Abstract
Public relations and activism have a complex and contentious relationship with evolving debates around their boundaries and convergences. How are these two central forces in society related, interconnected and how do they differ? To what extent are advocacy and activism a form of public relations and vice versa? What are the similarities in their discursive work and what implications does this have for power structures in society? How do public relations and promotional work intertwine with activism to contribute to or obstruct social change? These questions that lie at the heart of the contributions in this issue are increasingly pertinent in the current social climate, where everything is political, from people and non-humans we love, the environment we live in, health and lifestyle choices we make and institutions we trust to memes we share. Organisations, corporations, governments, NGOs, social movements, civil society and famous individuals in the public sphere are entangled in socio-political issues and expected to engage in public debates, advocate their positions, campaign for change and exert political influence to tackle social and environmental injustice. Thus, they effectively engage in a range of practices sometimes understood as ‘advocacy’ and ‘activism’.
In the last decade, activism and advocacy have received increasing attention in public relations research with scholars recognising their potential to enrich theory and practice (Adi, 2019). Advocacy and activism are often synonymous, but not in all contexts. While advocacy stands for taking a stance on an issue or arguing for a cause to advance the common good, societal benefits or to influence public policy on behalf of an organization, civil society or individual, activism is firmly embedded in social movements that bring people together to intentionally articulate their interests, voice grievances and critiques, and propose solutions to identified problems by engaging in a variety of collective actions to convince, pressure, or coerce external decision makers to meet collective goals and bring about social change (Weaver, 2019). Advocacy is, therefore, found at the core of both activism and public relations within and outside of the organisational structures.
We have come a long way from the dominant views in management-oriented functional public relations scholarship of the previous century, when public relations was directly pitted against civil society groups that engaged in public campaigns critical of business or industry. With a focus on the corporate sector, these studies conceptualised advocates and activists as ‘outsiders’ that obstruct organisational operations and growth and need to be dealt with in corporate actions and communication/storytelling. This ‘othering’ of activism and its separation from public relations has largely excluded communicative actions and pioneers of activism, for example women, LGBTQI+, indigenous communities, multilingual and multicultural communities as well as organisations, movements and groups they represent, from public relations theorisations and history (L’Etang, 2016). This historic diametric has had important implications for the discipline and its development, ranging from missing out on important knowledge and conceptualisations of activist communications to perpetuating ethnocentrism, insularity and social inequalities.
The phenomenal rise of market-based society, and neoliberalism in the last 40 years, propelling public relations into every domain (Demetrious, 2022) and the realisation that the public relations industry can learn from activism and advocacy have seen the two areas move from the margins to the centre of the disciplinary attention. Functionalist scholarship started recognising the intersections between public relations and activism in terms of sharing and/or borrowing ideas and techniques from each other, including communication campaigns, promotion, advocacy, issues management, events, lobbying, public affairs, community engagement and public mobilisation. While making important advancements in conceptualising activism as a central dynamic in public relations work, and theorising it at the technical level of organisations, it was not until sociocultural, critical and postmodern scholarship posited activism through its influence on wider democratic and civil society that this research gained a new momentum (Adi, 2019; Demetrious, 2013). Through this lens, advocacy and activism are viewed as specific expressions of public communication that work as discursive interventions to advance points of view, engage in cultural and social change, and assist civil society organisations (not for profits, NGOs, community action groups) to challenge the status quo and power structures. This shift led sociocultural and critical scholarship in public relations to “almost earn the title of an ‘activist turn’” (Moloney and McKie, 2015: 154) in terms of both challenging paradigmatic assumptions of functional scholarship and shifting the attention from corporations to studying public relations of advocacy organisations and activists from the activists’ point of view. These diverse oppositional views, conceptualising activism as an obstacle for organisational interests (in functionalist perspectives) to conferring public relations a role in achieving social change (in sociocultural and critical perspectives) do not come without tensions and perpetuation of false binaries between ‘internal’ versus ‘external’, ‘corporate’ versus ‘third’ sector and ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ advocacy and activism.
The first false binary centres on where the activist is speaking from, either inside the organisational structure or outside of it. The traditional functionalist perspective assumes that someone advocating for change from outside a corporation is an ‘activist’ with adversarial intent (Ciszek, 2015; Coombs and Holladay, 2018). This perspective misses that there are forms of activism that can be interpreted broadly with various intents (from advocating for corporate advantage to social change) within the organisational sphere, including employees, leaders, shareholders or trustees, especially in the wake of a growing social unification to mitigate the changing climate and social injustices. As such, it also overlooks the role of public relations professionals as activists, who with their strategic/persuasive communication expertise and power to organise ‘some of the most influential social and global discourses of our time’ (Bourne, 2022: 10) have a potential to intervene in and challenge regimes of injustice at the organisational and societal levels (Holtzhausen, 2006). It tends to exclude advocacy, activist and social movements groups from its investigations—these are largely the focus of critical scholarship.
This brings us to the second false binary, that is, the distinction between ‘corporate’ versus ‘third’ sector. In critical scholarship, advocacy and activism are essentially understood as an activity by third sector groups, such as social collectives, community action groups, social movements, and NGOs with the aim to empower the less powerful, enable people’s participation for a just society and lend legitimacy to their voices in challenging dominant positions and influencing public policy. However, in commercial democracies, business can play an increasing role in offering new modes of public engagement, agency and voice (Cronin, 2018) in the framework of a paradoxical ‘corporate advocacy’ and ‘corporate activism’. These activities, conceptualised as organisations taking stands on social issues that may, or may not, relate to a corporation’s core purpose or mission or have a bearing on their financial and marketplace interests, do not go without controversy. How do we deal with the phenomenon of advocacy and activism being hijacked by the resource-rich, powerful corporate sector, which traditionally excluded such activities and even antagonised them? This question is tackled with critical scrutiny of corporate advocacy and activism being done in pursuit of profits at the expense of public good. On the other hand, we see somewhat less critically scrutinised activists framing their civil society cause in corporate terms of a ‘product’ or ‘brand’ (Demetrious, 2023). In this transversal environment, corporations and the third sector alike act with diverse motives and intentions reflected in their persuasive discourses, ranging from corporate greed to social justice, from disingenuous engagement with to positive contributions to social change, from purely self-interested advocacy that limits the capacity of democratic systems to address challenges to constructively and authentically adding to productive deliberations around solving contentious issues (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021; Edwards, 2016; Fitch, 2015).
This leads to the third false binary of separating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ activism. With its powerful position in society and focus on profitability, corporate activism is often labelled as ‘bad’, that is, used in pretence of good faith to advance neoliberal logics and status quo that cause harm to individuals and society, while attempting to ward off conflict with external activist stakeholders. Public relations scholarship has widely critiqued corporate activism and culpability of public relations in enabling ‘white’/’green’/’rainbow’ washing or window-dressing practices. However, it has yet to come to grips with questions of evidence-free, non-dialogic assertive ‘activism’ based on disinformation and disingenuous communication within and outside of the corporate arena. Organisations and movements, such as climate denialists, anti-vaxxers and other civil society organisations that with their ethically questionable communication practices exacerbate social divisions, inequalities and harm, can invoke the orders of discourse of civil society and the underdog status to appear as the ‘good’ guys (with a problematic use of gendered language). This more recent conflation or blurring of the boundaries between activism, vested interests and public relations, within social conditions where trust in institutions, including governments, NGOs, media, experts and to a lesser extent businesses is low (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2024), warrants far more scrutiny and research.
These binaries, complexities and ‘messiness’ of advocacy and activism in relation to public relations are from a variety of theoretical, methodological, disciplinary and organisational perspectives tackled in the five articles and book review presented in this issue. They demonstrate that advocacy and activist communication involves contributions of collective intelligences from various sectors, entities and actors that extend beyond civil society organisations as primary agents of political, economic and social change as well as beyond traditional public relations and strategic communications roles.
The issue opens with Donn J Tilson’s article ‘All creatures great and small: Faith, spirituality, environmental-animal rights activism and public relations as covenantal stewardship’, providing an untapped historical account of public relations from the perspective of faith/spirituality-inspired social activism in environmental and animal rights. Through textual analysis of historical materials and institutional media, Tilson explores connections between faith/spirituality and advocacy of Indigenous peoples, governments, NGOs and individuals and offers a new worldview, definition and model of public relations practice. Grounding public relations in philosophy/worldview of ‘caritas’, he proposes a ‘covenantal stewardship model’ of relationship-building that guides behaviour in a pro-social manner toward an inclusive, ‘human and non-human set of publics’. This redefinition and reinterpretation of public relations are, according to Tilson, necessary for both overcoming Western ethnocentricity and the dominance of a corporate/organisational approaches in functionalist-oriented public relations scholarship and recognising a true value of public relations to society in the light of emerging sensitivities to the principles of diversity and inclusion.
On a similar topic of environment advocacy and stewardship, but from a corporate perspective, Luke Capizzo and Monique Luisi discuss definitions, intersections and relationships between Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and environmental justice in relation to public relations in their conceptual essay ‘Responsibility, sustainability, or environmental justice? Strategic communication and evolving expectations for stewardship and citizenship’. The essay opens with defining and providing conceptual clarity of CSR, ESG, and environmental justice and indicates how public relations would benefit through (1) the development of formal ethical standards for ESG communication, (2) a focus on environmental justice as an ethical standard and lens for ESG, and (3) the pursuit of equity in understanding an organization’s societal and environmental responsibilities. They provide six equity strategies for justice-informed ESG communication (clarity, addressing conflicts, reflectiveness, community empowerment, and collaborative, justice-oriented outcomes) to augment existing and establish new public relations codes of conduct underpinned by the principles of two-way communication, active organisational listening and conscious efforts toward representativeness of disparate voices. These strategies can move public relations towards more equitable inclusivity of stakeholders and provide benefits to organisations and public relations ethics theory.
In the third paper in this issue, ‘Public relations, activism, and the culture of assertion: The case of Blackrock’s Larry Fink and the letter to the CEOs’, Joshua Foust and Burton St John III apply activist literature to ESG communication in the corporate sector, but in contrast to the previous paper question the assumptions of two-way dialogical, consensus-oriented communication as foundational to public relations. Through the analysis of 10 years of corporate communication by Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, they show how corporate public relations with activist sensibilities reflects and reinforces a culture of growing non-dialogic, raw assertions rhetoric that favours the status quo. They call for critical rethinking of long-standing understandings of dialogue and harmony-seeking communication as fundamental to public relations and the public sphere, ranging from classical writings of Dewey and Habermas to public relations literature of Grunig’s Excellence Theory and Heath’s rhetorical perspectives. While the authors recognise that these theorisations have value, they argue that their notions of symmetrical communication in pursuit of consensus need to be updated if public relations is to better theorise the ascendancy of non-dialogic, evidence-free assertations and ‘bad’ faith activism that are becoming the norm in the public sphere, exerting significant social power and influence.
If the previous two papers apply advocacy and activism to corporate public relations, Naíde Müller’s ‘Challenge or resist dominant discourses: Authenticity as a strategic component of activist public relations’ turns the tables by exporting public relations theorisations into the area of human rights activism. Müller applies the concept of authenticity, the reputational impact of which has been widely studied in corporate strategic communication oriented to the market and consumption dynamics, to activist communication through a theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism. In her ethnographic study of two Portuguese human rights NGOs (Alternative and Answer Women’s Union and Portuguese Activist Group for HIV/AIDS), Müller observes authenticity in activist public relations on two levels: (1) as an intentional strategic choice associated with an ontological dimension that justifies the existence of these activist groups; and (2) as a challenge or resistance to dominant discourses with emotional rather than rational drive in strategic thinking. Situating authenticity as a strategic component of activist public relations fosters a deeper critical understanding of subjective dimension of managing perceptions in the nonprofit sector, its relations to the corporate world and its contributions to the field of civic participation dynamics that is fundamental to strengthening democracies.
Sarah A. Aghazadeh’s article ‘Don’t say “the D word”: Exploring death taboo and biopower in pregnancy loss awareness advocacy’ takes the examination of activism and advocacy even deeper into the sociocultural theory of public relations. Using the circuit of culture and Foucault’s concept of biopower to interrogate taboo of pregnancy loss as a mechanism of social control, Aghazadeh takes public relations theorisations of health-related taboos beyond stigma, silence and oppression. Using in-depth interviews with U.S. pregnancy loss awareness advocates/activists, she explicates their perceptions of how taboo regulates pregnancy loss through isolation, invalidation, erasure, and conflation with abortion and indicates how they resist such regulations that cause individual and cultural harms through framing pregnancy loss as a public health issue, building community, and reclaiming parental identity. These are not unproblematic; they might be conflated with anti-abortion rhetoric and used to thread on women’s reproductive rights. The study advances sociocultural theoretical and practical considerations by illustrating the complex regulatory functions taboos serve, presenting experience-based community as productive use of power, and considering the nuances of the contemporary health advocacy to improve wellbeing, particularly in relation to pregnancy loss, death and bereavement.
The issue concludes with Vassilis Charitsis’s review of Eleftheria J. Lekakis’s book Consumer Activism: Promotional Culture and Resistance. The book provides a comprehensive and critical exploration of complexities, contradictions, ambivalence, tensions and dilemmas inherent in the manifestation of consumer activism that emerges within the marketplace and turns it into an arena of politics. This form of activism, intertwining consumption and resistance, progressive and regressive ideas, ranging from fair-trade buying, celebrity advocacy to anti-consumerist grassroots movements, is now a key part of the fight for social and environmental justice. The book is an essential resource for understanding and researching the various ways in which citizens/consumers, collectives, and corporations utilise the marketplace for political purposes by actively engaging with and influencing consumption practices, corporate processes, and political decisions to tackle social issues. It brings important insights to a spectrum of disciplines—including media and communication, political science, cultural studies, sociology, marketing, and public relations.
This issue reflects an increasing focus on advocacy and activism in public relations scholarship, yet the opposite can hardly be said. Although activism and advocacy studies address public relations phenomena, ranging from purposive and persuasive communication techniques to societal discourses for social change, they rarely draw on public relations literature. This observation demonstrates that there is work to be done in terms of (1) acknowledging the problematic ideological tensions within and between the fields of activism and public relations, the historical legacies and social impacts of this, (2) producing in-depth, solid theorisations that are relevant, and (3) promoting this knowledge outside public relations scholarship. We believe that papers in this issue addressing diverse settings, purposes and impacts of public relations, advocacy and activism from a variety of theoretical, methodological and organisational perspectives make important steps towards achieving these aims. We hope that they will be a start of rich and invigorating debates that in Weaver’s (2019) words continue to reimagine public relations research beyond corporate and government sectors and embracing the recognition of activists and advocates’ contributions to public debate and social change.