they placed their work sometimes also exhibited their own prejudices about the subject area public relations. Thus, critical public relations academics were disadvantaged on several fronts; we were received with some hostility within a largely functional discipline and ‘othered’ elsewhere – pursuing what was sometimes portrayed as a trivial topic that did not warrant consideration or respect. Such behaviours were also experienced by many public relations academics within their own institutions, evidenced by snobbish and patronising put-downs by colleagues. We suspect that in some cases, colleagues’ put-downs may have been partly attributed to jealousy because public relations could attract many good students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Regardless, suffice it to say that it was not an easy existence for the first generation of public relations academics pursuing critical lines of inquiry.

Despite these roadblocks, the number of scholars pursuing interpretive and critical research in public relations increased (Waymer, 2022). As the numbers of academics interested in pursuing critical lines of inquiry expanded internationally, it became clear that there was the opportunity to create an academic, scholarly space where ideas could be explored freely using diverse methodologies. Jordi Xifra, then of Girona, must be credited with making the suggestion for a special public relations journal, and he worked closely with Jacquie L’Etang to get the project off the ground. By this point in time around 2010, the second generation of more critically focused scholars was emerging and the response within the growing mass of creative and reflexive critical public relations research was enthusiastic and productive. Public Relations Inquiry, officially launched in 2012, offered a chance for compensatory publication for those whose ideas had been effectively censored in the early years of the discipline.

More than a decade following the launch of Public Relations Inquiry, however, the landscape has changed and many of the barriers have been removed. The term critical has become somewhat diluted and no longer is exclusively a part of the functional versus critical binary which is how the term emerged in the early 1990s, particularly in the United Kingdom. One consequence of this gradual landscape shift has been the slow but steady acceptance of more varied perspectives and forms of scholarly inquiry by the established journals such as Public Relations Review and the Journal of Public Relations Research. Another consequence has perhaps been loss of identity of the term critical. What does the term mean today to public relations scholars and in public relations scholarship? Perhaps this question should be usefully re-engaged with from time-to-time in the field and in this journal – as we believe it remains important for scholars to be forced to declare and evidence what they mean by critical when they claim it as part of their identity or refer to it in literature reviews. Is critical intrinsic to the academic or is it a temporary phase of research one can enter and exit with frequency, easily added or deleted from one’s CV?

In sum, more than 10 years after the launch of this journal, the outgoing editors who constitute three of the first and second generation of critical public relations scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States reflect fondly on what this journal has been and is and look forward to what it will become under new editorship.