Guest editorial

Citation

L'Etang, J. (2011), "Guest editorial", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 15 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcom.2011.30715baa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Communication Management, Volume 15, Issue 2

This Themed Issue reflects upon a number of central themes in public relations: dialogue, legitimacy, and mediatisation. These themes inter-relate as authors tackle conceptual issues related to roles, jurisdiction, status and power.

Some of the articles presented in this Special Issue were presented in initial form at the University of Stirling in September 2009 (Pieczka, Merkelsen, Frederiksson and Pallas). The conference, “Stirling 21” (celebrating 21 years of higher education in public relations at Stirling) was essentially the UK national conference in public relations, sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), in memory of Alan Rawel, formerly Director of Education, CIPR, whose tragic early death robbed the UK academic and practice communities of one of the rare souls who could understand these linked and often conflictual parties. More than 70 academics from all over the world attended the conference, and a number of papers were developed for this Issue. All three contributions presented here add something significant to the international research agenda in public relations. The remaining contribution was selected for its complementarity, resonance and synchronicity (Johansson and Ottestig)

Pieczka’s article sets a new agenda for theory and practice and cuts to the heart of much debate, by unpacking the concept of dialogue in the public relations context. In fact, she demonstrates that the concept is poorly understood and under-conceptualised within public relations scholarship. She draws on a range of adjacent disciplines, notably political science, management, community development and organizational development to explore overlaps between symmetrical communication, CSR and dialogue. Her analysis begins with a presentation of some key quotes from eminent scholars in the field, and lays out the conceptual origins of symmetry in a review which useful combines historical and philosophical perspectives and shows how these link to community-building and co-orientation and a constitutive definition of communication that links to the notion of the public sphere. Pieczka presents CSR as a form of symbolic action in which “relationship management is another technique of managing the soft symbolic boundary of social responsibility” in a social context operating on the assumptions of “tolerant, peaceful deliberative democracy”. She provides a review of key literature focused on dialogue, and her review demonstrates how many disciplines have tried to claim the concept. This discussion is of interest not only to public relations specialists, but also to those whose focus is more specifically located in public affairs, public communication and public engagement.

Pieczka’s article demonstrates the surprising paucity of discussion to date on the topic of dialogue within public relations scholarship, and, even more crucially, suggests that the complementary failure of the practice to engage with the concept implies lost opportunities and perhaps marginalization, as international organizations instigate policies founded on dialogic practice.

In his article, “The double-edged sword of legitimacy in public relations”, Merkelsen also highlights the importance of dialogue to the public relations academic community, referring to “devotion to dialogue as a vehicle for public reasoning” and “the contemporary celebration of dialogue in public relations theory”. Merkelsen’s considerations on legitimacy explain dominant ideals in public relations scholarship as an enlightenment inheritance, and he argues that public relations theory has mixed pragmatic and moral notions of legitimacy, that has resulted in internal and unresolved tensions. Merkelsen draws on a range of multi-disciplinary literature to distinguish between institutional legitimacy theory, concerned with how organizations gain societal acceptance, and strategic legitimacy theory, which takes a managerial stance in seeking to gain acceptance in order to build up legitimacy as an organisational resource. Given the lack of attention that has been given to unpacking the concept of legitimacy, as Merkelsen notes, it seems that there is potential for further conceptual work around the legitimacy – reputation – rumour triangle. Merkelsen draws our attention to the proportionate relationship between power and legitimacy whereby “the more powerful an organization, institution … the more it needs to legitimise itself”, and he identifies PR’s professional project as a strategy to institutionalise occupational power. Merkelsen therefore raises the important question: “Who benefits from the professionalization and to whom is it desirable, proper, or appropriate, and hence an object of legitimation?”

Merkelsen’s overall project fills a gap in the literature since, as he points out, it focuses on a concept that tends to be defined in its absence, rather than its presence. He re-works the historical problem of “the public relations of public relations” and re-casts this as: “how to legitimise a profession that has legitimacy as its own object”? foregrounding the (ironic) challenge of promoting an intermediary occupation that works behind-the-scenes but is engaged in impression management. Merkelsen teases out legitimacy issues through four sets of relationships:

1. 1.

   client-public;

2. 2.

   profession-public;

3. 3.

   client-profession; and

4. 4.

   profession-academia.

His analysis helps to delineate the source of theoretical confusions and tensions that have caused debate to founder in endless repetitive cycles. Merkelsen includes a discussion of why PR may find it advantageous to “disguise itself as CSR” and an important contribution to understanding why debates about public relations’ reputation “never progress beyond predictable and pointless arguments concerning the ethical status of the PR profession, thus leaving important questions regarding how public relations can contribute to resolving societal problems of legitimacy unanswered and unanswerable”.

Merkelsen’s reflections raise some interesting questions, not just about disciplinary boundaries and academic encroachments, but about the identities of PR academics and the extent to which they acknowledge their allegiance to the PR discipline. It seems as though public relations academics must also be behind-the-scenes, since “many researchers in the field prefer to define themselves in other terms than public relations”. Public relations still appears not quite respectable as a discipline, evidenced by ranking of journals, lack of representation on research councils and success in grant applications. Merkelsen argues that PR academia is also not helped by the existence of very strong adjacent academic disciplines such as organizational communication. Overall, Merkelsen’s meta-theoretical analysis makes an important and insightful contribution to understanding lines of argument that underpin ideological positions within public relations, and thus enrichens our understanding of the politics of the discipline.

Frederiksson and Pallas explore media work in the context of institutionalised media described as the concept of mediatisation. They highlight what they see as a certain academic prejudice within public relations, which they argue has led to the de-legitimisation of academic research that focuses on media work. Since media relations activities are deemed tactical technical work (in contrast to the holy grail of strategic management), academic study of media relations has become the poor relation in PR scholarship, according to Fredriksson and Pallas. Apart from the lack of research emanating from within public relations, that Frederiksson and Pallas observe, it might also be noted that an acquaintance with media studies and media sociological literature cannot be taken for granted in PR scholarship.

Frederiksson and Pallas re-visit common understanding of media work in a societal context, and, incidentally, add some insight for another discipline largely ignored by PR scholarship, that of media management – the applied discipline that combines management, economics, communications, media studies to understand the issues and problems of the management of media institutions. Frederiksson and Pallas point out that the role of the media in society extends way beyond mere instrumentalism, in order to “reflect and enact structural properties, such as taken-for-granted norms, rules, logics and expectations” in the socio-cultural context. They argue that society is undergoing a structural transformation, and that central to this process is the mediatization process that is dynamic and multi-dimensional, impacting the activities of various societal actors. In particular, organizations internalise “media logics” as well as “channelling and editing the expectations and demands streaming from this logic”. Organizational relations with media institutions are not purely instrumental but epistemological and the “environment” is not solely a resource base but part of the ebb and flow of ideas – part of flux and transformation. Such conceptions imply a rather different conception of “boundary-spanning” as Frederiksson and Pallas suggest. Institutions are therefore the product of reflexive thinking and action, and mediatisation is a consequence of those dynamics.

Fredrikssson and Pallas propose a model of three strategies – providing, promoting and co-opting and show how these strategies influence the production of media texts and interactions with journalists and other sources. The model theoretically re-contextualises and enrichens understanding of media work to add to existing ideas from media sociology regarding source-media relations, information subsidies, framing, primary and secondary definition. Frederiksson and Pallas’ work re-contextualises media relations as linked to a range of strategic institutional transformations, and re-positions the topic for the public relations research agenda.

Johansson and Ottestig explore the concept of legitimacy in the organizational context. Their work considers the reflexive insights of Swedish “communication executives”, that is to say, those who performed a leadership role for the communications function. Johansson and Ottestig’s article is based on an empirical pilot study in which they interviewed ten executives from diverse organizational backgrounds (profit, non-profit, governmental and non-governmental organizations at local, national and multinational levels).

Johansson and Ottestig’s article begins with some important contextual data regarding Swedish public relations and the practice culture, highlighting the importance of the values of openness, credibility and transparency. The importance of transparency in Swedish culture is evidenced by the fact that media law is intended to protect the quality of transparency in practice.

In giving consideration to the role of senior communications personnel, Johansson and Ottestig highlight recent insights that have emphasised the necessarily political nature of communication management (Reber and Berger, 2001) that build upon earlier work (Spicer, 1997), and situational critical incidents which have catalysed the role of public relations (Bowen, 2009). Unsurprisingly, credibility and trust are central elements of senior level access and status within the organization, but appear to be more or less problematic in different cultures, according to Johansson and Ottestig.

Johansson and Ottestig’s empirical work explored the ideas and opinions of communication executives in relation to their experiences of internal and external legitimacy in the context of recent developments and future challenges. Her article presents a large number of quotes that give a unique insight into their self-images and wish-images, bearing in mind that public relations practitioners occupationally conditioned to wish to put forward a positive view, as Johansson and Ottestig acknowledge. The material presented clearly points to opportunities for further research that would test the claims of practitioners in the study and the article concludes with propositions for further research including specific research techniques. I would suggest that given that Johansson and Ottestig identify the specific methodological challenge of “official” accounts by practitioners, an ethnographic research agenda might be productive.

Each of these articles exemplifies refreshing originality and independent thinking, which is welcome in a field that has suffered from conformity and instrumentalism. Their conceptual, critical nature should provide a stimulus to the global community of public relations and act as a catalyst for deeper meta-theoretical analysis in the field.

Jacquie L’Etang