Challenging hegemony and power in the sixteenth century: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude as antecedent of critical public relations theory

This article applies La Boétie’s concept of voluntary servitude to public relations historiography through a historic-critical analysis. Written in the same Renaissance era than other early history books of the history of public relations such as Machiavelli’s The Prince, The discourse of voluntary servitude (1552-1553) reveals to the publics the power that would lie in their refusal to engage with the authority (or in other words, the state, the prince or the monarch). The result is that, through a postmodern approach of emphasizing dissensus, the concept of voluntary servitude and its encouragement of activism and passive resistance can be considered an early precedent of critical public relations theory. Furthermore, without being judgmental, La Boétie invites us to a reflection on the role of self-responsibility of the publics in their power relationships with organizations.

Discursive stickiness: Affective institutional texts and activist resistance

Pushing the bounds of public relations theory and research, we explore how institutional texts have produced and reified stigmas around gender transgression and how these texts are bound up in moments of activism and resistance. We considered how different discursive and material functions get “stuck” together by way of texts and how this sticking depends on a history of association and institutionalization. Activism presents opportunities to challenge institutional and structural stickiness, and we argue that public relations can challenge the affective assemblages that comprise and perpetuate these systems, unsettling the historical discourses that have governed institutions by establishing new communicative possibilities.

An exploration of strategic public relations management in Ghana

The study examines the current state of public relations practice in Ghana. The study applied the four principle of generic public relations theory to determine whether PR practice in Ghana was strategic. A mixed mode of survey and in-depth interviews were used to gather data from 108 respondents and 15 interviewees respectively. Findings show PR in Ghana is seldom managed strategically, is practiced more at the technician level than managerial, and is bound to cultural norms of the country.

Looking back and going forward: The concept of the public in public relations theory

This article examines the development of the public as a foundational concept in public relations theory. It provides an overview of the way in which public relations has understood the term as referring to two distinct phenomena of a public and the public. The article approaches public relations theory as unfolding of a narrative identity of public relations. The discussion subsequently reaches to the work of Michael Warner and Judith Butler to consider the limitations and implications of the situational theory of publics and the deliberativist approach to the public derived from the work of John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas. In its final sections, the article redefines the public as a family of three distinct, but at times, overlapping terms: an audience as a public of shared spaces, a self-organized public of shared attention, and the public as a political and social imaginary. This article argues for the need to adopt the performative approach to the public in order to tackle some of the biases in public relations theory. It also suggest the PESO model of communication a useful starting point to create a more complex understanding of the formation of the public (in all three senses) in relation to processes of co-creation and circulation of a wide range of texts.