Public Relations: Discipline, Practice and Profession

Public Relations: Discipline, Practice and Profession: History

Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Contributor: Nuno da Silva Jorge

Public Relations (PR) is the strategic role of communication between an organization or public actor and the publics on whose recognition, trust and consent its operation depends. The field encompasses media relations, internal and employee communication, public affairs and government relations, crisis and reputation management, community relations and corporate social responsibility, investor relations, marketing communications, political communication, digital and platform engagement, and the communication of activist and non-governmental organizations. PR scholarship draws on sociology, political philosophy, organizational studies, rhetoric and media studies to examine how organizations construct, sustain and contest their legitimacy in the public sphere. The dominant theoretical framework of the late twentieth century, the Excellence Theory developed by James Grunig and colleagues, defined PR as the symmetrical management of relationships with strategic publics; the field has since broadened to include relational, dialogic, rhetorical, situational, contingent and critical approaches, alongside frameworks grounded in stakeholder theory, institutional analysis and emerging work on public legitimacy. Contemporary PR operates within a hybrid media environment shaped by digital platforms, algorithmic visibility, generative artificial intelligence and the structural erosion of institutional trust. It is simultaneously a professional industry of significant global economic scale and a contested civic function whose democratic role, ethical foundations and disciplinary boundaries remain the subject of active scholarly debate.

public relations
strategic communication
excellence theory
stakeholders
public legitimacy
political public relations

Public Relations is among the most pervasive and least understood functions of modern social life. It is invoked to explain everything from a corporate apology after a product recall to the choreography of an election rally, from the daily routines of a hospital press officer to the curated presence of a head of state on a social platform. Few professional fields are so widely practiced, so consistently studied, and so persistently contested in their definition and democratic significance ^[1]^[2]^[3].

This entry maps Public Relations as both a field of practice and an academic discipline. It works through five questions: how the field came into being, how it has defined itself, which theoretical traditions organize scholarly debate, how it is practiced in its functional areas, and how it is being reshaped by the digital and algorithmic conditions of the present ^[4]^[5]^[6].

The entry does not settle the controversies over the scope and purpose of the field. It identifies what counts as established knowledge and where the live disagreements remain. Public Relations is too central to the working of contemporary organizations and democracies, and too unstable as a discipline, to be reduced to a single school. To understand it requires holding the managerial, relational, rhetorical and political dimensions in view at once ^[7]^[8].

While this entry maps the field’s major traditions even-handedly, it also adopts a particular interpretive standpoint, which the reader should be able to recognize. Across its historical, conceptual and theoretical sections it reads Public Relations through the lens of legitimacy-the communicative process by which organizations and public actors earn, sustain, lose and repair the recognition, trust and consent on which their authority depends. This standpoint is offered not as a settled consensus but as one productive way of integrating the field’s otherwise fragmented paradigms. Where the Excellence tradition centers managerial effectiveness and symmetry, the relational tradition the organization–public bond, the rhetorical tradition the contest of meaning, and the critical tradition the operation of power, the legitimacy perspective treats these as partial answers to a prior question: how the right to act and to be heard is publicly constituted.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6070146

References

L’Etang, J. Public Relations: Concepts, Practice and Critique; Sage: London, UK, 2008.
Edwards, L. Understanding Public Relations: Theory, Culture and Society; Sage: London, UK, 2018.
Heath, R.L. (Ed.) The SAGE Handbook of Public Relations, 2nd ed.; Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA, USA, 2010.
Botan, C.H.; Hazleton, V. (Eds.) Public Relations Theory II; Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ, USA, 2006.
Holtzhausen, D.; Zerfass, A. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Strategic Communication; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2015.
Tench, R.; Waddington, S. (Eds.) Exploring Public Relations and Management Communication, 5th ed.; Pearson: Harlow, UK, 2021.
Coombs, W.T.; Holladay, S.J. The Handbook of Crisis Communication; Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, UK, 2010.
Ihlen, Ø.; Verhoeven, P. Public Relations, Theorizing about. In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy; Jensen, K.B., Craig, R.T., Eds.; Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, UK, 2016.

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