Extending the cultural-economic model of public relations through Bourdieu’s theoretical lens to inform public diplomacy efforts

Sister Cities International

President Eisenhower founded SCI at the 1956 White House Summit on Citizen Diplomacy, although communities around the world had started to build relationships even earlier. Immigrants who traveled around the world had retained their culture and named towns that they built in honor of their ancestral homes or patrons, such as New York, Williamsburg, and St Louis. These early towns are seen as the beginning of sister city relationships and are known as “nametowns” (Sister Cities International, 2006).

Today’s sister city movement emerged at the end of World War II, which destroyed many cities around the world and left thousands hungry and in need of help. The postwar environment made people open to the idea of reaching out to those communities, and U.S. citizens reached out to citizens of Japan and Germany to help them after the war. For example, in 1951, Arlington, Texas, arranged a humanitarian aid project for Konigshofen, Germany, which initiated a long-term relationship between the two cities (Sister Cities International, 2006).

During World War II, General Eisenhower commanded the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe and the occupying forces in Germany. He saw the war’s destructive consequences firsthand and wanted to bring people together to plan and work toward common peace around the world. After becoming president in 1953, he encouraged communities around the U.S. to create town affiliation links with communities around the world. For example, in 1955, Hagerstown, Maryland, and Wesel, Germany, became sister cities to build relationships among their residents. Eisenhower and the early pioneers of the Sister City Program believed that if the citizens of countries could build mutually respectful relationships, it could transform diplomatic relations between those countries (Sister Cities International, 2006). When the program was first devised, relationships focused mainly on culture and education (Mascitelli and Chung, 2008).

Any city looking for a sister can be a part of the Sister Cities Program and have more than one sister (Sister Cities International, n.d.). Choosing a sister city is not a random process. According to Zelinski (1991), “historical connections, shared economic, cultural, recreational and ideological concerns, similar or identical place names, and, to a certain extent, the friction of distance” all play roles in choosing a sister city (p. 1). Others have suggested that sister cities should be of equal size, that larger cities should have more sister cities than smaller cities for a successful engagement process, and that the financial and human resources dedicated to the relationships are one of the most important variables for a successful sister city relationship (e.g., Gil, 2020). Officials from both communities must sign an official agreement to become sister cities. Sister city organizations can include volunteers and representatives from nonprofits, companies, or municipal governments.

The relationships between sister cities are independent of each other, and they can decide what projects are important to them (Sister Cities International, n.d.) and suitable for the needs and resources of both cities (Cremer et al., 2001), such as student exchanges, sporting events, or economic exchanges. For example, Salisbury, Maryland, and Tartu, Estonia, are sister cities that have an exchange program for college students studying cybersecurity (Ledbetter, 2017). Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston, South Carolina, have an arts festival that helps Charleston’s local economy (Jaffe, 2013). Although projects vary among sister cities, they all aim to build relationships. In addition, these relationships are performed at the local level and do not depend on the support of national governments (Cremer et al., 2001).

According to the SCI website, today SCI serves as the national membership organization for sister cities across the U.S. and unites thousands of citizen diplomats and volunteers in almost 500 member communities in more than 140 countries who run sister city programs to promote peace and strengthen local communities. The program has created approximately 3700 jobs in its network and provided more than $400,000 in humanitarian aid (Sister Cities International, n.d.). SCI (2006) also observed that many of the early relationships built under the Sister Cities program have lasted into the present. Since the program started, trade activities have increased, and the number of people and students who have traveled from the U.S. to visit a sister city has also increased and vice versa (Sister Cities International, 2006). Hu et al. (2021) have characterized sister city relationships as “decentralized intergovernmental relationships” (p. 1279) that not only promote information exchange between governments, businesses, and citizens but also allow local leaders to build relationships and economic exchanges for the local community.

Scholars (e.g., Arsenault, 2009; Fisher, 2016; Zaharna et al., 2013) have argued that today, countries’ public diplomacy efforts need to focus on forming relationships, cooperation, and collaboration among diverse communities around the world. As a long-term public diplomacy initiative, SCI has tried to adapt its public diplomacy efforts to new public diplomacy features by focusing on collaborative and relational strategies instead of simply disseminating messages. Therefore, SCI makes a good case study for this study to examine how the organization perceives and performs public diplomacy efforts.

Cultural-economic model of public relations

The CEM of public relations is based on the circuit of culture model (du Gay et al., 1997) and explains how the connection of culture and power creates meaning (Curtin and Gaither, 2007). The circuit of culture model guides theoretical development that emphasizes identities, differences, and power (Curtin and Gaither, 2005). Depending on the circuit of culture, the CEM not only sees culture as a process and a space in which meanings are created and places culture at the center of any communication efforts but also sees power as inherent and fluid in all relationships (Gaither and Curtin, 2007).

The circuit of culture model consists of five moments in a process: regulation, production, consumption, representation, and identity. These five moments “work in concert to provide a shared cultural space in which meaning is created, shaped, modified, and recreated” (Curtin and Gaither, 2007, p. 38). Thus, there is no beginning or end on the circuit, and each moment contributes to the whole in concert to create meaning (Curtin and Gaither, 2007). According to Curtin and Gaither (2008), we can understand the practice of public relations only if we understand how meaning is produced and reproduced in different moments of the model. Moreover, it is better to analyze each moment separately to understand the dimensions of each moment and to indicate whether extant research belongs to specific moments (Curtin and Gaither, 2005).

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice

Bourdieu’s sociological work, which he called a theory of practice, focuses on the practical logic of everyday actions of individuals (Bourdieu, 1977). His sociological concerns also included understanding relations of power and domination and the development of reflexive sociology (Power, 1999). In Bourdieu’s thinking, social structures and mental structures are interlinked. The subjective representations of the agent also need to be considered because they help agents change these objective structures (Wacquant, 2006). To effect this synthesis of objectivism and subjectivism, Bourdieu talked about habitus, field, and capital.

Data gathering

This study is part of a larger study conducted using in-depth interviews with the organizational members of SCI (26 participants), which formed the case study on which the research was based. Snowball sampling was used to collect data from organizational members and “is the method of asking study participants to make referrals to other potential participants, who in turn make referrals to other participants, and so on” (Davis and Lachlan, 2017, p. 152). The organizational members consist of those who live in the U.S. and play an active role in the organization’s public diplomacy efforts both in the U.S. and around the world. The researcher asked organizational members who agreed to participate in the study to suggest additional participants. Through the organization’s website, the researcher was able to connect with one of the global envoys and some of the state representatives who suggested additional participants throughout the interview process. Thus, participants were recruited by sending an email invitation to those whose email addresses were found on the organization’s website and by using snowball sampling. The interview sample consisted of 26 participants. Although McCracken (1988) indicated that eight participants are sufficient for interview studies, this study aimed to reach data saturation, which was achieved when the researcher received no new information during the last interviews.

Ten of the interview participants were male and 16 were female; however, gender variation was not a concern for this study. To see different perspectives of how organizational members perceive their organization’s public diplomacy effort, this study included participants who had different titles within the organization, such as global envoy, mayor, local volunteer, and state representative. Because the organization mainly includes White members, the author was able to interview only three African American organizational members. In addition, most of the interview participants were older than 50.

In-depth interviews

Upon receiving Institutional Review Board approval, the author conducted interviews over Zoom. Each participant verbally agreed to a consent form, indicating that they agreed to do the interview and to have the interview recorded. The author used an interview guide to shape the conversation (Warren and Karner, 2015). The interview guide included grand tour questions phrased in a nondirective manner to allow participants to tell their stories in their own terms (McCracken, 1988), such as their involvement with the organization, their role at the organization, and the biggest challenge they have faced on the job. The researcher also asked what has changed throughout the years in the program to those who were organizational members for more than 20 years. In the end, the researcher asked the participants what else she should have asked them about and what else the participants wanted to tell her to not miss any experiences that they wanted to share about the organization. Each grand tour question included several probes to follow up as necessary to gain more insightful information from the participants. Follow-up questions such as “Could you say some more about that?” and “What do you mean by that. . .?” were also used to clarify or elaborate the participants’ answers.

The interviews lasted approximately 1 hour each and were conducted starting at the beginning of August 2020 and ending at the end of September 2020. The author conducted all interviews and used a professional transcription service to transcribe them from digital recording files. The author compared the written transcripts with the recordings to verify the accuracy of the transcription.

Interview analysis

During the first stage of this process, which is called open coding, the author needs to have some sense of the “big picture” of the data (Warren and Karner, 2015). This stage involved close reading and naming each word, line, or segment of data. Codes were created by defining what the author saw in the data (Charmaz, 2006). The author identified recurrent patterns or themes, then connected them to issues in the research literature and started to make analytic decisions depending on the focus of the research (Warren and Karner, 2015). The second stage included coding the most salient categories and developing axial codes to connect the most salient categories with subcategories to identify relationships among them (Charmaz, 2006; Lindlof and Taylor, 2011). These links could include conditions, actions/interactions, and consequences to answer the why, where, when, by whom, and how questions, as well as “what happens” because of these actions/interactions (Charmaz, 2006). The author focused on how these axial codes can be integrated into theory in the third state, called theoretical coding (Charmaz, 2006).

Because this paper is concerned with theoretical development, only a brief overview of the results of the empirical study are provided here.

Results of the previous study

The results of the larger study indicated four salient categories: uncertainty about the future, eliminating differences, prioritizing economic gain, and decentralizing politics. These categories are discussed briefly here because they inform how Bourdieu’s theory could extend the CEM.

Participants emphasized the local efforts and volunteer work in city relationships and talked about how real work was done at the local level, such as raising money, traveling across countries, and programming exchanges. One thought that “All depends on the people involved.” They believed that their efforts at the local level made people-to-people diplomacy possible and that the organization wouldn’t be able to survive long term without local efforts and volunteers. However, there was also uncertainty about volunteerism because it is also seen as one of the biggest challenges for the organization and it creates skepticism about the organization’s future. Some participants think that not only is the organization aging but they also can’t represent the values, beliefs, and opinions of different generations because of the organization’s lack of youth. Moreover, some participants mentioned the lack of diversity in the organization. For example, participant seven believed that “This organization cannot, in its leadership, cannot be reflective only of white Anglo men.” This salient category is related to the moment of production because of its emphasis on the role of local efforts and volunteers in building relationships within the organization.

Participants also talked about how important knowing differences among cultures is in sister city relationships. Representatives of the organizational members considered the importance of cultural competency to understand, communicate with, and effectively interact with people across cultures. They, however, believed that they are all the same at the end of the day. Participants also mentioned that most people speak English around the world or they can use interpreters, so the language barrier is not a problem in building sister city relationships. Even though representatives of the organizational members are conscious of the cultural and language differences between people, they believe that everyone is the same at the end of the day and see cultural and language differences are superficial. They thought that everyone speaks English, wanted to eliminate differences among nations, and were trying to build relationships by seeing American culture, language, and U.S. cities as the norm. Participants also mentioned how the COVID-19 pandemic affected their programs and they had to adjust their technology usage through social media and video conferencing software. Even though participants believed technology provides easier and faster communication between sister cities, few talked about challenges, such as Internet connectivity or time differences. This category is related to the moment of regulation that examines how power flows are enacted in culture and technological infrastructure.

The third salient category that emerged from the interview data was prioritizing economic gain. Participants indicated that financial firms and business leaders are important for the organization to create business relations for economic gain. Participant 12 also said, “When we form our board of directors, we use representation from all the major companies in our state… So when we need their help, they’re very willing to give us help.” Participant 17 added, “You need to talk to some business leaders in your community into agreeing to work with these other cities whether it’s allowing some people to come here to look at their businesses and industry or send some people over there, you know, to work with their business and industry.” A few participants emphasized that the need for economic development is the prime factor of the organization. For example, participant 22 believed that “They wanted to be sure that any relationships they had with other cities were more, um, focused on economic and business, and not so much on the softer side such as culture and charities.” Participants also talked about the importance of education in sister city relationships. Participant 26 thought that “Scholarship leads to economic development” and added, “We would say and it’s a job creator. Uh, so the companies liked it because here they are getting a fully vetted and trained student that they had a year to work with to get that student culturally acclimated within their company before they actually had to hire them.” Several participants talked about educational exchange as one of the organization’s most significant efforts. Many efforts start with high schools or universities to build relationships between cities. Businesses support these educational efforts with the intent of economic gain. This category is related to the moment of production because it indicates how economic aspects play a significant role within the organization when organizing a public diplomacy program.

Another salient category was decentralizing politics because participants thought that politics are creating issues in sister city relationships. For example, participant two believed that it is difficult to deal with nonstable governments and leadership. Participant 9 said, “When our president and our government bans travel from Muslim countries, the Indonesian students could not come to the summer program. They couldn’t, they couldn’t get a visa.” Participants emphasized the importance of the country’s president and the mayors in these relationships. Several participants, however, thought that leadership can also create issues to maintain these relationships. Therefore, they believed it is essential for the organization to decentralize the leaders' role in these relationships to avoid their negative influences on the efforts. They also thought that the organization needs to isolate itself from the State Department. For example, participant 26 said, “State Department just stay out of the way…Get out of the way because this is not government. This is people to people. And if many people on the other side of the relationship get the sense that it’s government driven, they-they will not interact with this.” This salient category is also related to the moment of regulation because it contains government attempts to regulate sister city relationships.

The next section discusses how each code can be integrated into Bourdieu’s theory of practice and provide more explanatory power and depth to the CEM of public relations.