Power and Diversity in Public Relations

Power and Diversity in Public Relations reveals the ways in which power operates within the occupational field of PR, specifically in the service of the construction of practitioner identity and occupational belonging and exclusion. It explores the experiences of PR practitioners whose ethnicity and class differ from the ‘typical’ background associated with PR and examines how their experience of being different from the occupational norm shapes their understandings of PR and their progression through the field.

Whilst the book is based on a UK research project, the theoretical and methodological approach can be applied in any country, to understand the ways in which PR constructs belonging and exclusion and valorises some practitioner identities while devaluing others. Grounded in the material reality of today’s globalized political and economic structures, it traces the relationships between corporations, governments, NGOs and their respective audiences to the colonial connections of the past and the nature of PR itself.

Drawing on theoretical perspectives including Bourdieu's work, the sociology of the professions, identity and postcolonial / critical race theory, the book examines both occupational discourses of PR identity and purpose and practitioner accounts of their experiences in PR. The result is an in-depth understanding of power in the field as a product of the interaction between occupational structures and norms and practitioners’ reactions to those constraints.