In this chapter, we argue that the effect of public relations on society merits further attention... more In this chapter, we argue that the effect of public relations on society merits further attention from scholars and practitioners. In particular, the advent of digitisation, algorithmic technologies and AI more generally, have been under-examined. In these areas, greater reflexivity and scrutiny of how such tools are used in the industry, and the ways it might perpetuate or challenge their in-built biases, is sorely needed. In a communications landscape characterised by the coexistence of digital utopias, post-truth politics and fake news, we suggest that the challenges raised by these new technologies relate to two key issues: voice and diversity, both of which are deeply affected by digital technologies. The industry's capacity to adequately reflect on its role in enhancing or limiting these inequalities depends on adopting a renewed ethics in pedagogy and practice that adequately equips practitioners with the reflective and analytical skills to not only use digital technologies, but also to account for their effects as part of the arsenal of communications tactics in the 21 st century.
The five papers on this theme emerged from a plenary panel with the same title as the one above a... more The five papers on this theme emerged from a plenary panel with the same title as the one above at the third Barcelona International PR Conference held on 2-3 July, 2013. They were stimulated by the then-forthcoming publication of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Public Relations although they also address the first edition, the place of both in the public relations field, and links to issues surrounding encyclopedias in general. At the time of this submission, most of the authors had not seen the complete published copy that was released in late September, 2013. All five articles, albeit with some overlap as this was not a co-written project, are presented here as individual pieces with different titles and a variety of approaches.
ABSTRACT The global financial crisis increased critique towards hedge funds, raising the possibil... more ABSTRACT The global financial crisis increased critique towards hedge funds, raising the possibility of unprecedented global regulation which threatened to put some hedge funds out of business. In the face of threats to operational freedom and market advantage, hedge funds responded by engaging in a debate about their future. This study explores discursive strategies employed by the Alternative Investment Management Association, the global hedge fund trade body, to produce trust in the hedge fund industry and its institutions. A set of defined and overlapping trust practices are introduced as a means of analysing power and trust production in the ongoing discursive shifts of global systems.
Recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s strategies and tactics have caused shock and outra... more Recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s strategies and tactics have caused shock and outrage, in part because we want democratic processes to be just that, democratic. Decisions arrived at through popular suffrage – the next government, the decision about whether or not to leave the European Union – are ideally based on people’s rational, evidence-based opinions rather than manipulated emotional drivers such as fear or prejudice. And yet, the CA files show that presenting evidence and engaging citizens in high quality debates around key issues may be a minority interest for politicians. On the contrary, the quick and easy route to power now involves deploying emotional arguments online, via promotional techniques that make the most of our vulnerabilities and encourage us to avoid, rather than engage in debate.
In this article we draw on Scandinavian institutionalism to argue that ideas act as imperatives f... more In this article we draw on Scandinavian institutionalism to argue that ideas act as imperatives for organizations’ communication, whereby differences between ideas can generate tensions that organizations must manage. We focus on transparency and consistency, ideas that frequently underpin organizational communication, but are mobilized by different problems and offer different solutions. An analysis of communication policy and strategy documents in 188 Swedish public agencies shows how transparency and consistency coexist, but are translated into local settings in divergent ways. The resulting tensions relate to the purpose of communication, roles of organizational actors and of media, and stakeholder identities. Tensions are managed using three strategies: firewalling, ranking, and compromising. The findings show that ideas are fundamental to organizational communication, but that organizations also contribute to transformations and hybridizations of ideas. We suggest further anal...
This special issue examines the growing social and political importance of promotional activities... more This special issue examines the growing social and political importance of promotional activities and public relations. For decades, promotional tools have been deployed to foster the aims of various societal agencies, be they corporations, political actors, public institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or citizen movements. In today’s turbulent political and media environments, promotional practices have become more inventive, coordinated and ubiquitous, crossing transnational borders and circulating across business, politics and social institutions. Public relations is an essential tool in the promotional mix and is increasingly a stand-alone strategy for organisations of all kinds to manage their visibility, legitimacy and relationships with stakeholders. However, its influence and power in the context of an increasingly promotional culture are under-researched. In this introduction, we set out the landscape of promotional culture in which public relations activity t...
This article reframes public relations' contribution to democracy in light of the recent turn to ... more This article reframes public relations' contribution to democracy in light of the recent turn to deliberative systems in democratic theory. I consider the problematic that public relations poses to normative models of deliberative democracy, and how that problematic has been addressed in public relations theory thus far. I suggest that deliberative systems provides a more robust basis for theorising public relations' role in deliberation and propose an analytical approach for understanding the complex and sometimes contradictory role of public relations in deliberative democracy. The framework provides a starting point for locating public relations' engagement in deliberative systems and evaluating its effects.
This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, because of the breadth of its ... more This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make normative arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. Thus, copyright discourses illustrate the breadth and depth of copyright's systemic influence on the marketplace. At the same time, copyright discourses, which invoke both the market and democracy, reveal the implications of copyright for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity and the availability of public knowledge and help to explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve. In this series, marketplace icons have been described variously as 'brands, products or services that are historically significant for their cultural meanings' (Gopaldas 2016); as a 'basic aspect of the marketplace, something we cannot imagine living without […] essential to consumption markets and/or culture' (Consumption Markets and Culture 2017); as 'polarising' (Parmentier 2016) and ideologically significant (Holt 2016). While copyright may not seem to be an obvious marketplace icon-it is an intellectual property right, not a product, service or brand-it is a basic aspect of the marketplace, is deployed in the service of different ideologies, and is perhaps one of the most polarising of all market mechanisms. In this article I argue that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, going beyond brand, product or service. It is a disputed concept and a constructed object without which marketplaces cannot function. Copyright is most often associated with the creative and media industries, but it can be applied to any kind of expression of an idea-though not to the idea itself. We all own copyright in something: images we have posted, letters we have written, objects we have created. Like other creative work (music, film, performance), if these things enter the public domain, our status as rights holders entitles us to recognition (and, potentially, financial reward) as their original creator, and requires our permission to be sought for their use. These fundamentals of copyright are quite simple-but over 300 years of copyright law development, and the contemporary context of complex, globalised markets for creative work, have led to a dense thicket of policy and regulation around copyright. It is disputed territory, continually (re)constructed in networks of actions that generate inevitable tensions between producers, creators, users and other rights holders. Corporations are suspected of using it to realise ideological and economic control over the marketplace, creators need it to secure a necessary source of income and recognition, and users try to assert their right to publicly accessible forms of knowledge and creativity within its parameters. 'natural' right to reward for authors, all emerged over time as received wisdom (Kawohl and Kretschmer 2009). Today, the early balance of public and private interests has shifted, with international and domestic copyright laws now stipulate long periods of exclusivity before creative work is released into the public domain. Nonetheless, the need to balance these two imperatives continues to generate disagreement about copyright's role in contemporary markets, focused on the degree to which laws that seem to favour exclusivity can also protect the 'public domain' as a space for accessing and circulating creative work without restriction, so that the pool of collective creativity and knowledge may continually expand (Deazley and Meletti 2017). Given that limiting public access through copyright law constitutes an imposition on citizens, it must be justified as a proportionate measure not only to lawyers, but also in the public arena (Hettinger 1989); the values it is grounded in should be widely understood by what John Rawls described as 'reasonable' citizens (Sykes 2003, : 17). Copyright's iconic status-that is, its acceptance as a concept that guides the operations of markets and a valid object of attention for all market actors-depends on the degree to which these explanations are accepted.
Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cul... more Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with governments and media users. In so doing, they have appealed to general justificatory principlesabout what is good, right, and justthat provide some scope for opposition and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analysing user-directed marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright warsor at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2012
With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy init... more With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control, persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers, intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behaviour, considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.
This thematic issue invited submissions that address the challenges of researching the complex, h... more This thematic issue invited submissions that address the challenges of researching the complex, hybrid, and liminal nature of promotional cultures and the published articles include studies which reflect on the structures, technologies, agents, representations, effects, and ethics of promotion. They are united by a central question: What strategies do we use to explore and attempt to understand the assemblages of technologies, texts, networks, and actors in contemporary promotion? We hope the collection of perspectives gathered here help to address the challenges of researching the digital, excavating promotional ideologies, confronting professions, engaging audiences through academic work, and confronting the risks and realities of research that can equally promote change or speak into a vacuum.
Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cu... more Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.
Media policymaking is often regarded with suspicion by stakeholders, with the result that policy ... more Media policymaking is often regarded with suspicion by stakeholders, with the result that policy can lack legitimacy and be difficult to implement effectively. This paper reports on a UK-based, collaborative and impact-oriented project where we engage stakeholders in a process of meta-deliberation, aimed at producing a stakeholder-centric, systemic understanding of copyright consultations and a strategy for change. Based on the findings, we propose a framework of purposes and principles that provides both a means of critical evaluation of copyright consultations and a guide for their reform. We conclude that shifting focus from policy outcomes to policy process is a constructive way to move debate forward in intractable policy areas like copyright, characterised by polarised and seemingly intransigent stakeholder positions. While changing the policymaking process would face significant institutional barriers, the framework we present here supports those who are concerned with taking...
In this chapter, we argue that the effect of public relations on society merits further attention... more In this chapter, we argue that the effect of public relations on society merits further attention from scholars and practitioners. In particular, the advent of digitisation, algorithmic technologies and AI more generally, have been under-examined. In these areas, greater reflexivity and scrutiny of how such tools are used in the industry, and the ways it might perpetuate or challenge their in-built biases, is sorely needed. In a communications landscape characterised by the coexistence of digital utopias, post-truth politics and fake news, we suggest that the challenges raised by these new technologies relate to two key issues: voice and diversity, both of which are deeply affected by digital technologies. The industry's capacity to adequately reflect on its role in enhancing or limiting these inequalities depends on adopting a renewed ethics in pedagogy and practice that adequately equips practitioners with the reflective and analytical skills to not only use digital technologies, but also to account for their effects as part of the arsenal of communications tactics in the 21 st century.
The five papers on this theme emerged from a plenary panel with the same title as the one above a... more The five papers on this theme emerged from a plenary panel with the same title as the one above at the third Barcelona International PR Conference held on 2-3 July, 2013. They were stimulated by the then-forthcoming publication of the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Public Relations although they also address the first edition, the place of both in the public relations field, and links to issues surrounding encyclopedias in general. At the time of this submission, most of the authors had not seen the complete published copy that was released in late September, 2013. All five articles, albeit with some overlap as this was not a co-written project, are presented here as individual pieces with different titles and a variety of approaches.
ABSTRACT The global financial crisis increased critique towards hedge funds, raising the possibil... more ABSTRACT The global financial crisis increased critique towards hedge funds, raising the possibility of unprecedented global regulation which threatened to put some hedge funds out of business. In the face of threats to operational freedom and market advantage, hedge funds responded by engaging in a debate about their future. This study explores discursive strategies employed by the Alternative Investment Management Association, the global hedge fund trade body, to produce trust in the hedge fund industry and its institutions. A set of defined and overlapping trust practices are introduced as a means of analysing power and trust production in the ongoing discursive shifts of global systems.
Recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s strategies and tactics have caused shock and outra... more Recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s strategies and tactics have caused shock and outrage, in part because we want democratic processes to be just that, democratic. Decisions arrived at through popular suffrage – the next government, the decision about whether or not to leave the European Union – are ideally based on people’s rational, evidence-based opinions rather than manipulated emotional drivers such as fear or prejudice. And yet, the CA files show that presenting evidence and engaging citizens in high quality debates around key issues may be a minority interest for politicians. On the contrary, the quick and easy route to power now involves deploying emotional arguments online, via promotional techniques that make the most of our vulnerabilities and encourage us to avoid, rather than engage in debate.
In this article we draw on Scandinavian institutionalism to argue that ideas act as imperatives f... more In this article we draw on Scandinavian institutionalism to argue that ideas act as imperatives for organizations’ communication, whereby differences between ideas can generate tensions that organizations must manage. We focus on transparency and consistency, ideas that frequently underpin organizational communication, but are mobilized by different problems and offer different solutions. An analysis of communication policy and strategy documents in 188 Swedish public agencies shows how transparency and consistency coexist, but are translated into local settings in divergent ways. The resulting tensions relate to the purpose of communication, roles of organizational actors and of media, and stakeholder identities. Tensions are managed using three strategies: firewalling, ranking, and compromising. The findings show that ideas are fundamental to organizational communication, but that organizations also contribute to transformations and hybridizations of ideas. We suggest further anal...
This special issue examines the growing social and political importance of promotional activities... more This special issue examines the growing social and political importance of promotional activities and public relations. For decades, promotional tools have been deployed to foster the aims of various societal agencies, be they corporations, political actors, public institutions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or citizen movements. In today’s turbulent political and media environments, promotional practices have become more inventive, coordinated and ubiquitous, crossing transnational borders and circulating across business, politics and social institutions. Public relations is an essential tool in the promotional mix and is increasingly a stand-alone strategy for organisations of all kinds to manage their visibility, legitimacy and relationships with stakeholders. However, its influence and power in the context of an increasingly promotional culture are under-researched. In this introduction, we set out the landscape of promotional culture in which public relations activity t...
This article reframes public relations' contribution to democracy in light of the recent turn to ... more This article reframes public relations' contribution to democracy in light of the recent turn to deliberative systems in democratic theory. I consider the problematic that public relations poses to normative models of deliberative democracy, and how that problematic has been addressed in public relations theory thus far. I suggest that deliberative systems provides a more robust basis for theorising public relations' role in deliberation and propose an analytical approach for understanding the complex and sometimes contradictory role of public relations in deliberative democracy. The framework provides a starting point for locating public relations' engagement in deliberative systems and evaluating its effects.
This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, because of the breadth of its ... more This article argues that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, because of the breadth of its effects on market operations. Copyright determines how intellectual property rights for creative work are allocated between the different actors involved in production and consumption, and must balance the civic priority of public access to creative work with the market-driven principle of rewarding private interests for their effort. This duality tends to polarise opinion about its implementation by rights holders, because very different ideological assumptions underpin civic and market objectives. Copyright discourses reveal how these ideological struggles play out among interested parties, who use the concept of copyright to make normative arguments about how markets should be structured, how creative work should be exchanged, and how consumers should behave. In the process, copyright is constructed, explained, branded and promoted as an object to which market actors must orient themselves if they wish to conduct themselves appropriately, and as a rationale for material changes to market structures. Thus, copyright discourses illustrate the breadth and depth of copyright's systemic influence on the marketplace. At the same time, copyright discourses, which invoke both the market and democracy, reveal the implications of copyright for the quality of democracy, the circulation of creativity and the availability of public knowledge and help to explain why ideological struggles over copyright are so difficult to resolve. In this series, marketplace icons have been described variously as 'brands, products or services that are historically significant for their cultural meanings' (Gopaldas 2016); as a 'basic aspect of the marketplace, something we cannot imagine living without […] essential to consumption markets and/or culture' (Consumption Markets and Culture 2017); as 'polarising' (Parmentier 2016) and ideologically significant (Holt 2016). While copyright may not seem to be an obvious marketplace icon-it is an intellectual property right, not a product, service or brand-it is a basic aspect of the marketplace, is deployed in the service of different ideologies, and is perhaps one of the most polarising of all market mechanisms. In this article I argue that copyright is a systemic marketplace icon, going beyond brand, product or service. It is a disputed concept and a constructed object without which marketplaces cannot function. Copyright is most often associated with the creative and media industries, but it can be applied to any kind of expression of an idea-though not to the idea itself. We all own copyright in something: images we have posted, letters we have written, objects we have created. Like other creative work (music, film, performance), if these things enter the public domain, our status as rights holders entitles us to recognition (and, potentially, financial reward) as their original creator, and requires our permission to be sought for their use. These fundamentals of copyright are quite simple-but over 300 years of copyright law development, and the contemporary context of complex, globalised markets for creative work, have led to a dense thicket of policy and regulation around copyright. It is disputed territory, continually (re)constructed in networks of actions that generate inevitable tensions between producers, creators, users and other rights holders. Corporations are suspected of using it to realise ideological and economic control over the marketplace, creators need it to secure a necessary source of income and recognition, and users try to assert their right to publicly accessible forms of knowledge and creativity within its parameters. 'natural' right to reward for authors, all emerged over time as received wisdom (Kawohl and Kretschmer 2009). Today, the early balance of public and private interests has shifted, with international and domestic copyright laws now stipulate long periods of exclusivity before creative work is released into the public domain. Nonetheless, the need to balance these two imperatives continues to generate disagreement about copyright's role in contemporary markets, focused on the degree to which laws that seem to favour exclusivity can also protect the 'public domain' as a space for accessing and circulating creative work without restriction, so that the pool of collective creativity and knowledge may continually expand (Deazley and Meletti 2017). Given that limiting public access through copyright law constitutes an imposition on citizens, it must be justified as a proportionate measure not only to lawyers, but also in the public arena (Hettinger 1989); the values it is grounded in should be widely understood by what John Rawls described as 'reasonable' citizens (Sykes 2003, : 17). Copyright's iconic status-that is, its acceptance as a concept that guides the operations of markets and a valid object of attention for all market actors-depends on the degree to which these explanations are accepted.
Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cul... more Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with governments and media users. In so doing, they have appealed to general justificatory principlesabout what is good, right, and justthat provide some scope for opposition and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analysing user-directed marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright warsor at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2012
With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy init... more With illegal downloading at the centre of debates about the creative economy, various policy initiatives and regulatory attempts have tried (and largely failed) to control, persuade and punish users into adhering to copyright law. Rights holders, policymakers, intermediaries and users each circulate and maintain particular attitudes about appropriate uses of digital media. This article maps the failure of regulation to control user behaviour, considers various policy and academic research approaches to understanding users, and introduces an analytical framework that re-evaluates user resistance as expressions of legitimate justifications. A democratic copyright policymaking process must accommodate the modes of justification offered by users to allow copyright law to reconnect with the public interest goals at its foundation.
This thematic issue invited submissions that address the challenges of researching the complex, h... more This thematic issue invited submissions that address the challenges of researching the complex, hybrid, and liminal nature of promotional cultures and the published articles include studies which reflect on the structures, technologies, agents, representations, effects, and ethics of promotion. They are united by a central question: What strategies do we use to explore and attempt to understand the assemblages of technologies, texts, networks, and actors in contemporary promotion? We hope the collection of perspectives gathered here help to address the challenges of researching the digital, excavating promotional ideologies, confronting professions, engaging audiences through academic work, and confronting the risks and realities of research that can equally promote change or speak into a vacuum.
Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cu... more Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.
Media policymaking is often regarded with suspicion by stakeholders, with the result that policy ... more Media policymaking is often regarded with suspicion by stakeholders, with the result that policy can lack legitimacy and be difficult to implement effectively. This paper reports on a UK-based, collaborative and impact-oriented project where we engage stakeholders in a process of meta-deliberation, aimed at producing a stakeholder-centric, systemic understanding of copyright consultations and a strategy for change. Based on the findings, we propose a framework of purposes and principles that provides both a means of critical evaluation of copyright consultations and a guide for their reform. We conclude that shifting focus from policy outcomes to policy process is a constructive way to move debate forward in intractable policy areas like copyright, characterised by polarised and seemingly intransigent stakeholder positions. While changing the policymaking process would face significant institutional barriers, the framework we present here supports those who are concerned with taking...
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Papers by Lee Edwards