Public relations, sophistry and the rhetoric of democracy

The intention of this paper is to explain the activities of public relations in terms of rhetorical theory and the history of sophistry. There is a burgeoning field of study in the US which is incorporating much cultural and communication theory into both historical and contemporary perspectives on these two ancient arts. Consequently, an examination of the purposive communication activities of public relations offers an opportunity to involve semiotics as a central concept for analysing the creation and maintenance of democratic thought and institutions. This paper highlights Peircean semiotics in this respect and suggests the relevance of Peirce's notion of the 'Pragmatic Maxim' and his use of the concept of 'habit' in terms of how public relations might be said to 'cast' the quality of the democracy which we experience.

Public relations and the rhetoric of civil society

The intention of this paper is to build on a book by Anne Surma (2005). It takes some of Surma’s ideas probably beyond what was originally intended in order to suggest their logical conclusions for the practice of public relations. Surma argues that writing and reading of every type enables or otherwise facilitates or restricts imagination. Further, this shaping or inflection of the imagination leads to the shaping or the inflection of the type of ‘ethic’ which we are able to hold in our heads about the world which surrounds us. If this is the case then public relations writing, which has the very raison d’etre of influencing thought, must lend itself to important analysis in this regard. This paper presumes the reader has a basic understanding of Charles Saunders Peirce’s notion of semiotics.

Bringing innovation to centre stage : the rhetoric of commercialisation and cross-sector collaboration

As a key element in Australia's national innovation system, public sector organizations, such as universities and public-funded research agencies, have increasingly become involved in R&D collaborations with firms. Government policy has encouraged this cross-sector collaboration, and in the most recent policy "act" has focused on the commercialisation of research findings (through which R&D outputs are translated into marketable commodities) and has encouraged public sector organizations to become more directly involved in this activity. But while the policy rhetoric has contributed to a discourse of marketization, through which cultural change in the research performing organizations is both promoted and legitimised, there are other voices in the unfolding policy drama which point to the complex and multifaceted nature of commercialisation in national economies. These countervailing voices emphasise the multiple roles that public sector organizations play in national innovation systems, and this introduces organizational role ambiguity into the discourse leading to confusion among the research performing actors. It is concluded that, given the complex and subtle nature of innovation processes, the traditional dichotomy between applied (or commercially-focused) research and "public good" research is no longer tenable nor helpful in the policy debates.

Doubling and convergence : novel models of vision and sense of space

Re-photography is considered in this paper as a synthesis of the processes of seeing, to develop an aesthetic of space.

This practice deals with being (noun and verb) in space and the perception of space and depiction of space; space at the intersection of landscape and human. A key to the conundrum of the figure and the ground arises out of practical photographic investigations to convey the very human sensations of being on the ground, in the confounding landscape of the Central Victorian (Australian) ironbark forests and goldfields.

What is revealed is that what we see, what we attend to, actually appears concentrated at the nodes of a series of vortices. Each vortex is a moiré interference of converging views of the same scene. Attention is a convergence on particulars. Like a magnetic field, the vortex remains invisible in our everyday vision, but it appears in these images. It is imprinted from individual perspectives at particular places; a new perspective with a point of apparition rather than of vanishing.

How to make the rhetoric of joined-up government really work

"Joined-up' government and 'whole-of-government' approaches have evolved over the past two decades from the simple 'one-stop-shop' concept to much more formal organisational structures mandated at the highest levels. In many cases, the participants in these developments were learning on the job, as they responded to community and political demands for better service delivery and more accountability. This paper looks back at some of those developments and proposes a schema to assess and place policies, strategies and programs.

The country’s not what it used to be : research participants’ understandings of space, place and identity in rural Victoria

This chapter explores the various ways in which research participants from rural areas located in country Victoria, Australia, construct and reconstruct their understandings of themselves and their rural spaces in terms of place and identity. This chapter draws upon the data of two separate research projects that bought together a variety of researchers and research participants either growing up in, working in, or studying in rural areas.

The rhetoric of ‘community’ : ABC local radio's coverage of the 2009 Victorian bushfires

This article joins recent debates in media and communication studies concerning audience participation in news journalism. Specifically, we investigate the impact of an increasing reliance on audience-generated content on newsroom practice in traditional media organisations. We do this by recounting and analysing the experiences of journalists involved in ABC Radio's coverage of the dramatic Victorian bushfires of early 2009, which relied heavily in listener contributions and was closely integrated with the ABC's online coverage. Interviews with two staff at ABC Gippsland, and the ABC's Manager of Emergency Broadcasting provide the basis for a case study of the kinds of tensions that media workers routinely confront within an organisation like the ABC. The interviews suggest that in negotiating the possibility of increased audience participation, journalists and their managers are thinking about much more that the rhetorics of democracy and the validity of news values: their focus is also on a complex structure, the need for skill (re)development and the precise mechanics of creating and maintaining productive relationships with local communities. The significance of the research lies in its attempt to bring together a number of related factors: the increasingly active role of audiences in generating and supplying news content; the impact of digital communications technologies on news production practices; and the ABC's ongoing development of its now contested role as an 'emergency broadcaster'.