Abstract
What are the legacies of public relations? How have its industries and language practices shaped or reduced political meaning in public debates? Does anyone really know the impact of public relations in our lives, or on our futures? Questions like these are impossible to offer pat answers to, but that does not mean that they are unworthy of our attention. Some light might be shed by sociologist Ulrich Beck who tabled the idea of a ‘risk society’ in a few short words: “I am afraid!” (1992, p.49). But why are people in the West gnawed by fear at a time when, relatively speaking, so many material needs have been met? For Beck the source of this anxiety is a “new ‘shadow kingdom’”, concealed behind a seemingly harmless façade, but one which steadily produces the toxic hazards that contaminate our world within the flawed and simplistic notion that ‘progress’ is good for you (1992, p.72). But one price we pay for this, one literal cost, is the climate emergency (Almiron, 2020; Fawkes 2025).
In enabling these conditions, public relations industries and their affiliates like think tanks, front groups, donors, and other allied associations, have worked for decades as proxies for the fossil fuel industry to advance their interests. In doing so the submerged network has contributed to dangerous market reification and propelled pernicious ‘climate change denial’ into public debates, along with the bitter self-serving politics of division and doubt, in order to block the acceptance of climate science and the inevitable market reform. Testament to the extent that invisible public relations has worked as a ‘hand’ for the shadow kingdom is a 2022 report by the US Congress: The Role of Public Relations Firms in Preventing Action On Climate Change. The report charges public relations with engineering counternarratives with massive reach for the fossil fuel industries and warns: “These tactics are misleading or deceptive by design, often making it difficult for outsiders to discern the full breadth of a PR firm’s campaign” (2022, p.1). While it is important to acknowledge that much public relations is conducted within the guide rails of professional ethical codes and delivers social benefit, this activity cannot be ignored. Even if only some ‘PR’ enables the producers of global risk to continue unabated and to set in motion the catastrophe’s that future generations will pay for, what will be its enduring legacy, and how might we challenge the inevitability of this? More than ever, we need to pay public relations more, not less, attention.
Power is critical to comprehending the scale and scope of public relations and its legacies. A starting point to understand this is to conceptualize ‘PR’ as a point of convergence for vast financial resources, communicative power, and an ideological agenda to promote the political settings of ‘neoliberalism’, such as pursuing lower taxes, small government, and less spending on welfare or collectivism, in order to turbo charge business profitability (Demetrious 2022; Miller and Dinan 2008). Shedding light on one way this may happen, Anne Cronin (2020) discusses public relations’ unique discursive role in propelling the neoliberal project through a “secrecy−transparency dynamic” which works to produce a semblance of openness, but “deliver[s] only justifications of the status quo or further obfuscation” (2020, p.220). Consequently, secrecy is a practice embedded hegemonically as part and parcel of a working capitalist market system, which offers business competitive advantage, and buffers it from any opposition. Reframing public relations as having a central role in producing, policing and enforcing the language dynamics that work to shield and insulate industry and business sectors from reform is significant in several ways. It reveals that public relations is an economic discourse that has huge cultural and political implications.
Despite public relations’ historical role in accelerating and spreading the transnational movement of capital and ideas, or globalisation, particularly since the 1970s, it can evade the intense disciplinary scrutiny it deserves. Thus, for Paul Elmer, “the narrow characterisation of public relations as a contemporary business activity, rather than as a type of cultural practice, means that some valuable analysis occurs in parallel fields of enquiry, rather than within the public relations field” (2007, p.364). PR's slippery disciplinary positioning and shifting nomenclautre is compounded in a twenty-first century digital settings, when its activities are often at a distance from institutional sites like ‘PR' professional associations or disarticulated from traditional business models. Its distinctive language practices have proved adaptive and resilient over the years in colonising social media in new ways for commerical purposes, adding complexity to the role they play in furthering these interests. Today, public relations is unleashed by AI and pushed along by algorithmic culture, which has built-in biases with huge potential for transformative cultural effects. For Clea Bourne, public relations’ penchant for futurity works hand in hand with “AI’s programmed inequalities – toward race, gender and identities” (Bourne 2019, 24). Public relations and its language practices are central then, not just to the production of political discourses that shape our lives, and the lives of future generations, but also in shaping labour markets, and facilitating expectations and boundaries around identity which affects political participation. The legacies of public relations are many and varied, and mapping these is critical in understanding how discourses like neoliberalism are maintained and spread. Public relations in its multiple forms occupies a range of spaces that seek to build consent, including within popular culture, that we cannot easily see. From the rolling environmental and humanitarian crises and the dangerous political vacuums to the conflicts and problems that beset society, there are many good reasons to feel afraid today. Beck’s ideas suggest that industries like public relations are deeply complicit, and that we need to look not once, but always twice, in order to understand how. In mapping and excavating the field, this issue of Public Relations Inquiry looks twice, opening new conversations about its scope and implications.
The first article is Pablo Miño’s ‘Ethnoscapes, finanscapes and mediascapes: Global cultural flow theory in the Latin American public relations industry between the 1990s and 2000s’. Placing the effects of globalisation and public relations at the centre of his discussion, Miño argues the multilingual US city of Miami became a base for firms at a time when multinational public relations agencies expanded into Latin America “in a quest for new clients and publics to serve”. But public relations’ movement into new markets facilitated more than just the flow of capital. It also took people, and neoliberal ideologies. Using a combination of in-depth interviews with professionals who experienced the public relations industry expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as a content analysis of PR Week, Mino drills down into how this happened in practice. Mergers and acquisitions, and the movement of some of the biggest ‘PR’ firms like Burson-Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton into countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico is only just starting to be understood.
In a world in flux, grappling with the uncertainties of global environmental transformation and crisis, the second article explores how public relations practitioners as social actors construct new ‘realities’ within corporate sustainability. ‘Claiming narrative agency: Public relations ideals and realities in socio-ecological transformational change’ by Franzisca Weder and C. Kay Weaver asks what roles practitioners actually do in their daily practice when co-producing new narratives to effect change and shape social and cultural understandings of the ‘future’. For Weder and Weaver, public relations practice “remains opaque” but their research of in-house practitioners in the US and Austria is one step in identifying, naming and clarifying the potent discursive dynamics within their work.
How corporates respond to complex sociopolitical change is the theme of our next article. Using a case study of division and support for abortion access as a lens, ‘Corporate social advocacy and reproductive rights: Analysing public relations responses to Dobbs v. Jackson’ by Teresa Tackett, Josh C Bramlett, Mackenzie Quick and Amelia McKee maps the legal, political and economic discourses framing this issue. They show how corporates respond in complex ways, treading a fine line between taking a position on social justice and rights advocacy, protecting their reputation, and at the same time acknowledging the breadth of stances in employees and customers. The article makes a contribution in understanding how public relations as “corporate social advocacy” are deeply entwined in setting the trajectory of contentious political debates.
The cycle of challenge and advocacy is also explored by Ruth Avidar and Margalit Toledano who examine the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguing the need to reassess the ways in which language strategies are framed and distributed. In ‘The relationships between Israeli pro- and anti-vaccination advocates during pre-COVID measles crisis: A case for dialogue’ the authors provide an in-depth look at ‘vaccine hesitancy’ through pro- and anti-vaccination groups during a measles outbreak. They show it is a site of intense struggle that produces different approaches, due to the volatility of the media, and make clear the disproportionate effect this can have in setting the agenda. Mistrust is rife and by carefully analysing the sources, the authors investigate how the constraints that affect dialogue can lead to an understanding of its limitations but also point to possible ways through.
The emerging tensions between the climate crisis, public relations practice and artificial intelligence intersect in the final article in this issue. Emma Christensen’s ‘The socio-ecological costs of AI: Toward socially responsible and sustainable communication practices’ explores the notion materiality in AI. Much of the language that surrounds the new technology not only contains an aura of futurity, but locates it in a liminal sense, depicting its presence in our lives metaphorically as in ‘the cloud’. However, for Christensen, AI has a very real material presence, and this article brings these overlooked costs to the forefront, urging practitioners to critically engage in exploring pathways for fostering socially responsible and environmentally sustainable AI practices.
We finish this issue with a commentary by Ramon Girona and Jordi Xifra, ‘Fiction as public relations film discourse: The case of metropolitan police press bureau and procedural drama the blue lamp’. Examining its role in postwar cinema, Girona and Xifra revisit Alex Rock’s book The Metropolitan Police and the British Film Industry,1919–1956 “as a key contribution to the history of public relations in the United Kingdom and to the study of cinema as a strategic tool for the post-war legitimization of the London Metropolitan Police.” Focusing on this collaboration, Girona and Xifra identify cinema as “central site of narrative public relations and symbolic consent-building” which shapes the collective and social imagination.
There are many rich discussions in this issue of Public Relations Inquiry: its role of globalisation, its practices in concept and in reality, its hybridisations, conflicts and styles. Together they serve to open the context of its practices and flag the reach of its activities. It is hoped that this issue contributes wider conceptions of the field, disarticulated solely from confines of ‘communication’ and provoking integral interdisciplinary questions about the ‘new shadow kingdom’ and its legacies.
