The public relations profession as discursive boundary work

Abstract

According to Bucher et al. (2016: 499), boundaries "demarcate professions from other professions and subprofessions with distinctive status and centrality in the field. However, these boundaries are not fixed." This observation holds true when applied to PR's professional project, which is ever-changing-encompassing boundary-work with adjacent fields such as journalism, advertising, marketing, human resources, management consultancy, accountancy and data management. PR's boundary-work has also led to fragmentation into other communication specialisms, including corporate communications, investor relations (IR), marketing communications and reputation management. Several studies have looked at contestation between PR and adjacent fields (Bourne, 2015a; Christensen et al., 2008; Hutton, 2010; Johansen & Anderson, 2012). However, the wider literature on professionalisation lacks a systematic account of how professions discursively construct their boundaries, or how differences in field position can influence a profession's use of discursive strategies to defend or contest its boundaries (Bucher et al., 2016). This matters for the deepening of PR's scholarship, since an effective exploration of the PR profession must account for professions as socially-constructed, and include studies of PR's jurisdictional disputes (Abbott, 1988; Bourne, 2015a; Zorn, 2002).

Chartered status and public relations' struggle for legitimacy

“…However, legitimacy, and especially social acceptance and closure does not only depend on a profession meeting these technical requirements. As indicated in the literature (Edwards 2014(Edwards , 2018Edwards and Pieczka, 2013;Bourne, 2019), legitimacy has to be achieved at the macro, meso and micro levels and these come together in the legitimation, or otherwise of the professional body because it is the institutional representative of the collective membership in society, and therefore to organisations as part of society. On the issue of diversity, there have been numerous initiatives to broaden the intake to the profession and to retain those minorities who enter.…”

“…Combining these two notions is helpful in that the process of being recognised as a profession, or professionalisation as it is often called, is about an occupation's ongoing struggle to secure its jurisdictional borders (boundaries of the profession), to capture a position in the market and to obtain social recognition and approval for its work, in other words, legitimacy. Professionalisation is seen to be a 'cure' for the lack of legitimacy that public relations suffers from (Pieczka and L'Etang, 2006;Merkelsen, 2011;Edwards and Pieczka, 2013;Taylor and Kent, 2016) It is helpful to note the definition of a profession given by Friedson (1970): …..an occupation which has assumed a dominant position in the division of labor so that it gains control over the determination and substance of its own work (p.xv11) There are a number of facets that define a profession and which emerge from the literature: jurisdiction over a particular occupational field; a code of ethics, a body of theoretical knowledge, formal and recognised (certified) training; closed entry; a public service orientation and a representative professional body (Wylie, 1994;Pieczka and L'Etang, 2006;Taylor and Kent, 2016;Edwards, 2018;Bourne, 2019).…”

Fintech’s Transparency–Publicity Nexus: Value Cocreation Through Transparency Discourses in Business-to-Business Digital Marketing

“…The next section of this article explores literature on transparency in B2B markets and in platform ecosystems. This is followed by a discussion of content marketing as a professional genre (Wall & Spinuzzi, 2018), and the chosen method of field-level discourse analysis (Bourne, 2019). Thereafter, I discuss findings, connecting transparency as a form of value cocreation achieved through texts strategically deployed to respond to protectionist discourses, and to establish discourses of hybridizing knowledge, or expansionary encroachment on other experts’ knowledge areas.…”

“…The methodological approach draws on Bourne’s (2019) field-level discourse analytical framework (see Figure 2). This method is designed to deconstruct discursive boundary-work carried out by professionals within an expert field, or between adjacent fields of expertise, in order to reveal how claims to professional knowledge and expertise are successfully deployed, defended, and maintained.…”

“…Protectionist discourses emphasize exclusiveness of one’s knowledge area; hybridizing discourses fragment knowledge into new specialisms; and expansionary discourses expand into knowledge areas claimed by others. These discourses can overlap, and run concurrently (Bourne, 2019). Fintech magazine’s monthly format provides a discursive mechanism for fintech’s players to cocreate transparency by promoting regimes of industry data sharing, and normalizing financial services’ reorganization around platformization as a route to consumer openness, fairness, and transparency (Gillespie, 2010).…”