Unmanaging public relations: Reclaiming complex practice in pursuit of global consent

Globalisation raises numerous problems for contemporary public relations theory. In a world where the geographic reach of organisations routinely spans cultures and nation states and where issues of culture, economics and politics are inseparably intertwined, the discipline of public relations has established a distance from the immediacy of the marketplace, failed to fully engage with discussions of culture. By taking a relentlessly managerialist approach, theorists have also failed to recognise the true complexity of public relations practice and this has marginalised aspects of practice that, though nebulous and intangible, are none the less real. This paper argues that attention needs to shift towards the complexities of practice, in order to recapture and theorise a distinctive occupational field with the aim of better understanding the relationship between universal humanising principles, on the one hand, and the purposive demands of capital, on the other; the attempt to theorise how public relations makes profitable sense in society. The paper was prompted by the author's reflections on auto-ethnographic research into the public relations field, part of an ongoing research project.