Abstract
As the new editors of Public Relations Inquiry, we are grateful for the opportunity to lead a journal that occupies a significant place in the history and contemporary developments of public relations scholarship. In this, we would like to thank the outgoing editorial team of Damion Waymer and founding editors Jacquie L’Etang and Magda Pieczka for their pioneering work and trust they have placed in us. Since its launch in 2012, the journal has played a key role in fostering diverse, innovative and radical perspectives on public relations, recognising the ways in which public relations activity is ‘intrinsically political’ (Daymon and Demetrious, 2014: 3) and making significant contributions to challenge and overcome a traditional dominance of management and organisational perspectives in public relations theory.
The launch of this journal was part of an expansion of publication and dissemination opportunities that enabled more diverse public relations scholarship, concerned less with organisational effectiveness and more with critical and interpretive approaches. These opportunities have also enabled critical and sociocultural perspectives on public relations to become more accepted and to move from the margins to the centre of the discipline. We plan to build on this foundation to ensure – as Waymer noted in his final editorial – Public Relations Inquiry ‘embod[ies] the identity of a journal that will provoke, dare to be different and unpredictable, a living debate’ (2023: 160).
In asking important questions and building a community of like-minded scholars, our predecessors Jacquie L’Etang and Magda Pieckza have played a central role. With fearless intellectual rigour, they set the groundwork for some of the most stimulating research influencing understandings of how public relations intersects with politics, society and culture. Emerging from critical public relations scholarship, this journal publishes research that not only questions the theories and practices of functionalist public relations, neoliberal maxims and status quo, but, by conceptualising public relations as one of the central sociocultural activities, investigates a range of new sites and seeks for change. Central to this is a recognition that by organising ‘some of the most influential societal and global discourses of our time’ (Bourne, 2022: 10), public relations has the potential to act as both a structural force for domination and a force for change.
This field is a rich and genuinely critical space. As we carry the legacy of Public Relations Inquiry, we commit to offer an important discursive space where critique, addressing blind spots and challenging taking-for-granted assumptions can flourish. We want to offer a platform for research, theorisations, discussion, dialogue and deliberation of public relations issues and communication phenomena that matter, and aim to enrich social and political understanding of the world through the public relations lens. We therefore hope to attract ground-breaking, innovative, thought-provoking and critical research and bring together a community of scholars who share these values, rigorously challenge dominant ways of thinking about public relations and its ‘regimes of truth’, offer provocative views and nourish meaningful conversations about public relations and communication in societies.
We want to provide a welcoming space for voices that have been silenced, marginalised or absent from public relations theory, and – in an attempt to embrace more interdisciplinary scholarship and to rattle disciplinary silos – attract scholars from outside the field. We hope to do this by engaging in contemporary debates and cutting-edge concerns that reflect on the role of public relations and promotional culture in a global, complex and challenging world. We particularly want to diversify overwhelmingly white, middle-class perspectives in the Global North, which have a stronghold in public relations scholarship. We are therefore very pleased to announce that our most recent special issue, ‘Towards a Latin American Perspective in PR Theory and Practice’ edited by Claudia LaBarca, Gabriel Sadi and Damion Waymer and published in May 2022, was awarded the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Prize earlier this year. Congratulations to everyone who contributed. We hope to see more groundbreaking work in the coming years.
In addition, we want to acknowledge the ways in which what we understand public relations is also changing and the unique challenges it faces, including digital transformation, ongoing ethical concerns, and its role in sustainability and social justice. We welcome submissions and proposals for special issues that would help us fulfill these objectives.
Lastly, we would like to introduce ourselves as the new journal editors and our relationship with critical public relations.
Dr Kristin Demetrious is an Associate Professor of Communication at Deakin University in Australia. Her research of activism and public relations has built ethical theory in the field, which is turn has opened new ways to think about the discursive impacts of alternative approaches. Her latest book is Public Relations and Neoliberalism: The Language Practices of Knowledge Formation. Milestones include a monograph in 2013, Public Relations, Activism and Social Change: Speaking Up, which was awarded the PRIDE Book Award for outstanding Innovation, Development, and Educational Achievement in PR from the Public Relations Division National Communication Association (NCA), USA and an edited book Gender and Public Relations: Critical Perspectives on Voice, Image and Identity (Daymon and Demetrious, 2014), which also received an international award.
Dr Kate Fitch is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism and convener of the public relations specialisation at Monash University, Australia. She has collaborated with Jacquie L’Etang on several publications, and been a visiting scholar at the University of Stirling, Queen Margaret University and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, all institutions strongly associated with critical public relations scholarship. Her research foregrounds critical and sociocultural understandings of public relations, drawing on historical, feminist and social justice perspectives. Her first monograph, Professionalizing Public Relations: History, Gender and Education (Fitch, 2016) remains the only book-length, historical investigation of the industry in Australia. Her second book, Popular Culture and Social Change: The Hidden Work of Public Relations (Fitch and Motion 2021) offers a critical account of the broader societal impact of public relations.
Dr Alenka Jelen is an Associate Professor and Head of Division of Communications, Media and Culture at the University of Stirling, which is known as the cradle of critical public relations. She met Jacquie L’Etang in 2004 when she was doing her research on public relations as an academic discipline and was taken with her critical approach, which has strongly influenced her work ever since. She worked at the University of Ljubljana and the University of Central Lancashire before joining Stirling in 2013. She has been Programme Director of MSc Strategic Communication and Public Relations, joint degree with Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (led by Jordi Xifra), bringing together two institutions that have played a key role in developing critical public relations research in Europe. Her research interest is in public relations as an academic discipline, gender in public relations and media, relationships between media and politics, and health communication. In 2022, she edited a special Public Relations Inquiry issue ‘Taboos in Heath Communication: Stigma, Silence and Voice' with Jacquie L’Etang and Roumen Dimitrov.
This issue represents is a transitional one between the old and new editorial teams, but we are delighted to be able to include papers that reflect geographical and methodological diversity and explore public relations from interdisciplinary perspectives.
In ‘#RIPJKRowling: A tale of a fandom, Twitter and a haunting author who refuses to die’, Griffith University’s Hannah Ravell investigates the #RIPJKRowling hashtag and the activism that has emerged in response to the author’s widely reported transphobic comments. Ravell concludes that fans have reclaimed Harry Potter – and the themes of love, diversity and acceptance – for themselves. Employing a public relations lens and literary theory by drawing on Barthes’ ‘death of the author’, Ravell considers the implications for celebrity authorship, when fans metaphorically ‘kill’ or cancel the author whom they consider has betrayed their fans and brand identity.
Tugce Ertem-Eray, North Carolina State University, contributes to theory building in both public relations and public diplomacy in ‘Extending the cultural-economic model of public relations through Bourdieu’s theoretical lens to inform public diplomacy efforts’. Drawing on in-depth interviews with members of Sister Cities International – the sister cities movement emerged at the end of WWII – Ertem-Eray draws on Bourdieu and the cultural-economic model of public relations to recognise the ways in which public diplomacy is a cultural practice of meaning, connected to power and status, and to argue for stronger recognition of the significant role of education in public diplomacy.
Rosalynn A. Vasquez and Marlene S. Neill, Baylor University, investigate the cultural identities, challenges and coping strategies of US Latinas working in public relations. US Latinas, largely underrepresented in both public relations scholarship and industry, are diverse and participants in this study represented Latin American heritage and links with ten different countries. The authors found differences between immigrant, first-generation and non-immigrant Latinas. Participants often felt pulled into roles requiring English and Spanish speakers or cultural competence, missing out on opportunities to take on other senior public relations or leadership roles.
Finally, in ‘Behind the scenes: A critical discourse analysis of Botswana government power plays on Facebook during two post-millennial state-owned organisational crises’, Chedza Simon, Sian Rees and Richard Thomas from Swansea University contribute to a growing body of public relations scholarship from Africa. This is the first article on Botswana in this journal. Their analysis reveals how the government uses organised persuasive communication, informed by a corporate ideology of economic development, to galvanise support and mobilise audiences to rally behind state-owned organisations and to maintain state power. This approach works against a long term and dialogic strategy, but, as the authors note, Botswana already has a culture of dialogue through its Kgotla, a village communications system involving face-to-face assemblies to debate and consensually agree on important matters.
In addition to these articles, we have two book reviews. Philip Effiom Ephraim reviews Cayce Myers’ (2021) Public Relations History: Theory, Practice, and Profession, noting histories of public relations are often multi-layered, self-serving and ‘a bit messy’. Sergei A Samoilenko reviews Katerina Tsetsura and Dean Kruckeberg’s (2021) edited volume, Strategic Communications in Russia: Public Relations and Advertising, a significant collection that traces the historical and contemporary developments of public relations in the post-Soviet context and offers the perspectives of Russian speaking scholars.