Power and public relations: Paradoxes and programmatic thoughts (original) (raw)

Changing Power Perceptions: Public Relations Practitioners and Social Media

Social media, now an indispensable part of our daily life, has changed the way public relations professionals work. Thus, this chapter endeavours to examine the power perceptions of public relations practitioners in terms of social media usage for business purposes through an exploratory study and concludes with a discussion of three major issues arising from the literature review i.e. expert power, structural power, and prestige power. To this aim, 29 interviews were conducted with Turkish public relations professionals from diverse professional backgrounds, including public relations agencies, corporations and non-profit-organizations, in order to gain a deeper understanding. The results reveal that while Turkish public relations practitioners have already begun to utilise social media, they do not yet perceive social media as the major source of their own managerial power. The data acquired within the scope of the research highlights that participants perceive social media as an inevitable tool that has influence on all their expertise. However, only 8 participants believe that their social media usage had an impact on their structural authority within the corporation. Eventually, 22 of 29 participants claim that their ability to utilize social media positively affects their prestige power.

Symbolic Power and Public Relations Practice: Locating Individual Practitioners in their Social Context

Journal of Public Relations Research, 21(3): 251-272, 2009

This article applies Pierre Bourdieu's understandings of capital and symbolic power to the public relations environment, to establish a link between the practice of public relations and the social effects of the profession. A three-month case study in the corporate affairs team of a UK passenger transport operator revealed the manner in which the pursuit and maintenance of power is potentially present in all public relations activities. Bourdieu's framework connects individual practice with the social effects of public relations and gives practitioners and academics a new starting point for understanding the nature of power in public relations practice.

Power in communication: revisiting power studies

Topics in Linguistics, 2016

This paper revisits a range of theories of power in communication and argues that there has been no methodology able to grasp the multiplicity of power in communication as a concept. As a result, the present scholarship on power in communication is characterized by a multiplicity of approaches that a) use the concept of power as a self-explanatory or vague concept in the analysis of several interactional phenomena; b) draw on a particular approach to power, disregarding multiple workings of power; or c) acknowledge the complexity of power and synthesize various approaches to power.

Provocations in Public Relations: A Study of Gendered Ideologies of Power-Influence in Practice

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2008

Responses from 869 public relations practitioners were examined to see how female and male practitioners perceive and enact power-influence in public relations, including perceptions of power-influence, resources, preferred influence tactics, constraints on power, persuasive appeals, and what it means to “do the right thing” in public relations. Male and female practitioners shared similar definitions of power-influence in practice and similar beliefs in the value of personal advocacy and ethical appeals to influence decision making. Practitioners illustrated differences in the value of influence resources, choice of influence tactics, perceptions of constraints on practice, and style and vocabulary of dissent.

Power and Influence: Assessing the Conceptual Relationship

Koers, 2020

Power and influence are fundamental concepts used in the social sciences. As closely-related concepts it is not easy to distinguish them clearly. There are diverse definitions for power and influence in academic literature. Different views are also held on the relationship between these concepts. The present article revisits these debates. The researcher explains the difficulties to define concepts in general and those of power and influence in particular. This is done by referring to academic attempts to clarify the meaning of the mentioned concepts and thereby their conceptual relationship. It is demonstrated that the debate is complicated and a final answer cannot be found that easily. However, this article explores the differences in meaning between the concepts from the literature. Based on these distinctions, the researcher identifies the concepts' primary meanings as well as the areas where these meanings overlap. This article contributes by providing users of these concepts with conceptual markers that could help them use and integrate the concepts meaningfully.