Popular Culture and Social Change : The Hidden Work of Public Relations

Popular Culture and Social Change: The Hidden Work of Public Relations argues the complicated and contradictory relationship between public relations, popular culture and social change is a neglected theoretical project. Its diverse chapters identify ways in which public relations influences the production of popular culture and how alternative, often community-driven conceptualisations of public relations work can be harnessed for social change and in pursuit of social justice.

This book opens up critical scholarship on public relations in that it moves beyond corporate understandings and perspectives to explore alternative and eclectic communicative cultures, in part to consider a more optimistic conceptualisation of public relations as a resource for progressive social change. Fitch and Motion began with an interest in identifying the ways in which public relations both draws on and influences the production of popular culture by creating, promoting and amplifying particular narratives and images. The chapters in this book consider how public relations creates popular cultures that are deeply compromised and commercialised, but at the same time can be harnessed to advocate for social change in supporting, reproducing, challenging or resisting the status quo.

Drawing on critical and sociocultural perspectives, this book is an important resource for researchers, educators and students exploring public relations theory, strategic communication and promotional culture. It investigates the entanglement of public relations, popular culture and social change in different social, cultural and political contexts – from fashion and fortune telling to race activism and aesthetic labour – in order to better understand the (often subterranean) societal influence of public relations activity.

Kate Fitch is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where she coordinates the public relations specialisation. She previously worked at Murdoch University, where she founded the public relations major and chaired the program for 10 years. Her book, Professionalizing Public Relations: History, Gender and Education, offered the first sociological history of Australian public relations in the twentieth century. Her research interests and publications span critical public relations perspectives on gender, history, promotional and contemporary culture.

Judy Motion is Professor of Communication in the Environmental Humanities group at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Judy’s most recent research focuses on public discourse, sense making and change in relation to environmental issues and controversies. Past research has included discourse and identity in organizational change, power and resistance in the implementation of new technologies and the influence of public relations on policy formation. Her latest book, Social Media and Public Relations: Fake Friends and Powerful Publics, co-authored with Robert L. Heath and Shirley Leitch, was awarded the Outstanding Book Award in 2016 by the National Communication Association, USA.