Looking back and going forward: The concept ofthe publicin public relations theory

Abstract

This article examines the development of the public as a foundational concept in public relations theory. It provides an overview of the way in which public relations has understood the term as referring to two distinct phenomena of a public and the public. The article approaches public relations theory as unfolding of a narrative identity of public relations. The discussion subsequently reaches to the work of Michael Warner and Judith Butler to consider the limitations and implications of the situational theory of publics and the deliberativist approach to the public derived from the work of John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas. In its final sections, the article redefines the public as a family of three distinct, but at times, overlapping terms: an audience as a public of shared spaces, a self-organized public of shared attention, and the public as a political and social imaginary. This article argues for the need to adopt the performative approach to the public in order to tackle some of the biases in public relations theory. It also suggest the PESO model of communication a useful starting point to create a more complex understanding of the formation of the public (in all three senses) in relation to processes of co-creation and circulation of a wide range of texts.

Voicing the organization on Instagram: Towards a performative understanding of employee voice

“…The study draws on Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical metaphor to examine employee voice as a socially situated theatre performance. This means that it follows the performance based tradition within public relations research (Johansson, 2007; see also Pieczka, 2019 for a related approach), as well as Holland et al’s (2016: 16) call for employee voice research using ‘a more holistic approach [. .…”

The secrecy−transparency dynamic: A sociological reframing of secrecy and transparency for public relations research

“…In PR scholarship there has been less direct interest in secrecy as a concept although there has been considerable attention to practices of obscuring information, limiting information release and shaping the form and tone of such information and how this relates, for instance, to shaping public(s) (Pieczka, 2019) or the potentially blurred boundaries between propaganda and PR (Lock and Ludolph, 2019). There have been analyses of how PR is implicated in ‘denying voice’ (Bourne, 2019), and in the use of ‘strategic silence’ (Dimitrov, 2017).…”

A Systematic review of ontology-based approach and decision-making (DM) to improve public service delivery (PSD)

“…The citizen needs communication as an essential tool to participation, which could be understood as public communication, to gain knowledge (Pieczka, 2019). Dixon (2010) explained on knowledge and truth in relation to human nature where human will make selections that they expect will benefits them, provided that they have complete and certain knowledge of, and the capability to compute the outcomes of the chosen alternative and varied courses of action.…”