'Publics' or 'stakeholders'? Performing social responsibility through stakeholder software

Government and corporate organizations increasingly seek the support of the communities where they operate and represent themselves as good corporate citizens with a sense of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). These organizations seek to create and sustain dialogue with their many and varied ‘stakeholders’ and reject traditional ‘PR’ approaches that regard communication as a way to manipulate ‘target publics’. Some of these organizations use a form of ‘stakeholder software’ to guide and support their efforts to embrace CSR in their operations and this article examines two such software packages. It sets their use and the broader drive for CSR in the context of a diminishing trust in traditional institutions and a rise in new, extra-parliamentary forms of activism (new activism); and it examines stakeholder software’s potential contribution to a values-based approach to PR training in universities and colleges.

Environmental art and the production of publics : responding to environmental change

Environmental crises around the world have inspired an outpour of creative response. As the effects of climate change increasingly manifest, environmental! art is being politically and pedagogically mobilised for ameliorative strategies. The rubric that instrumentalist, techno-scientific approaches to environmental stress (and attendant social distress) cannot solely provide solutions to this challenge has found increasing acceptance. The concern of this paper, however, is the limited understanding of public art's capacity that is perpetuated bv certain trends in environmental art in which the work is charged with communicative responsibility,. Connected to the representational and instructive traditions of public art, this tendency is further informed by the influence of the 'information-deficit model' in environmental conmunication research: a concept that asserts a straightforward connection between information provision, indiyidual awareness and collective action on a concern. The idea that public art can function as a conduit for knowledge,.which in turn will inspire new moral positions and behaviours, absents the art work from the process of knowledge-making and the production of conditons that enable new practice. Arguing for a revised approach to the environmental possibilities of public art, this paper will propose that in thinking aboutl environmental transformation as essentially unrepresentable, a dfferent mode of public engagement with the issue is enabled.

Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics

This paper argues that Flickr, a popular ‘photosharing’ website, is facilitating new public engagements with world heritage sites like the Sydney Opera House. Australian heritage institutions (namely libraries and museums) have recently begun to employ Flickr as a site through which to engage communities with their photographic archives and collections. Yet Flickr is more than an ‘online photo album’: it is a social and cultural network generated around personal photographic practices. Members can form ‘groups’: self‐organised communities defined by shared interests in places, photographic genres, or the appraisal of photographs. These groups are public spaces for both visual and textual conversations – complex social negotiations involving personal expression and collective identity. For one group, the common interest is the Sydney Opera House, and their shared visual and textual expressions – representations of this building. This paper argues that such socio‐visual practices themselves constitute an intangible heritage. By drawing on the work of scholars Jose Van Dijck and Nancy Van House, Dawson Munjeri and Michael Warner, the paper proposes that this enactment of intangible heritage is implicated in the broader cultural value of the Sydney Opera House

Contested Publics: Racist rants, bystander action and social media acts of citizenship

While social media tools enable new kinds of creativity, cultural expression and forms of public, civic and political participation, we often hear more about the harms that arise from instances of trolling and 'aberrant' online participation, including racist provocation. In media and communications research, these issues have been framed in a number of ways, usually focusing on new tools for civic engagement, political participation and digital inclusion. Government policy has been shifting steadily towards potential regulation of social media 'misuse' in relation to appropriate forms of 'digital citizenship'. It is in this evolving context that we consider several instances of cultural or nationalistic provocation and conflict in which social media platforms (YouTube and Facebook in particular) have been central to the social dynamic that has unfolded. We examine the recording and uploading of racist rants and associated bystander actions on public transport in Australia and elsewhere around the world. In this article, we contend that while racism remains an issue in uses of social media platforms such as YouTube, this focus often overshadows these platforms' productive potential, including their capacity to support agonistic publics from which productive expressions of cultural citizenship and solidarity might emerge.

The publics of celebrity: introduction

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

Spectacle and publics: Ava Gardner in Australia 1959

Ava Gardner’s famous line about Melbourne being the right place to film a story about the end of the world was part of the spectacle created by the print media to capitalise on her presence here to film, On the Beach in 1959. Gardner’s refusal to appear in public created different responses from the Australian print media the most interesting of which was Melbourne’s The Truth. With the help of a fledgling paparazzi, Truth used Gardner’s non-appearance to create a fictitious image of her which was mediated to create extremes of public opinion in order to generate sales. This paper examines The Truth ’s response to Gardner in the context of the creation and manipulation of public spectacle.

Contemporary publics: shifting boundaries in new media, technology and culture

If the twentieth century has been dominated by discussions of the public, public life, and the public sphere, Contemporary Publics argues that, in the twenty-first century, we must complicate the singularity of that paradigm and start thinking of our world in terms of multiple, overlapping, and competing publics. In three distinct streams—art, media and technology, and the intimate life—this volume offers up the intellectual and political significance of thinking through the plurality of our publics. “Countering Neoliberal Publics: Screen and Space,” explores how different artistic practices articulate the challenges and desires of multiple publics. “Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology” showcases how media shape publics, and how new and emerging publics use these technologies to construct identities. “Commodifying Public Intimacies” examines what happens to the notion of the private when intimacies structure publics, move into public spaces, and develop value that can be exchanged and circulated.

Introduction: the plurality of publics

The singularity of the concepts of public and public sphere is explored in this essay and ultimately challenged. Through an investigation of the deployment of the term public, a determination of the relationship of the private to the public, and a study of the emergence and value of the term “publics,” the book’s sections and contributions are introduced.

Media technologies and publics

“Making and Shaping Publics: Discourse and Technology” is composed of five different positions on how media technologies shape publics, and how new and emerging publics construct identities and strategic goals. This section of Contemporary Publics begins with an introduction where media technologies are utilised to facilitate progressive change. This facilitative role is examined in subsequent chapters, where publics can unite around discourse and technology that enables communication and identity creation. The negative consequences of technologies in making and shaping publics are also examined, particularly with respect to privacy. Overall, various responses have emerged from the ways in which media and discursive practices attempt to fold us into particular kinds of publics. The chapters in this section observe how publics react to forms of control.

Democratic corporealities of love : the architectural cinema and eroticized publics of Pauline Kael

The American film critic Pauline Kael’s career interestingly parallels the Cold War period but nobody has explored this yet. Filling that gap, this essay constructs Kael’s writings and critic’s persona as a contribution to a discourse of international democracy. Kael was part of a generation of American critics who took seriously the importance of art to politics. However, she goes further than her contemporaries by energizing this relationship through her emphasis on corporeality—both on screen and off screen—and on the eroticized body. A discernible philosophical lineage runs from Plato’s version of love as described by Socrates in The Symposium to Kael’s writings and bodily habits. In this lineage, love is figured as relational and desiring. A second line of relationship between Plato and Kael is in the way they each connected erotic discourses to the very similar architectures of the andrôn (men’s quarters), for Plato, and the modern American cinema or screening room, for Kael. Plato and Kael draw out the inherent spatial energy of these places (which is most evident at the borders of andrôn and cinema) through the interactions they construct of images and talk with the erotic, love-based relationality of bodies. They thereby maximize the bodily powers of these architectures as places where a public of differences and (inevitably) “loose” democracy might form. Kael’s advocacy doesn’t suggest a formal political program so much as a more feminine democracy of erotic discourses allied to an energizing architecture suitable to the accumulation of plural, participatory corporealities.

Misuse of the term 'stakeholder' in public relations

This article queries the relatively recent adoption of the term 'stakeholder', borrowed from the UK political and the US business management spheres, in public relations academic writing. The article concludes that these spheres use the term in a normative or ideological manner that has worrying implications. The term frames people as having a pre-existing relationship with the governments or business organisations which name them as such. This process of incorporation prejudges and potentially obscures the real relations of groups of people vis-à-vis governments and business organisations which they may wish to have nothing to do with. An argument is mounted for the defence of the term 'publics'. It is pointed out that a key originator of stakeholder theory opposes the notion of 'publics' as closer to a notion of an uncontrolled audience. The article argues that the notion of 'publics' is more fitting than the notion of 'stakeholders' if public relations is about acknowledging this uncontrollability, and to do with advising organisations about their positioning in the democratic milieu. On the other hand, the notion 'stakeholders' may be the right one if public relations is simply aimed at immediately shaping people's behaviour, irrespective of longer term and wider political implications.

Rhetorical theory of public relations: opening the door to semiotic and pragmatism approaches

The 2001 Handbook of Public Relations edited by Robert Heath contains a prominent article advocating the use of rhetorical theory or ‘rhetorical enactment rational’ as a fruitful way of advancing theoretical understandings of public relations. In 2004 Heath and Dan Millar edited: Responding to Crisis: A Rhetorical Approach to Crisis Communication. These are the latest excursions into a perspective on public relations reflecting the extensive study of rhetoric in North America. Other examples are Public Relations Inquiry as Rhetorical Criticism (Elwood, 1995); Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations (Toth and Heath, 1992); and a chapter Public Relations? No, Relations with Publics: A Rhetorical-Organisational Approach to Contemporary Corporate Communication (Cheney and Dionisopoulos, in Botan and Hazleton (Eds.) 1989).

The conventional notion of rhetoric is argumentation and persuasion stemming from the ancient Greek sophists, such as Aristotle, and from the Romans, particularly Cicero and Quintillion. Rhetoric became a fundamental plank of the trivium of ancient and medieval education: grammar, logic and rhetoric. Then in the 20th century Kenneth Burke, Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca extended Aristotle’s suggestion that: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic” Aristotle (trans. 1991). To use the rhetorical approach to argue that rational discourse cannot describe the world on its own. Instead living, enculturated human beings have to perceive ‘their’ truths. They take a perceptual ‘position’ on reason.

Public relations, is an industry for influencing perceptual ‘positions’. But the study of perception and attempts to influence perception cannot be claimed by rhetorical scholars alone. Semioticians and linguists who take the perspective of linguistic pragmatics also claim this field. This paper takes the example of ‘public relations’ as a focus for the confluence of rhetorical, semiotic and pragmatism approaches to the ‘problematic’ of understanding and truth.