Abstract
Adding to the growing literature considering public relations practitioners as activists, this qualitative, interpretative research article explores the controversial idea of acting as spokesperson for a so-called leaderless social movement, Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Through interviews with members of the erstwhile OWS Press Relations Working Group in New York, this article explores their negotiated dual roles as both activists and practitioners. Using critical cultural theory with its emphasis on power, context, and history, the group’s media relations tactics are discussed with an emphasis on the role of spokesperson, revealing contested meanings about public relations work. The framework of the circuit of culture explains the constraints experienced by many of these activist practitioners as they navigated ideals of their movement that were often in conflict with their public relations practices. The study finds uneasy relationships with power in relation to internal and external communication. Specifically, the group disrupts the false binaries of managerial and critical cultural approaches to public relations, as well as agency and oppression through contextual power. Their work brokers a paradox – speaking to change the status quo through a media system arguably captured by the status quo, while using a tactic that was seen as equally problematic.
Members of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Press Relations Working Group (Press WG) gathered frequently from September to December of 2011 to write and edit press releases, craft sound bites, respond to more than 10,000 emails from journalists, and importantly, debate what it was they were doing and why. The working group, which included approximately 25 active members, was a subset of a movement that began when hundreds of protesters united to build what would become an encampment in Zuccotti Park, a concrete slab, zoned public/private, near the financial epicenter of the world.
The protestors of OWS held disparate political views; however, the focal point of their indignation was clear: Wall Street and the corporate greed it symbolized. Soon the world took notice of a new discursive formation born of the movement: the poor, including the vanishing American middle class, represented by ‘The 99 percent’ versus the richest Americans, ‘The 1 percent’, who held the extreme concentration of the nation’s wealth. The members of the Press WG engaged with mainstream media outlets to play an important part in establishing this narrative concerning income inequality.
As they struggled to create meaning as spokespeople and ‘fixers’ – those practitioners who arrange interviews – the group members encountered friction between a social movement predicated upon consensus-based decision making and media relations tactics that were hierarchical. Their practices were juxtaposed with popular discourses of the mainstream media that paint public relations as dishonest – a precursor to the ‘fake news’ Zeitgeist fueled by American President Donald Trump in 2018. OWS offers a special opportunity to study public relations given that it was, as Chomsky (2012) described, the first mass, popular response to some 30 years of class warfare. The Press WG helped make this surprising social movement synonymous with economic justice.
This article frames data from the Press WG using the circuit of culture model (Du Gay et al., 2013) to explore some of the power struggles evident in the media relations work of a dedicated group of volunteers, many with prior professional experience in public relations. This critical cultural theory when juxtaposed with historical perspectives from the Civil Rights Movement helps to explain the OWS group’s practices and their relation to power.
As evidenced by the Public Relations Inquiry special issue, ‘Public relations, activism and social movements: critical perspectives’ (L’Etang, 2016), the intersections of public relations and social change provide a burgeoning area of exploration. This article seeks to push forward by adding to the small number of studies recognizing public relations practitioners and activists as the same people, that is, not oppositional actors. This complex identity highlights contingent power flows as these activist–practitioners navigated the paradox of being leaders in a leaderless movement.
Literature review
The approach taken in this article provides a nuanced contrast to managerial studies of public relations, or what Edwards and Hodges (2011) referred to as ‘the functional understanding of public relations as a disinterested channel through which organizational interests are achieved’ (p. 4). A cultural approach to public relations practice, according to Curtin and Gaither (2005), is one where, ‘developing theory should be able to describe and inform public relations as a cultural practice of meaning making that encompasses contested identities, relational characteristics of difference, and the primal role of power’ (p. 97). Such an approach lends itself well to a study of public relations practice within the Press WG of OWS because the members expressed clashing perspectives that were deeply concerned with the corruptible potential of power.
However, it would be remiss to say they eschewed managerial approaches entirely as some group members were arguably practicing ‘asymmetrical’ (Grunig, 2006) communication while at the same time explicating a conscious, uncomfortable relationship with the power of public relations and journalism. Furthermore, their practices, while often in concert with movement social justice goals, did not rise to a disinterested level of ‘organizational interests’ (Edwards and Hodges, 2011) at all costs. This distinction sets this project apart from other studies in the literature, such as Thompson’s (2016) examination of activist public relations which found rent-seeking behaviors in large part for the purpose of organizational sustainability. The members of the Press WG restrained (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) their own growth as a movement due to concerns about the nature of public relations work and hierarchical power – a concept they opposed. Of course, OWS was not treading new ground here.
Plenty of historical social movements used public relations. For example, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, said, Public relations is a very necessary part of any protest of civil disobedience … . The public at large must be aware of the inequalities involved in such a system [of segregation]. In effect, in the absence of justice in the established courts of the region, nonviolent protesters are asking for a hearing in the court of world opinion. (quoted in Hon, 1997: 163, from Garrow, 1986: 172)
King understood that without legal justice and without violence, people engaged in the struggle for equality must appeal to the majority by building awareness through the practice of public relations. For him, public relations practice was not confined to a corporate office park or even a profession. It was a practice he used to powerful effect through his own rhetorical gifts and through the portion of his staff dedicated to public relations work (Hon, 1997). In a similar sense, those activists who sought to influence representations of the OWS movement through media relations work understood the importance of public relations to mobilizing broad support for equality in the 21st century.
Speaking for the Montgomery Improvement Association: Historical comparison
Although tracing the myriad histories of social movements is out of scope, it is useful to compare the tensions around the act of being a spokesperson in OWS to the same act in an organization of the Civil Rights Movement. Garrow (1986) detailed the concerns about the role of a spokesperson in the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), among other Civil Rights Movement organizations. Whereas the tensions with the OWS Press WG were largely the result of friction between public relations work and the larger movement’s commitment to consensus-based-decision-making, the MIA articulated arguments about the role of spokesperson differently. The MIA did not object to the role per se – as some sort of inappropriate use of power. On the contrary, spokespeople were seen as vital to hold oppressors to account. This does not mean, however, that the meaning of the tactic was not contested.
For example, not everyone agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr as the primary spokesperson of the MIA and the bus boycotts from 1955–1956 (Garrow, 1986). Many long-time residents of Montgomery resented the relative newcomer who had just become the young minister of a local church (Garrow, 1986). According to Garrow (1986), King himself was a reluctant leader at first, knowing that he was a relative outsider and that the spotlight of publicity would put a strain on him and his family. But the leaders of the MIA chose King and he accepted the call.
King was chosen in part because of his oratory skills and an education that ‘would appeal strongly to the wealthier, professional segment of the black community, people who otherwise might be ambivalent about conditions on public buses that they rarely patronized’ (Garrow, 1986: 20). By the same token, his position as a minister would ‘draw more conservative clergy into what had begun as a secularly led effort’ (Garrow, 1986: 20). But the strategic selection of King would not only unify classes and worldviews within the Black community.
Through press releases, press conferences, interviews, and a variety of other tactics wherein King was the prominent spokesperson, the MIA sought to make their demands clear to the city, and as the stalemate wore on, the nation. According to Garrow (1986), ‘By the third week of January [1956], the press began to focus upon King as the principal spokesman for the movement’ (p. 53). It is interesting that King was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight in both the Black and the White communities. The Black leaders of the MIA elected King into his leadership role, while the White community recognized King as the leader mostly through the press. Garrow (1986) wrote that it was the White people of Montgomery who ‘focused upon King as the effort’s principal spokesman’ (p. 51). The pressure on King was great and the publicity focus created more internal tensions and jealousies among the MIA leaders (Garrow, 1986).
By contrast, several decades and many movements later with OWS, the Press WG was less strategic in their selection of spokespeople. Although they would carefully fix interviews to match the story angles of journalists, the Press WG fought internally about the role itself. Unlike the MIA, the Press WG did not coalesce around a single leader, and it is doubtful they would have even if their movement’s ideals had made such an affordance. The MIA moment is a reminder that public relations in social movements past was also fraught and that public relations practices on behalf of social movements are far from cut and paste functions – a fact that leads to literature concerning contemporary activism.
Public relations and contemporary activism
Smith and Ferguson (2001) called for further research on activism and public relations, specifically to test J.E. Grunig and L.A. Grunig’s (1997) doubt that ‘activists “do” public relations any differently from how other practitioners do it’ (p. 299). Some studies suggest that they were correct; there are a great number of similarities between activist public relations and corporate public relations (Roper, 2002; Taylor et al., 2001; Vasquez and Taylor, 2001). And yet, despite similarities there are important perceived and real differences – -many contextual – that reveal the contingent quality of power in practices of public relations or meaning making. To begin, why is there a perception that activist public relations stands far apart from its corporate counterpart?
Demetrious (2006) offered one possible answer: due to dominant narratives about the evils of public relations at the hands of corporations and other large institutions, activists typically view themselves as victims of a corporatized public relations function. Although activist organizations and social movements employed what they sometimes term ‘public communication’, there was little attention paid to public relations, which was characterized as part of a larger threat to society (Demetrious, 2006: 107). Thus, the managerial public relations literature viewed activism as an ‘antithesis’ to institutional organizational power, while the activist literature would rather not recognize the utilization of processes similar to those of the ruling class (Demetrious, 2006: 104).
On a similar note, Weaver (2011) argued that the marketing mind-set, or ‘ideologies of the marketplace’ (Weaver, 2013: 3), was so pervasive in certain US public relations academic circles as to render them blind to ‘how their own cultural prejudices were privileging economic interests over wider public interest and wellbeing’ (Weaver, 2011; Weaver, 2013: 3). Weaver (2001), along with L’Etang and others, was one of the early advocates for a critical cultural studies approach to public relations scholarship. As L’Etang (2013) wrote, ‘Such an approach [British cultural studies] assumes contested meanings, alternative readings and dialectical processes involved in the production of social meanings that inform the nature of culture’ (p. 22).
Terry (2005) used the circuit of culture model to examine activists practicing public relations in Kazakhstan. Here, the international context was critical as she demonstrated that Western-centric, neoliberal models of public relations failed to explain the case of Kazakhstan, where she spent 10 months doing ethnographic research (Terry, 2005). Terry (2005) described moments of production as consumed by money. Everyone was paying someone in this practice of public relations; articles were bought and sold (Terry, 2005). This destroyed any shred of credibility. ‘Communication/meaning in the public domain becomes, in effect, meaningless’. (Terry, 2005: 34)
L’Etang, (2011) argued that Terry (2005) furthered the dominant, managerial approach to practice and theory by privileging it as the desired, ‘Western’ way to do public relations instead of acknowledging and exploring the cultural differences in Kazakhstan where her fieldwork took place (L’Etang, 2011). Although this is true (after all, Terry is a Westerner and no amount of ethnography or self-reflexivity will change this), Terry’s use of the circuit of culture is still instructive for the study of public relations and activism because it privileges context and power.
Although generalizations have been made using structuration theory (Sommerfeldt, 2013), ‘context, not just structure, is key to strategy and tactic use’ (Curtin, 2016: 30). The context Curtin (2016) referenced involved two members of the Girls Scout’s of America who launched their own activist public relations campaign while remaining members of the organization. The activist practitioners bear similarities to the activist practitioners in OWS in that many members of the larger organization were opposed to their public relations efforts, yet all managed to maintain their status within their respective groups – a testament to their power.
Theoretical framework: The circuit of culture
The circuit of culture model (Du Gay et al., 2013) forms the primary theoretical framework of this study. The theory defines culture as a continuous process of making meaning and is a heuristic with five ‘major cultural processes’ forming the circuit, namely, representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation (Du Gay et al., 2013: 3). The processes within the circuit interact forming incalculable moments of ‘articulation’ that ‘lead to variable and contingent outcomes’ (Du Gay et al., 2013: 3). As with any circuit, one may begin at any point and still complete it. Each moment on the circuit is briefly explained in the following.
Representation comprises denotative and connotative meanings that according to Du Gay et al. (2013) combine with techniques that construct ‘the object in a certain way’ (p. xxiii). In their Walkman example, an ad for the new device in the 1980s, written in Japanese, has clearly identifiable meanings and techniques beyond the national language. The techniques could be the headphones (an older, familiar technology) paired with the new, boxy device signaling that it is used for recorded sound. The meanings might be the connotation that the device is for young people as the ad juxtaposes a fashionable young woman listening to the device while an old man stands adjacent and aghast (Du Gay et al., 2013).
The process of identity explains the society behind the object of study – their culture. In the case of Sony, it includes their branding efforts not only to infuse the object with the cultural prerogatives of Sony but also to link the consumer’s identity to the commodity in a seamless fashion so one may not discern if the Walkman represents the person or the person represents the Walkman.
Processes of production, or following Hall (1993) the ‘encoding’ of meaning, are in conversation with processes of consumption, or ‘decoding’ (Hall, 1993). A producer encodes a cultural text/artifact with a particular or dominant meaning. The consumer may take any variety of dynamic readings: accepting the inserted meaning (the ‘dominant’) or accepting some, but not all, of the desired meaning (the ‘negotiated’), or rejecting the dominant altogether (the ‘oppositional’; Hall, 1993: 136–138).
Curtin and Gaither (2005) noted the increasing salience of organizational culture to the moment of production in the era of globalization where Western notions of doing public relations come to dominate local differences. This power dynamic is understood through articulations of culture that encompass multi-scalar contextual interactions that recognize conjunctures, rather than managerial approaches that often inadvertently reify hegemonic practices of public relations (Curtin and Gaither, 2005).
‘Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. […I]ndividuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application’ (Foucault, 1980: 98). If one extends the metaphor, power flows through a web of people in context, rather than existing in nodes that can be seized or hacked in any permanent sense – a useful reminder in our increasingly digitally constructed society. As ‘vehicles of power’, public relations practitioners do not wield power, they are power. The circuit of culture illuminates this truth. Researchers who employ the circuit of culture consider articulations of moments, allowing for multiple meanings and contingencies. This cultural approach to public relations allows for a dynamic spectrum of qualitative description and understanding rather than predicting or forcefully reducing polysemic public relations campaigns into one fixed meaning.
Method
This article is based on a case study concerning the OWS Press WG and delves into one particular, emergent theme: the power of the spokesperson. The researcher collected three main types of data, as follows: semi-structured interviews, the work products of the group (press releases, talking points, etc.), and ‘listservs’ containing email correspondence within the group and with the press. The selection of materials for analysis was based on criteria constructed from the interviews. For example, if a participant told a story about a conflict, the researcher would ask a different participant if there were any email exchanges regarding the story. The researcher would then compare and contrast the interview transcription with the related emails, as well as find and analyze any related press coverage.
In the interest of length, this article concentrates on the semi-structured, qualitative interviews, as well as a Press-WG-authored editorial and an illustrative email chain. The interviews were conducted in various locations mostly throughout New York City and New Jersey from 2014 to 2015 with the majority lasting from 1 to 2 hours. The researcher conducted 16 interviews using a snowball sample, representing 64 percent of the approximately 25 active former members (Bray, 2013) in order to understand the practices and perspectives of the Press WG during the period of their most intense activity.
The data analysis for this article is based on analytic induction wherein the researcher looks for patterns. From here, the author developed analytic categories which after a number of interpretation outlines led to many themes including the focus of this article: power contestations concerning the tactic of serving as a spokesperson and/or fixing such engagements with the press. The researcher then interrogated this theme using the circuit of culture model, as well as contemporary and historical literature.
Results
The average age of the study participants in 2011 was 32.5 years. Most of the members did not know each other prior to their involvement in the Press WG. Many of the members were freelancers, and/or part-time workers, or unemployed. Many of Press WG members reported working 20–40 hours a week on behalf of OWS in addition to managing paid employment. Several of the informants had personal stories of economic hardship that strengthened their ties to the movement. But their hardships also made it possible for them to volunteer more time, and their relative degree of privilege in terms of being (mostly) White and college educated granted them social capital upon which to survive. For example, Paul, 1 a self-described ‘freelance revolutionary’, slept on friends’ couches, and Pam frequently opened her home to OWS activists.
The political orientations of those interviewed were mixed, but with a strong anarchistic bent, a fact that is supported by the findings of Bray (2013). OWS was not unique in this regard, even for the year 2011, as it followed and was connected to the various movements of the Arab Spring. OWS shared individual protestors across these Arab Spring movements (especially from the Indignado movement in Spain), as well as a philosophical commitment to prefigurative politics (Brienes, 1989), horizontalism, and direct action (Graeber, 2013).
The experience level of the activist practitioners ran the gamut from the former head of a public relations agency (Pam) to mid-career communications consultants for various non-profit groups to complete newcomers to public relations. The primary goal of the group was to help the press produce stories about OWS.
The Press WG members utilized some combination of the following 13 practices: fixing interviews for the press, creating web site content, monitoring of the press coverage, writing/editing press releases and sound bites, media spokesperson training, serving as spokespeople, soliciting and/or writing of editorials, press email management/interaction tracking, strategizing, staffing the press table, delivering presentations to press, stakeholder outreach, and utilizing social media. They conducted the majority of their efforts in reaction to a significant volume of requests from journalists, a majority of them representing international outlets. All but two of the practices of public relations, stakeholder outreach and web site content generation, would be classified as media relations.
Many drew heavily upon their understanding of the way the US media system functions. Some of the professionals in the group had previous experience within international media systems – experience that proved useful given the high level of interest from international media outlets. For example, Pam took extensive notes on potential spokespeople, including who could speak certain languages; fellow members solicited this type of information over email and constructed a Google spreadsheet to serve as a repository or simple database. While such a practice might seem rudimentary, it would have been easy for the practitioners who were dealing with a tremendous volume of requests to say, for example, ‘No, sorry; we don’t know who speaks Hebrew.’ They were prepared for a variety of international requests, and by all accounts, they received them.
Discussion
Regulation and production
Regulation refers to the moment in the circuit of culture wherein every day activities are constrained in both explicit (e.g. censorship) and implicit (e.g. cultural norms) ways. Both types of regulation have enforcement mechanisms; however, as with codes of ethics for public relations (Curtin and Gaither, 2007), enforcement was largely absent in the context of the Press WG. In other words, there were no easily discernable, direct consequences when the informal rules were broken. That being said, violations of norms certainly took a toll in the form of group morale. Many informants discussed fatigue dealing with people who wanted to bask in the media spotlight or from people who wished to repeatedly challenge actions when there had been a previous consensus.
The moment of production in the context of public relations relates to questions of how to define a target audience and what channels to use to reach that target audience, as well as the content or message to employ. This more managerial approach meets more ritualistic ones following Carey (1989), as people – ‘targets’ and practitioners alike – are far from one-dimensional. OWS was a co-constructed, ritualized news event in addition to being a social movement. The audience, the press, and the public relations practitioners were all engaged in constructing narratives, often competing ones, about the purpose and quality of OWS.
The practitioners of the OWS Press WG, more often than not, had a high degree of understanding of how to craft a message that would resonate with their broad target audience, the press, but they had less explicit knowledge of the people consuming the press information. They saw the press as a conduit to various audiences, broadly defined as young and old, liberal and/or conservative. Finer, more precise definitions of audiences and desired actions (e.g. awareness versus mobilization) were not uncovered from interviews and documents.
Working from such broad parameters, the practitioners interviewed for this study, unlike their typical institutional counterparts, did not undertake formal research to help define their targets; it is unclear why, but in all likelihood, they simply decided they did not have time. The pace of their public relations work at the height of the media scrutiny was unlike anything they had experienced before including in their activist and professional lives. This corporate-like sophistication with some of their practices and not others illustrates some degree of connection to managerial or functional approaches to public relations. This quasi-managerial practice was confronted by differently ordered identities in relation to their social movement and the status quo they wished to change.
Spokesperson is a four-letter word
To understand the regulation of public relations in articulation with production within the case study, it is useful to ask what could not be said? Subtle regulations were operating in the background. For example, although the practitioners were either actively serving as spokespeople for the media and/or fixing interviews behind-the-scenes, several group members strongly objected to the use of the word ‘spokesperson’ in the context of their public relations activities. Rachel was emphatic when she said, There is no list of spokespeople. There is a discussion over the list about who we should … There are no spokespeople. There is only the unofficial list of spokespeople in the sense that there were preferences around certain people [speaking to the media].
Empirically speaking this was not true as the researcher viewed the previously mentioned list spearheaded by Pam and widely disseminated via the group’s email listserv – of which Rachel’s email was included.
Later, during the same interview, Rachel contradicted herself when she said that the media decided who was a spokesperson and that was okay as long as the person being quoted was articulate; when the person was deemed incoherent, Rachel felt that it was out of their hands. Her justification erased the numerous times when specific people from a specific list were pushed forward to media outlets, ‘unofficial’ though it may have been. Meanwhile, several other group members also contradicted themselves, saying there were no spokespeople, but then adopting the use of the term throughout the remainder of the interview. For example, Dana said there were no spokespeople, but when describing the day-to-day practice, she said, We hadn’t been like elected to be the voices of the movement, right, but there would be moments where you’re just asked spot on like okay, what are you doing here and you have to just perform and respond [to the media]. There’s not always time to go like, ‘Hold on, let me get you a spokesperson from the da da da who represents whatever.’
Here, Dana is providing a picture of the hectic pace in the park when one might be called upon to go on camera or talk to a journalist at any moment. She also touches upon the tension of speaking for the movement when the movement is not supposed to have any leaders. In short, she does not see the contradiction. In the same way as many of her peers, Dana felt the work (of being a spokesperson) had to get done, regardless of the terminology. Yet the terminology and practice get at the root of cultural regulation within OWS.
What are the possible reasons for this disconnect – this insistence that there are no spokespeople juxtaposed with use of the word throughout the group and the act of serving in the capacity of a spokesperson almost by definition? At one level, the governing structure did not allow for formal organizational hierarchy, yet informal hierarchies were plentiful. The members of the Press WG exercised a great deal of power through such informal hierarchies, including, but not limited to serving as spokespeople. Although Rachel was one of the members who did not like the term ‘spokesperson,’ she nevertheless recognized the power dynamics and potential misuse of that power within the Press WG. She said, We were a very powerful working group and I don’t know what would have happened if we had been more powerful than we were. I don’t think that would have been a good thing at all. So I think we had too much power as it was. […] You know, you become a conduit, people see you as connected to power and then they want to know you because you know journalists and they want to get to the journalists. I just, it felt dirty to me, all that. (Rachel)
Rachel is locating the source of the group’s power in its connections to journalists. The idea of a spokesperson, no matter how many times a person insists they do not speak for the whole, becomes uncomfortable because that power in the moment of regulation articulated with production becomes visible in the practice of being a spokesperson or when connecting a journalist to one. The amplification of a single voice through the media megaphone designates leaders in a so-called leaderless movement. This was an inconvenient truth for some of the practitioners.
At another level, the discomfort around the spokesperson language connects to more serious misgivings, and some would argue misperceptions, about public relations work in general. Rachel contended that the ‘PR’ in the PR Working Group (a frequent abbreviation used by members and non-members alike) ‘definitely didn’t mean public relations’. She also said she did not think it meant that to anyone else either. She said it meant press relations, and unlike the professional consensus, she thought press relations was not a part of public relations. Setting aside the fact that others in the group did refer to their work as public relations, Rachel’s definition of and subsequent rejection of public relations is revealing. She said, So there’s a difference between trying to make the jobs of journalists easier as workers and as people trying to tell a good story and maybe getting them as close to the truth as you can, as somebody who hopefully has integrity and ethical backbone, helping them in that way, believing that they have the potential to do the right thing, treating them in that way. That’s not how some people might have perceived what press work is about. They might have seen it as catering to or like a little bit of ass kissing. That’s not what we did though. That’s public relations, in my view. It’s like when you’re hungry for press, you’re running after press, you’re trying to speak to the public through the press and you feel like you’re not going to get to the public unless you manage to wine and dine this reporter sufficiently. We didn’t have a fucking instance of that. (Rachel)
It is interesting to note that Rachel had several years of experience in communications work prior to OWS. Somewhere along the line she began to define public relations work, as opposed to the ‘press work’ of OWS, as dishonest, desperate ‘ass kissing’. Her view of the press is not much better as indicated by their dubious ‘potential to do the right thing’. It would seem she is doubtful about journalists’ ethics, but not without hope that OWS might push them in the right (her) direction.
Granted, this conception of public relations is common in popular culture; popular opinion of journalism is also not high in the United States. The important aspect to seize upon here, however, is that such stereotypes of public relations and journalism regulate practices. If Rachel saw no difference between her media relations and the broader work of public relations, then she likely would not have volunteered for the Press WG. Along the same lines, if she had seen mainstream media journalists as being irrevocably tied to the status quo (as many of her peers within the larger movement thought), then she would not have been able to do the work either. Rachel’s interpretation of public relations and journalism is a kind of negotiated reading (Hall, 1993) that infuses her practice. She is negotiating/reconciling the hierarchical characteristics of public relations and mainstream journalism with her political identity that resists all concentrations of power.
This discomfort with the neoliberal status quo in relation to public relations work was not isolated to theoretical concerns. Members of the Press WG were complicit in reifying some of the same characteristics of oppression prevalent in the dominant world order the activists fervently wished to change – they would, for example, choose white people for interviews when women of color were qualified and available. They would justify such decisions in the same way a managerial practitioner of public relations might – by gesturing to media ratings and demographic targets. In other words, capitalism oppresses, even in an anti-capitalist movement, and it oppresses people differently, despite the unifying class cry of the 99 percent. The practices of public relations in this context reveal fissures between the marginalized and the merely discontented. The journey on the circuit continues with the articulation of representation and consumption.
Representation and consumption
Following Hall (1997), the subjectivities and historical specificities of an event, such as OWS, shape representations that are always already in flux. Therefore, the question of what it means to serve as a spokesperson in the Press WG of OWS in New York City is a moving debate, as is the question of what the larger movement being promoted by the Press WG means.
This is not to say meaning is everything or its converse: nothing exists without meaning. Hall (2005) clarified this common slippage when he said, ‘“Nothing meaningful exists outside of discourse.” I think that statement is true. On the other hand, “Nothing exists outside of discourse,” in my view, that statement is wrong’ (p. 12). In this case, OWS existed and would have existed even if no one outside of the group mentioned it or the press had ignored the movement. In fact, it is the hidden or distant nature of marginalized discourses, and not their lack of reality, that calls into question their histories. In other words, struggles exist without representation, but corresponding meanings do not. The discourses, or per Hall (1997) ‘ways of […] constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice’ (p. 6), created through the representations of OWS connect to power in a variety of ways. ‘Who has the power, in what channels, to circulate which meanings to whom? Which is why the issue of power can never be bracketed out from the question of representation’. (Hall, 2005: 14).
In terms of power, one editorial written by Press WG members and posted to the Guardian’s web site on 17 November 2011 warrants particular attention.
The editorial happened to be timed with the New York City Police Department’s forceful eviction of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. From this editorial emerged a popular talking point among the protestors and the press: ‘You can’t evict an idea whose time has come’ (Smucker et al., 2011: 1). The consumption of this idea (itself a representation of an unattributed Victor Hugo quote) was mixed according to the comment trail on the site with some, such as commenter ‘Strummered’, echoing the text, saying, ‘This movement cannot be brushed under the carpet or suppressed by force – It’s here to stay as are the ideas. Some people (the 1% and their apologists) better get used to that’ (Smucker et al., 2011: 2). While others, such as ‘AlbertaRabbit’, disagreed, commenting, ‘I would welcome an idea – any idea. But I notice that there’s no actual, you know, IDEAS put forward in this article. They appear to be protesting for the sake of protesting’ (Smucker et al., 2011: 2). From the standpoint of the articulation between production and representation, however, the representation harmonized with the primary message of economic justice, even though the consumption generated some oppositional and negotiated readings.
Identity and power
The moments of the circuit utilized thus far – regulation, production, representation, and consumption flow in articulation with the final moment of the framework: identity. The Press WG expressed a range of identities along continua, for example, from professional to amateur, or from Anarchist to Statist. Roughly half of the informants interviewed for this study had some prior professional experience in public relations and/or journalism. Professionals and amateurs came together in the Press WG due to a shared interest in media, including mainstream sources of media. At first glance, the dichotomy between professionals and amateurs was straight-forward. The professionals formalized certain tactics (e.g. press releases, media list management, talking points) and shared epistemologies of the media system as it related to the movement. And yet, the difference between professional and amateur was often one of degree, rather than a strict dichotomy.
Members seldom used their resumes as weapons with at least one notable exception documented in an email exchange between a veteran newsman and member of the Press WG and a more junior member with some experience in communications work. The exchange concerned the veteran journalist who decided to answer questions from a Fox News reporter without group consultation. This in and of itself was not at all unusual as deadlines, logistics, convenience, personal relationships with journalists, and sometimes ego, contributed to many a spokesperson in the group moving forward without consensus. What was unusual about the Fox incident was that the veteran practitioner decided to share his answers with the group and to strike an insincere tone with the reporter at Fox.
The following is an excerpt from the email Q&A between the reporter at Fox and the Press WG spokesperson: [Reporter] There are accusations that these hired activists are being used as door-to-door canvassers to collect money that is used to support the OWS protests. A: There are accusations that I’ve also heard from my ‘sources’ that many of these are actually Fox News interns being required to do it for Fox News as an effort to augment their salaries. Pending some hitting the jackpot as other [sic] have done when they have filed sexual harassment charges against certain talents at Fox.
In response, the less experienced Press WG member told the group over the email listserv, ‘I’m sorry, but I really really dislike this type of slander fighting slander approach’. This prompted another member to ask why he felt that way and what might work better. There was no response, only two more emails from the veteran member taking great offense to the suggestion that his approach was anything less than appropriate. He closed by stating, ‘Suffice it to say that personally, I have over 41 years of experience in News and public relations and feel comfortable in my ability to handle press’.
In addition to questionable professionalism, the power dynamics between professional and amateur identities in OWS were often in line with a view that recognizes outside, institutional knowledge as a powerful, sometimes corrupting characteristic. Rachel, for example, responded to the notion that the Press WG was ineffective, a view put forth explicitly by members of other working groups as well as implicitly by some journalists who characterized the message of OWS as inchoate – an indirect challenge to the public relations work of the group. She invoked the power of professionalization – of skills and experiences – that was integral to her perception of success and the superiority to many other working groups. However, as an anarchist, she was uncomfortable with the uneven expression of power by the Press WG. Her ambivalence belies the complex quality of power within the group.
All of the practitioners of the Press WG, professional and amateur, anarchistic, and reformist broke ranks with many of their fellow activists because they acknowledged the power of the media and the possibility of influencing that power in the direction of economic equality. Their practices were, like most, filled with contradictions and pitfalls.
This is an opportune juncture to remind the reader that power within the circuit of culture was flowing not only in one moment, or indeed only being exercised by the Press WG, the activists of the larger movement in New York, the journalists, and the public consuming and in some cases co-constructing messages. Articulations were also being co-constructed by other occupations throughout the country and the world, some with their own press working groups, as well as by systemic forces such as economic systems and globalization. At present, pausing on the moment of identity within the study illustrates the dynamic and contingent flow of power in a particular context.
In order to trace the effects of a particular articulation of power, it is useful to consider Hall’s (1982, quoted in Hanczor, 1997) point that with any given articulation in a historical context, there is no ‘necessary correspondence’ between relationships. In other words, there is no natural link between ‘Christian fundamentalism and the conservative political parties’ to use Hanczor’s (1997) example. In this case, articulation theory reveals in kind that there is no necessary link between economic justice and anarchy, for example. The debate over how to communicate about economic justice to the public is, however, imbricated with hegemonic forces – with neoliberalism circa 2011. These relationships of power combined to form contested meanings of economic justice, public relations, governance, and all manner of topics within a relatively homogeneous group. These contestations point to different ways of understanding public relations in social movements.
Although there were many similarities to managerial practices, the assemblage of tactics used by the Press WG in its entirety could be characterized as anti-institutional. In other words, the traces of professional public relations did not solidify to the kind of institutional knowledge power one finds at say a public relations agency.
At the typical American agency, large proprietary storehouses of knowledge are built over time, including painstakingly detailed information about specific journalists, so as to better influence and target them. Briefing books are developed prior to media engagements to prepare spokespeople and arm them with answers to difficult or ‘rude’ questions. PR strategists retreat to ‘war rooms’ in advance of campaigns to plot a product launch. This is not meant to sound sinister, rather to express the language of the profession, or the panoptic quality of power through institutional public relations practice. When speaking about the local dispersion of panoptic power through schools, hospitals, and the like, Foucault (1980) explained, ‘People learned how to establish dossiers, systems of marking and classifying, the integrated accountancy of individual records’ (p. 71). Such institutional knowledge within public relations was not relatively formalized and enforced within the Press WG. Perhaps such knowledge power of the kind associated with the status quo would have calcified eventually, but in the waning months of 2011, the members of the Press WG disrupted public relations as usual if only through their articulations of social justice power.
The data suggest, however, that even if OWS had lasted longer, the focus on sustainability, on building structures of power, was absent for better or for worse. The desire to spread the message of economic justice and to be the change they wanted to see drove these activist practitioners, rather than an interest in organizational self-preservation making them distinct from previously studied groups in the public relations literature.
Conclusion
The act of serving as a spokesperson and the discourses surrounding it emerged as an area of contestation as articulated through the circuit of culture. As group members tried to convey messages about economic justice and power, many were struggling with their own agency and power, some recognizing a contradiction between a so-called leaderless movement and the contradictory act of speaking for the whole.
By comparison, members of the MIA found conflict concerning spokesperson tactics, but for different reasons. While the governing ethos of OWS contributed most to the contested meanings of doing public relations work for the Press WG, some MIA members initially distrusted the relative newcomer status of Martin Luther King, Jr, despite his approval from the established group leadership. Although the press would generally use the full names of OWS spokespeople against their wishes, no single spokesperson was co-constructed by the press for OWS, as was the case with MIA.
Despite the power struggles, the Press WG was able to produce mediated content that delivered the message of economic justice without fully compromising the need to regulate the powerful act of being a spokesperson or choosing spokespeople. Furthermore, the activist practitioners were able to overcome the discomfort precipitated by negative discourses of doing public relations in order to advance the cause of social justice.
The Press WG proved that public relations is a source of power for the marginalized, but it was a discursive power that found cohesion around the message of economic justice as co-constructed by public relations practitioners and journalists. The practices of public relations within the group, then, on the large stage of the mainstream media found a degree of success, but behind-the-scenes key members were ironically marginalizing women and people of color, and at the same time, actively questioning their complicity in wielding power through public relations. The articulations of power were contingent even within a relatively homogeneous group.
These contingencies exist within all groups who practice public relations – from the most managerial to the most cultural. This comes into relief when studying the Press WG through the circuit of culture. The particularities of this case further break apart old, false binaries about public relations and social movements, expressing power and the potential for social change.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.