Other voices? The state of public relations history and historiography: Questions, challenges and limitations of ‘national’ histories and historiographies

Fitch, Kate; L'Etang, Jacquie

doi:10.1177/2046147x16687796

Cited by 16 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Moving from the particular to the general – from off-the-record communication to strategic silence – one can obtain a key of understanding and researching other modes of silence – from strategic ambiguity, apophatic, explicit and implicit silence to noise-curation, non-issue-framing and grand communication design (Dimitrov, 2018). In the epoch of increasing inequality when both hegemonic rivals of neoliberal globalism and populist nationalism fail their constituencies (Elmer, 2007; Fitch and L’Etang, 2017; Miller and Dinan, 2008; Moloney, 2002), there is a growing number of stakeholders who need the help of PR with such invisible – and invincible – strategies of resistance, survival, meditation, affirmation and rebound.…”

Section: Conclusion: From Wholesale To Retail?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating off the record

Dimitrov

2019

Public Relations Inquiry

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This article pursues three major goals. The first is a critical one. It confronts the widespread bias that off-the-record communication briefings are inferior – including professionally and ethically – to other techniques of communication, especially to its counterpart of on-the-record communication. The second goal is a practical one. Discussed are cases of both failed and successful off-the-record strategies, from which basic rules – prerequisites for such interaction – are extracted. And the third goal is a theoretical one. Off-the-record is conceptualised as more indirect and, in this sense, more strategic mode of communication than its counterpart. Affinity rather than trust is the core quality of the source-media relations here. A new distinction is made between advertising and public relations. On the record, one controls the message but due to the obvious self-interest of the source – attributable or unattributable – its credibility is low. Off the record, one cannot control the message, but other and more credible influencers take ownership of it and increase its impact. On the record is advertising; off the record is public relations.

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Section: Conclusion: From Wholesale To Retail?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Communicating off the record

Dimitrov

2019

Public Relations Inquiry

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“…These histories almost always adopt the practitioner perspective, drawing on personal experiences as well as memoirs of, and interviews with, prominent practitioners, and even identify the introduction of university courses as evidence of professional standing (Crawford and Macnamara, 2012; Fitch, 2015, 2016). We have argued elsewhere about the lack of scholarly attribution and evidence in such histories (Fitch and L'Etang, 2017). For example, the standard account of the development of PR in Australia is widely attributed to the version recounted by Sir Asher Joel, which frames his experience working with US military information in Second World War and his post-war role in establishing a professional institute in New South Wales as pivotal to the beginning of professional PR in Australia (Fitch, 2016).…”

Section: Textbook Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problematising history in the public relations curriculum

Fitch

L'Etang

2020

CCIJ

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PurposeThe aim of this paper is to begin a conversation about historicising the public relations (PR) curriculum in universities.Design/methodology/approachThe paper discusses PR history and historiography to identify the underlying ideological and methodological influences. It considers scholarship on PR education, and the inclusion or, more often, the exclusion of history except where it serves to reinforce a narrative of steady, and apparently unproblematic, professional development. The paper reviews the presentation of history in textbooks and discusses the authors' experiences of teaching PR history. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the inclusion of history in the PR curriculum offers an important critical intervention in PR education.FindingsThe PR curriculum tends to meet industry expectations around practice and skills in order to develop students as future practitioners. But this paper argues that a more historical and historiographical understanding of PR can develop in students important skills in research, analysis and interpretation. It can also introduce students to working with ambiguity and alternate perspectives. Foregrounding new histories and challenging existing histories introduce students to richer and more complex understandings of PR. It also introduces students to epistemology and ethics, and therefore offers a way to introduce critical thinking into the curriculum.Originality/valueA more historical understanding of PR develops student skills in research, analysis and interpretation as well as critical thinking.

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“…Despite some textbook histories stretching back to the Babylonians to show a long line of organized uses of communication for the achievement of political, economic of cultural aims as a kind of proto-PR (Cutlip and Center, 1978), the origins of PR as a distinct occupational practice can be located in the division of labour in the modern capitalist, industrial, mass democracies of the 19th century with communication specialists serving both the industry and the state (Fitch and L’Etang, 2017; Myers, 2017). As such, it is also inextricably linked to both the technologies of mass communication and the political legacy of the Enlightenment attached to the idea of the public – a collective noun for the rational and autonomous citizens of a modern polity (Bohman, 2004; Dewey, [1927] 2012; Habermas, 1996, 2006; Jackall and Hirota, 2000; Lippmann, 1925; Wernick, 1991).…”

Section: Pr Discovers the Publicmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pieczka

2019

Public Relations Inquiry

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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.

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Other voices? The state of public relations history and historiography: Questions, challenges and limitations of ‘national’ histories and historiographies

Cited by 16 publications

References 37 publications

Communicating off the record

Communicating off the record

Problematising history in the public relations curriculum

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

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