The firm faces unprecedented external threats to its legitimacy.1 As a major source of tur-bulence, firms’ apparent loss of legitimacy2 has been followed by the emergence of powerfulpublics: so-called political consumers3 and activists.4 These publics emerge around the percep-tion of risk; personal risk and societal risk: be they environmental risks, health risks, risks ofexploitation, etc. In many ways, for society in general and for firms in particular, the production(and consumption) of risks has become at least as important as the production and consumptionof goods and services.5 Given public relations’ explicit role of reducing environmental risk anduncertainty for the firm, it is remarkable that the discipline has not incorporated ideas of risk
50 R. Jones / Public Relations Review 28 (2002) 49–62
communication and deeper sociological consequences of the emergence of the so-called risksociety into its scholarship. Through a more critical and reflective approach to the definition ofpublics and the study of their dynamics, pulling from fields such as sociology, media studies,and marketing, this paper opens up an avenue of research which would aid both the theory andpractice of public relations in coping with the complex and uncertain environment.
This paper presents the notion of risk society as a basis for building up a framework forreconceptualising our approach to publics. Current conceptualisations of publics within publicrelations remain remarkably simplistic and reflect the managerial and normative traditionsprevalent in the discipline.6 Most notably they tend to impose a rational–managerial logiconto publics. This neglects to consider the internal dynamics of public assuming that theyare composed of information processing individuals who react to organisationally definedissues, and fails to incorporate the idea that publics might emerge without organisationalaction. In this paper, it is noted that communities of publics form in a sub-political arena.These communities are built and sustained through issue-based discourses, which define theiridentity. The consequences of regarding publics as discourse arenas involved in the exchangeof meaning and identity is discussed. The paper rounds off by arguing that a renewed focus onpublics and away from organisations, incorporating the notions of risk, identity and discoursepresented in this paper, would offer the public relations discipline the opportunity to offer aunique and sustained leadership role in the study of firms’ relationship with their environment.
2. Publics in risk society
This section looks at the emergence of the so-called risk society and its consequences forthe role of the individual in society. It draws heavily from one of the main proponents of thetheory of the risk society, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck.
A number of theories of society raise the issue of a new role for the individual. Thesecome under the various themes of late-modernism,7 detraditional society8, postmodernism9
and reflexive modernisation.10 Beck11 presents a society that is increasingly turning in onitself—not in a self-reflective, introvert way, but critically, questioning the very principlesupon which society is founded. Modern society’s fundamental belief in technological progressand the benefits that it can give to mankind are now being overshadowed by the negative effectsof that technology. Threats, or risks, to society are coming from the source of society’s wealth.Scientific and technological progress has produced the very industries that are now threateningour environment and our future survival, argues Beck. Unparalleled growth has produced asociety that is reliant on the products of its own destruction. Not only that, but science is notproducing any answers to many of our environmental problems. Indeed, Beck argues, thereis an increasing perception that “science has become a protector of a global contamination ofpeople and nature.”12 Traditional institutions: government, business, science, etc. face a crisisin their legitimacy.13 The individual reassesses, and critically questions these institutions ofsociety. In questioning these institutions, the individual accepts a greater personal responsibilityfor their life. Thus, whilst it was once the case that the individual would allow responsibilityto lay externally, believing that elected bodies and formal organisations were both capable andlegitimate carriers of authority, it is now the case that the individual feels impelled to take
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on the responsibility themselves. As Thompson writes, “As traditions lose their hold in manyspheres of social life, individuals are obliged to increasingly fall back on their own resourcesto construct a coherent identity for themselves. Whereas traditions once provided—or so theargument goes—a relatively stable framework for the self and for the process of self formation,today individuals must chart their own course through a world of bewildering complexity, aworld in which our capacity to understand is constantly outstripped by the unintended andfar-reaching consequences of our actions.”14 Increasingly legitimacy becomes centred aroundthe individual, or around the collectivity of individuals: public opinion.
The risks and contradictions of society become internalised in the individual as traditionalinstitutions loose their credibility. In the absence of clear guidelines from government andscience about risk in society today, it is left to the individual to change his or her lifestyle tomatch theirperceptionof the risks involved. Individuals must draw from their own experiencesand the complex assemblage of role models, the media and friends that form the discoursecommunities to which they belong, to make decisions about their stand and the issues that theyface. It is through the position we take on these issues (including abstention) that we add toour personal identity. With the loss of traditional sources of collective and shared meaning,we seek to create our own personal identities: through our lifestyle choices, the things webuy, the groups to which we belong, the causes we support and the opinions that we have.Thus, we create our own biographies in the absence of the old traditional lifeways providedby apprenticeships, family businesses and traditional career choices.15 The individual is nolonger the role player of the industrial society, but is active in making decisions about his orher future. “Individualisation means the disintegration of the certainties of industrial societyas well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others withoutthem.”16 Individuals feel both a new responsibility for and an accompanying uncertainty abouttheir lives. This responsibility (whether real or perceived) results in the individual taking amore critical stance towards many of the traditions of society that were once taken for granted.One of the more visible results of this trend has been the emergence of consumer activism17
and of the so-called sovereign consumer.18
Deegan19 points out that political activism is not just associated with consumerism, but hasbecome the remit of NGO’s attacks on corporate irresponsibility. Through a number of welldocumented case studies, she argues that activists have become a real threat to firms and thattraditional public relations techniques are failing industry. Whilst small in terms of resources,these activist groups are extremely effective at targeting their campaigns against “unethical”behaviour by firms. Likewise Coombs20 and Heath21 argue that Internet offers the ideal vehiclefor the ennoblement of activists.
In this way one of the central features of late-modern society is a movement of politicsfrom the established political arena to asub-political arena.22 Take for instance the recentcases of Royal Dutch/Shell’s attempt to dump a life expired oil-storage platform in the NorthAtlantic,23 and the aborted attempt by 39 pharmaceutical companies to take the governmentof South Africa to court over the use of generic AIDS medicine. In both cases major decisionsabout, in the first case, environmental policy in the North Sea oil fields, and, in the second, ofpatent protection rights, were discussed and resolved outside established institutions. In boththese cases it was a debate between one or more companies and NGOs. Regardless of the factthat no precedent was set in law, no laws or government policies were created or altered, a moral
52 R. Jones / Public Relations Review 28 (2002) 49–62
precedent or at least praxis was established that will be as effective as any law or governmentpolicy. It is this new arena that public relations now has to operate within and which it has tounderstand.
There are three characteristics that are significant in looking at the sub-political arena. Firstly,that it allows new players into the “political” arena. As Beck notes:
Sub-politicsis distinguished from politics in that (a) agents outside the political or corporatistsystem are also allowed to appear on the stage of social design (this group includes professionaland occupational groups, the technical intelligentsia in companies, research institutions andmanagement, skilled workers, citizens’ initiatives, the public sphere, and so on), and (b) notonly social and collective agents, butindividualsas well compete with the latter and each otherfor the emerging power to shape politics.24
This plurality fits well with conceptions of the sovereign consumer and new notions ofcitizenship. It is not that these new actors gain access to the existing political stage, but thatthey are dominant on a new, sub-political stage. The emergence of a new political order ismade possible by a decline in the traditional social and political institutions of society.
Secondly, it opens up the possibility for new ways of defining and discussing issues whichdo not conform to the institutionally accepted discourses. As Jones25 notes in the case ofthe dumping of the Brent Spar platform, Greenpeace’s success was due in large part to itsrhetorical definition of the case, moving it away from a narrowly defined issue of the dumpingof a particular platform to a wider issue of responsibility; in this case industry’s responsibilitytowards the environment. As Jones writes, “This case was won by Greenpeace because itmobilised popular concern about the environment and industrial misuse of the environmentwith direct reference to public opinion.”26 Greenpeace in effect turned the case into one thatarticulated the public’s helplessness over the control of environmental risks. In the sub-politicalarena, loosened from the bondage of scientific discourse, messages are aimed at addressingindividuals’ concerns in rhetorically persuasive ways. This applies equally to activist groupsas well as companies. The persuasion here is not that envisioned by Bernays, but is achievedthrough an alignment of value bases of sender and receiver. Increasingly, it becomes importantfor communicators to achieve identification with the values of the public they are trying tocommunicate with.
One of the issues vexing critical public relations scholars in relation to symmetrical dia-logue, is that whilst symmetry can apparently function at the intentional level,27 it is harderto imagine it functioning at the practical level when the distribution of resources is so asym-metrical between the corporate and not-for-profit worlds. Whilst it is indeed intuitive to followthis thinking, there is some evidence (Brent Spar, the South Africa AIDS patents case, etc.),which suggests that these resource weak publics can actually be very effective in targeting re-source strong corporations. In the world of reflexive modernity; where conflict, power games,instruments and arenas pervade,28 it is the communicative elements of what Tsoukas29 calls“texture” that influences and ultimately decides the outcomes of stakeholder interaction. Incontemporary society, where corporations are involved in the production of risks as well asproducts and services, it is often more relevant to look at symbolic rather than economic power.Indeed as Sternberg30 argues, even the production of goods and services is essentially iconic,in that it is as much the symbolic meaning conveyed by a good as much as the good itself,
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which is on sale.31 From a symbolic perspective, the ability of a public to exert power is afunction of its ability to communicate convincingly in the public sphere. In this respect poweris levered through the mediation of communication,32 whereby amplification of messages isachieved through subsidy by the media.
Thirdly, the sub-political arena is characterised by emergence of discourse communities.As publics form and disband many do so around specific issues. Typically publics form insti-tutionalised responses to specific issues in the form of issue-based organisations. The issuesprovide the focus and “logic” for the resultant publics; they define who the public is and whatthey stand for. The identity of the public can be understood by looking at the ways in whichmeaning is constituted within and by the public. Specific languages are built up based on ashared understanding of the issue. These discourses constitute not only the meaning of theissue but also of the public itself; they are what Fairclough calls the “common sense of aculture.”33 The individual may be a member of several issue-based organisations or, as is thecase with most of us, he/she may support several issue-based organisations. At the individuallevel these publics are involved in a complex interplay of identities through their associationwith the respective groups. Thus, publics are “groups of individuals who develop their ownidentities, and perhaps representations of their collective interests, in relation to the system.”34
Whilst the “fabric of public opinion”35 is created through the interaction between the variousdiscourses on various issues currently being debated in the public arena, for the firm, it isoften a relatively narrow set of issues that face them. The point to be made here is that inthis relatively narrow range of issues facing the firm, the texture36 of the discursive environ-ment can be quite complex. Given the interplay of identities present at the individual level,there is no reason not to accept a similar process at the organisational level. As issue-basedorganisations fight for their survival, the notion of lifeworld organisations “independent of thesystem”37 becomes nonsensical. Social movement organisations are “made” and “remade”38
through explicit reference to the system they oppose. Likewise their language or discoursedefines their reality. As Livesey points out “the social reality of the organisation is created andmaintained for internal and external stakeholders through language and symbolic action.”39
For those attempting to establish symmetrical dialogue with such organisations, they must beaware of the way in which the organisation’s reality is constituted through language and actaccordingly. For firms attempting, as is usual, to communicate with several publics at once,this can prove to be nigh on impossible. Successful public relations in these circumstancesmust be capable of communicating to multiple publics with multiple identities.40
In reality, this apparently impossible situation is achievable in several ways. Firstly, sinceorganisations are centrally concerned with their survival, they align themselves with others inorder to form powerful strategic alliances. Whilst much has been written about the economicrationale for strategic alliances, less has been written about their rhetorical nature. In terms ofidentity, organisations and their publics are often involved in an interplay of identities,41 whichis aimed at building and maintaining organisational legitimacy.42 For many environmentalorganisations, for example, it has proved worthwhile to “sponsor” corporations’ efforts toimplement environment monitoring and management systems as a way of showing their ownwillingness to compromise as well as to support the positive efforts of corporations in thisarea. Secondly, firms might direct their efforts to “opinion-leader” publics or to umbrellaorganisations representing several publics. Whilst this does not mitigate against other publics
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from attacking the firm, it allows the firm to simplify its rhetorical strategy and focus ona narrower field of publics. Thirdly, the firm can use ambivalent forms of communicationto communicate to various publics.43 For Cheney, identity is “shared interests or intereststhat are perceived to be shared.”44 Recent scholarship on organisational storytelling suggeststhat organisational narratives are very effective at communicating organisational values and inreaching wider publics based on the interactivity (between sender and receiver) in storytelling.45
Such stories, as an organisation’s eco-identity,46 can form effective ways in communicating tomultiple publics on the basis of shared interests.
3. Discussion
Within the public relations literature there have been repeated calls for the development of arobust theoretical base to the discipline.47 Recent scholarship has suggested that the disciplinedefine relationship management as its central focus.48 Of the two actors in the relationship, theliterature has favoured an organisational perspective.49 This paper joins a number of scholarswithin the discipline in calling for greater focus on publics. However, it presents a revisednotion of publics and their dynamics. The role of public opinion, as an inactive mass, has tobe revised as public opinion increasingly plays a key symbolic role in contemporary society.Notwithstanding the problematic nature of public opinion as a self-referential phenomenon,50
it is to this that politicians, pressure groups and firms increasingly refer when looking forlegitimacy. In looking at more traditional publics I would like to put forward two propositionsthat would lead to a greater understanding of publics that will ultimately lead to the developmentof better public relations praxis: identity and discourse. Lastly, I want to discuss ways in whichan invigorated notion of publics can become central in the discipline’s search for its ownidentity.
3.1. Public relations as the exchange of identities
The first idea I want to put forward is that public relations, or the relationship betweenorganisation and its publics, is essentially concerned with the exchange of identities. Put morebluntly, the issues around which publics form and which they support are used as vehicles forthe expression of their identity. The consequence of this is that, in dealing with publics, it isnot the issue itself that is necessarily the problem, but the identity of the public in relation tothat issue. This may sound like a slim distinction, but it is significant.
At the level of the individual, association with an issue is normally in the form of analignment to an organisation or through the more anonymous expression of public opinion.As individuals seek to build up their own sense of identity or self-biography51 they use theirposition on issues to articulate this. This may be quite a conscious effort on the individual’spart but more often than not the individual is not aware that he/she is doing this. Thus, whenindividuals chose to support the action against Shell in the Brent Spar case (a case ostensiblyabout the environmental consequences of dumping a relatively environmentally inert metalstructure in the depths of the North Atlantic) as opposed to supporting the myriad of otherenvironmental organisations campaigning for protection of valuable ecosystems, protection of
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endangered species, action against global warming, or other issues such as tackling the AIDSepidemic in Africa, or poverty in the third world, they did so on the basis of its symbolicqualities rather than the environmental consequences.52 This case, through its very high profilenature provided the perfect foil for individuals to express their views about the denigrationof the environment and feed into their own sense of concern. In this way, the case is bestunderstood as an articulation of values and identity.
The consequences for public relations are clear, particularly in terms of building up sym-metrical dialogues with publics, as I will explain below. In their book “Dealing with an AngryPublic,” Susskind and Field note that in certain dialogues, it is very difficult for the two sidesto come to any form of agreement and compromise:
Debates involving values are not only about what we want but also who we think we are andwho we think “they” are in relation to us. Debates involving values upset our view of the worldand ourselves. In value-laden debates, to compromise or to accommodate neither advancesone’s self interest not increases joint gains. Compromise, in its most pejorative sense, meansabandoning deeply held beliefs, values or ideas. To negotiate away values is to risk giving upone’s identity.53
The authors also note that often the original cause of the conflict becomes blurred as it isredefined over time; in other words the issue becomes de-centred as values and identity overtakethe debate. As a number of critical, rhetorically based scholars within the field of public relationshave noted, effective communication (and hence effective public relations) often uses rhetoricaltechniques of identity to persuade their audiences. In the analysis of Mobil’s “Op-eds” in the1970’s, Crable and Vibbert54 highlight the ways in which corporate issues are linked to societalvalues (in that case of freedom, family and technology). As opposed to the examples of Susskindand Field, Crable and Vibbert pointed to the almost commonsensical form of communicationadopted by Mobil; here what is at stake is not conflicting values, but widely accepted values,which are appended to a case.
Likewise, at the organisational level, organisational identity is essentially tied to issue po-sitions. Organisations and their publics are often involved in an interplay of identities in afight to build up a strong position in crowded markets (be they industrial, consumer or issuemarkets) and ultimately their long-term survival.55 For the organisation, the ability to providethe consumer or potential member with a strong identity, be it in terms of a lifestyle choice(as in much product branding) or on an issue or approaches to issues (as organisations such asGreenpeace strive to do), feeds into the individual’s search for identity. In this way what is atstake is not always the direct facts of the issue at hand, but the way in which they are used tobuild identities.
The consequence of this is that positions on issues become rhetorical in the sense thatthey are aimed at building up identification between the organisation and its publics. Issuemanagement, for instance, becomes a tool for communicationing values and identities as muchas about attitudes to the issue itself. Looking at communication between the organisation andits publics in this way has two consequences. Firstly, since issue positions are linked to theindividual or organisation’s sense of identity, they can be very hard to move. Secondly, andcorollary to this, is that given the symbolic nature of the association with the issue, publics maybe much more flexible than at first believed. In the case of the non-economic strategic alliances
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the partners are looking for symbolic gains concerned with identity rather than specific issues.Thus Livesey56 found that the Environment Defense Fund was much more willing to cooperatewith McDonalds on the issue of packaging than one might at first have believed. In this alliancethe Defense Fund gained symbolically (in terns of expressing a willingness to cooperate andachieve measurable gains) against its loss in environment terms. This case is not isolated but isincreasingly prevalent where environmental groups vie for new members by showing resultson the ground rather than intransigence; in these cases it is arguably the environment that endsup compromised.
When interactions with publics are viewed as exchanges of identity then Leitch and Taylor’s57
concerns about the differences between organisations and publics seem of little consequence.I would like to go as far as to suggest that all publics are organisations in so far as they arecollectivities of people who share an identity, which they try to build and maintain. Issues,around which publics “emerge,” cannot therefore be simply viewed as anonymous putativeconditions, labelled problems, but must consider who has labelled them and in which arenas.For each public the signification of the issue may be vastly different. The socially constructedarena that the public exists within determines the context in which publics define issues.
3.2. Public relations as a discourse praxis
The second idea I want to put forward is that of publics as discourse arenas. Whilst Beckargues for the emergence of a sub-political arena, he does not expand on the nature of this arena.This idea stems from the notion of discourse as a constituting force.58 Discourse is meant here inthe sense that through the language (and texts) organisations create (and recreate) their reality.Publics not only converge around common issues, they also converge around a common way ofcommunicating. Publics form communities of shared meaning, where issues become the focus.This meaning is no clearer than through the language they use to describe their experiencesand their expectations. As Vasquez and Taylor note:
Symbolic reality is created, raised and sustained through the exchange of shared and competingfantasy themes.59
This symbolic approach allows us to conceive of publics as communities who come to-gether through common concerns (issues), but which are maintained through a collective senseof identity and a particular world view sustained through their discourse. One of the mistakes ofcontemporary public relations theory is that in defining publics as being either latent or active60
and then categorising them strategically according to how they might affect the organisation,61
it offers no insight into the internal dynamics of publics and the ways in which they con-struct the issue at hand. As noted by Livesey62 in relation to the phenomenon of strategicalliances, organisations are often involved in compromises between the demands of their ownconstituencies and those of external constituencies. What is interesting is that this dialogueoccurs mainly at the symbolic level, where the parties are involved in a symbolic exchange inorder to legitimise themselves with their own constituencies. The most significant outcomesof dialogue processes are often just as symbolic as they are concrete. Thus, in their alliancewith McDonalds, the Environmental Defense Fund gained symbolic legitimacy as its majoroutcome, in its fracas with Shell, Greenpeace’s main outcome was an increase in awareness of
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its work and a stopping up of its declining membership. Thus, to understand these exchangeswe need to understand the logic of publics’ positions with their own constituencies. Whendialogue is viewed as a communicative action where the parties act on the basis of the logicof the discourse within which they operate, the organisational perspective to defining publicsbecomes useless.
There are a number of elements significant to the study of these publics. Firstly, this discoursecan be organisation specific, but often it is shared by many organisations/publics in an arena.63
In this way publics can be defined by the nature of the discourse they use and several publicscan be amalgamated into discourse arenas; their commonality being the discourse which theyuse. These publics will usually be focused around a particular issue, forming issue arenas. It isthese arenas which should interest organisations because it is usually around issues that publicsappear and it is often around issues that organisations seek solutions. Whilst the organisationmay only have contact with one public, it is vital to understand that that group more often thannot belongs to a network constituting the discourse arena; this arena forms the constitutivecommunity for the public in which it has a position in the arena’s hierarchy and from whichthe public’s position on the issue is formed and sustained. This view goes a step further thanVasquez’s notion that “a public represents individuals who have created, raised and sustained agroup consciousness around a problematic situation,”64 to suggest that this group consciousnessis wider than just one public. For the practitioner this means that in order to understand onepublic, one has to look at the network of publics to which they belong. As a constituting arena,it is the myths and stories that drive the public that provide the logic of the public’s action.In this way, the public’s position on an issue should be understood in relation to the widerdiscourse arena and the way in which the issue is constructed in that arena.
Secondly, one public does not use a single discourse but has a number of competing dis-courses within it;65 it may therefore be part of several arenas. In so far as all organisations existonly through the discourses that constitute them,66 so it is with publics. Publics can be seen asan outcome of competing discourses: competing professional discourses, management versusactivist discourses, family versus professional discourses, etc. The outcome of this competi-tion defines how the public defines itself and the issues that it promotes. These internal powerstruggles67 are of interest to the organisation since they define the public’s stance to the issue(and how it defines the issue), but also because some of the public’s discourses may coincidewith the organisation’s. For example, if the public is run according to a management discourse,then communication with the public should be run using a professional management discourse;this is clearly the way most organisation prefer to communicate with their publics and in caseswhere the public adopts this way of communicating, then it is reasonably effective. However,if the activist discourse is dominant then other approaches are necessary and it may be verydifficult for the organisation to establish direct communication with the group. The point hereis that if the organisation is to be successful in establishing a dialogue with the public, thenthe style of communication and the issues that should be discussed must be determined by thepublic’s dominant discourses. Thus, whilst two publics may have the same stance on an issue,they may have two distinct ways of communicating about it.
Lastly, the language of the publics is not “merely” a means of communication but definestheir lifeworld, i.e., it is constitutive.68 This final point is perhaps the most important. Discoursedefines the world according to those who practice it: it tells people what issues are important,
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it tells them why they are important and it contextualises them. Watson writes, discourseis a “connected set of statements, concepts, terms and expressions which constitutes a wayof talking or writing about a particular issue, thus framing the way peopleunderstandandact with respect to that issue.”69 Discourse is, thus, much more than the texts it describes,it is a world-view. Seen in this way this helps us to understand why some publics are sovehement in their views about a particular issue, it also significantly helps us to understandwhy they think the way they do about the issue. Take for example, a current issue vexingpart of the pharmaceutical industry: falling participation in child vaccination programmes. Thepublic relations exercise has been to inform parents of the relative risks of vaccines versuscontracting the actual illness (which clearly favour vaccination). However, for many parentsthe (slim) probability of imposing disability and possibly death on one’s own child (throughthe vaccination) outweighs the (natural) chances of contracting the disease. When industryviews the public relations problem as one of communicating probabilities, it totally misses theconcerns of parents in terms oftheirperception of risk in this case. Viewing publics as discoursearenas helps to underline the symbolic nature of the issue and the context or framing of the issueseen fromtheir point of view. One of the major mistakes of public relations practitioners todayis that having identified issues and their associated publics, they fail to see that these issues maybe perceived in completely different ways, i.e., that their contexts are different. A prerequisitefor effective dialogue is that the participants understand not only the issue being debated butalso the meaning that it has for the public (and the organisation). In this respect issues arecarriers of meaning for the public, since they are set in a wider value system composed by thediscourse.
3.3. The challenge for public relations
Given the increased focus on publics in the management literature and the demands fromindustry for more effective ways of dealing with critical publics and avoiding crises, publicrelations appears perfectly placed to meet these demands. In particular, this paper focuses on theemergence of risk as a major facet of production of contemporary society. With organisationsproducing risk as much as they produce goods and services, risk communication becomes aprerogative of public relations. The notion of risk society entails not only the production ofrisk but also the re-placement of the individual in society. In this scenario, the role of publicopinion and sub-politics are heightened as individuals seek to create their own sense of identityin a society where the legitimacy of traditional institutions is questioned.
Given these structural changes in society, public relations needs to begin to redefine theways in which it conceptualises publics and to begin to build a framework for understandingthem and ways to interact with them. Two elements are suggested here: identity and discourse.The issue of identity pervades contemporary society. Organisations and individuals seek tocreate identity; individuals in terms of their own self biography, and organisations in order todifferentiate themselves and communicate effectively to individuals. The creation of identityis necessarily a two-way process involving both sender and receiver. This dialogic form asyet remains to be explored in the public relations literature. Its consequences are clear. In thesemiotic environment of contemporary society, business needs to be able to compete on itssymbolic capital as well as its economic capital. Notions of corporate reputation and image
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management have not emerged coincidentally but represent the need for organisations to buildup strong, long-term identities, which can be traded on the semiotic market.
The notion of sub-politics provides a rich area for study. This paper has suggested that thesub-political arena be defined in terms of discourse arenas. The advantage to using the notionof discourse in relation to publics is that it defines them in terms of wider constitutive networksor arenas, it introduces the concept of power within networks of publics and between publicand organisations and it places issues that publics form around within their meaning system.Linked closely with the identity, this conceptualisation sees organisations involved in meaningexchange as one of their primary functions. The idea of symbolic exchange is not new,70 butprovides a promising area for understanding the nature of exchange in contemporary societyand for relations with publics.
4. Conclusion
This paper sees a renewed focus on publics and communities as the way for the disciplineto distinguish itself conceptually from the related field of marketing and contribute both to ourunderstanding of the role of the firm in society and to ways in which the firm interacts with itsvarious stakeholders. This requires, however, more conceptually robust notions of the public,and an openness within the discipline to alternative (and complimentary) approaches to studyingpublic relations. Moreover, it requires that the firm is de-centred from the discipline and greatereffort is put in to the study of the dynamics of publics. Whilst this call for de-centring is nothingnew, this paper calls for more positive as opposed to normative study of the relationships inpublic relations. In this way, a theory of publics could provide the basis for the development ofa conceptually robust theory of public relations. This paper has provided a framework for theunderstanding of the emergence of publics: of sub-political arenas, issue and discourse arenas.It is now up to the discipline to take this further.
Richard Jones is an assistant professor in the Institute of Marketing at the University ofSouthern Denmark. This paper was written whilst Richard Jones was a visiting acadennicat School of Management, University of Technology, Sydney.
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[4] Denise Deegan,Managing Activism: A Guide to Dealing with Activists and Pressure Groups, Kogan Page,London, 2001; Matthias Winter, Ulrich Steger,Managing Outside Pressure and Corporate Early Awareness,Wiley, Chichester, 1998.
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[6] Shirley Leitch, David Neilson, Bringing publics into public relations: new theoretical frameworks for practice,in: Robert L. Heath (Ed.),Handbook of Public Relations, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2001, pp. 127–138.
[7] See, for example, Charles Jencks,The Post-modern Reader, Academy Editions, London, 1992.[8] See, for example, Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, Paul Morris,Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority
and Identity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.[9] See, for example, Fredric Jameson,Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, New York,
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