Two delightful reviews for my latest book: really gratifying after years of hard work.
“Depth Public Relations is an ambitious and highly original book. Johanna Fawkes shares insights from a career as a public relations academic, practitioner, and teacher. It presents the challenges and opportunities facing contemporary public relations practice from a critical research perspective. It’s unusually readable for an academic book that will appeal to anyone working in public relations. Fawkes is herself an excellent public relations practitioner.”
Stephen Waddington, Managing Partner, Wadds Inc., Visiting Professor, Newcastle University, PhD Student, Leeds Business School
“It is not easy for a book to hit the nail on the head. And even more so if it is a text about a discipline and a profession about which many people think that everything has already been said. This occurs with the book by Johanna Fawkes, whose great merit is having offered an approach to public relations that combines references to the transforming processes of professional practice with others to theoretical frameworks little explored until now, such as the one to ideas from Jung. Fawkes deals with issues that seem very evident to the reader, but, at the same time, the reader wonders why nobody had said it until now. The outcome is an exciting theoretical and practical update of the public relations body of knowledge based on its main feature: interdisciplinarity. Indeed, this book shows how necessary interdisciplinarity and a 360 degrees’ approach is necessary for critical public relations scholars.”
Jordi Xifra, Full Professor, Catedrático de Universidad, Department of Communication, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
My new book Depth Public Relations: After the Masquerade will be published by Routledge this December. It takes a cool look at PR’s contribution to the dominant culture, focussing on the climate crisis. Instead of (as well as) despair, it offers the possibility for depth responses, drawing on approaches from psychology philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. Full blurb and contents here: https://www.routledge.com/Depth-Public-Relations-After-the-Masquerade/Fawkes/p/book/9780815358732
Lovely comments from Prof. Rob Brown:
“In her ambitiously comprehensive, deeply researched, gracefully written, socio-cultural scholarly tour-de-force, Professor Fawkes expands the aperture of public relations, while offering a compelling critique of the concept and the practice. What comes into focus is much that has been obscured by PR’s traditional managerial perspective. Her achievement is to give us a long and deep look at ways of conceptualizing PR beyond the limitations of the older model without throwing out the communication-management baby with the socio-cultural bathwater. Fawkes’s insights are likely to resonate with PR and other disciplinary scholars, teachers and students as well as thoughtful practitioners of the persuasive industries. As a critical scholar, Fawkes has not neglected a certain ‘inwardness’ in PR, which identifies, in a minor key, the field’s increasingly intentional, aspirational and redemptive humanism.”
Robert E. Brown (PhD), Emeritus Professor of Media and Communication, Salem State University and Affiliated Faculty, Communication Studies, Emerson College.
There’s a discount on the Routledge page or DM me for further info.
In my recent keynote speech to Euprera Annual Congress at the Universidad de Navarra I argued that
a) the global culture has become pathologically performative, emphasising outward aspects of life over inner
b) that public relations has benefitted from and contributed to this culture, and that
c) the culture is exploitative, discriminatory, narcissistic, illusory, hyperactive and killing the planet.
The sociologist Harmut Rosa calls it a ‘frenetic standstill’. I suggest the term ‘masquerade’ to reflect the performances that drive individuals and institutions in contemporary western culture.
Covid-19 pressed pause. Do we just rewind or imagine something different? More stuff or more future?
If we choose different, I argue we have to go inward. In the talk I referenced Carl Jung, Harmut Rosa, Hannah Arendt and the novelist Marilynne Robinson, all of whom urge a turn inward to reconnect with the human, especially in times of darkness and confusion (references below)/
Depth Public Relations is built on the following foundations (full workings will be revealed in forthcoming book).
1) Slowing Down
‘The times are urgent: let us slow down’ says Bayo Akolomafe. Slow food, slow journalism slow science (see also Dorling, 2020).
Social media demand instant responses and constant presence; private and public spheres are fused and spinning faster all the time. PR needs strategies to create space for reflection.
However, like Rosa, I prefer the inner/outer axis to the faster/slower. Slow bullshit is still BS.
2) Shadow Work
Going in means facing up to things the masquerade is designed to distract us from.
Carl Jung calls it shadow work, the purpose of which is wholeness. It means breaking old patterns without knowing what comes next. Living in the liminal.
Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958) says: It is [necessary to] walk in the discomfort that sometimes accompanies reflection, (p70).
The key shadow for PR, I reckon, is the part the industry has played in denying climate change: it’s role in the construction and maintenance of the ‘denial machine’ is fully documented in Almiron and Xifra’s (2020) excellent book. It is not possible to read this and insist that PR is a force for social good, as so many scholars and practitioners do. Maturity requires contemplation of harm done.
3) Finding what’s real
In a world of illusion and fakery, how to connect to the real? A common question in these times, of course. Global movements are seeking meaning amid the meaningless. Many start with the body: the wonder and simplicity of breath; kinship with the non-human world; our common transience. How might such connections change PR?
4) Develop Resilience
Connecting with our collective fragility, witnessing the loss of species. the suffering already here and still to come, requires resilience. The Deep Adaptation Network brings together professional groups facing global change – there is space here for PR to mitigate some of the harm done.
5) Connect
Depth PR is about digging deep in order to connect at depth, not to isolate or withdraw. Jung says we have to connect with ourselves to connect to others. Not shouting but listening (real listening, not the tick box ‘consultations’). Young people are building communities that communicate in very different ways to those dominant in PR theory and practice, including learning from indigenous peoples’. Listening may require not-fixing, a challenge for PR, perhaps?
6) Change
Practice is responding to growing pressure for change. Agencies are branding themselves as actors for change; ESG is a growing force in organisations. But without depth much of this will still be too close to green washing or purpose washing – a continuation of the masquerade, just with different costumes. Depth PR requires different conversations.
The academy is still teaching old tunes, reflecting the embedded nature of PR within business schools. Pressures on universities preclude the kind of creativity required for this moment. Academe should, of course, be the home of reflection – perhaps it is time to remember that role?
Change will come – PR can participate in that change or just watch, but either way, change is coming.
What do you think? Still writing the final chapter – all feedback to these ideas welcome.
REFERENCES
ALMIRON, N. & JORDI, X. 2020. Climate change denial and public relations: strategic communication and interest groups in climate interaction, London, New York, Routledge.
ARENDT, H. 1958. The human condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Dorling, D. (2020). Slowdown : The end of the great acceleration–and why it’s good for the planet, the economy, and our lives. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Robinson, M. (2010). Absence of mind : the dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance : a sociology of the relationship to the world (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Polity.
I’m starting a new blog to track the creation of my next book on appearance, deception, fast and slow communication. It’s provisionally titled Public Relations and Depth Communication: Behind the Mask (for the Routledge New Directions in Public Relations and Communications Research series). Will have thoughts, reviews, links. Followers, suggestions & contributions cordially invited here: Mask book
with thanks to Padraig Macnamara for beautiful logo
Just discovered my book on public relations and professional ethics is now in paperback. Always wanted it to be more accessible – do hope some of you will buy or borrow it .
I have two (!) papers in the latest edition of Public Relations Review (one has been online since 2014 but now gets full publication) and two online chapters to share.
Fawkes, J. (2015a) A Jungian Conscience: self-awareness for PR practice, Public Relations Review, Vol 41, pp 726–733. Doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2015.06.005
Fawkes, J. (2015b) Performance and Persona: Goffman and Jung’s approaches to professional identity applied to public relations. Public Relations Review, Vol 41, pp 675–680. Doi: 0.1016/j.pubrev.2014.02.011
Finally, delighted that my chapter has been included in the free selection from the excellent Routledge New Directions in Public Relations Research series
Delighted one of the chapters from my book is included in the 85-page booklet showcasing work from Routledge’s New Directions in Public Relations Research series, edited by the redoubtable Kevin Moloney.
Reflecting on two days’ discussion of PR/Strat Comms as a research field, I observe a profound tension between
a) scholars who wish to constrain the research objects to something manageable, measurable and scientific which will help define the field for reserchers and enhance understanding of practice – theories which are observable in the material world. The strength of this desire is the search for core concepts/models through rigorous scientific method; the weakness is that it tries to put vagaries of human communication into boxes too small to contain them; and
b) scholars who embrace multi perspective/interdisciplinary approaches and consider pursuit of Truth as futile or phantastical – they have a more playful sense of research which undermines the foundational claims commonly made in PR/SC research. Their strength is the richness of ideas and imagination they bring to traditionally rather applied research; the weakness is that as perspectives multiply, the field itself could easily scatter beyond recognition or identification.
I belong to group b – with its roots in critical thinking and engagement with postmodern theory – but am aware that this has dangers.
My book proposal illustrates this: I presented ideas for a volume that combines social theory, PR theory, cultural studies, psychologies of persuasion, Jungian concepts and current PR practice. There is a central argument that weaves these strands together which, phew, was comprehensible to those present who gave the ideas a very warm welcome. So the weakness could be that the macro-level discussion of PR’s impact on society becomes too abstract; the strength lies in my experience of practice and ability to ground wilder theories in the everyday.
I greatly appreciated the opportunity to test these ideas and their relevance to the question of where PR research is going – it may have taken a lot of airmiles and a massive drop in Centigrade to get there, but I reckon one hour’s discussion has saved me 6 months’ solitary head banging. So, thanks to Howard Nothhaft and Sara von Platen from Lund University and Jens Seifert from U of Vienna for organising this event.
Johanna Fawkes Research 