Can theories of power help us understand public relations better?

Abstract

After thanking James Grunig for providing an architecture for thinking about public relations (PR) for 25 years, more academics should now consider questions of reassessing his formidable intellectual legacy. This seems timely, for with his retirement there is a generational change among PR thinkers and some colleagues, especially American and Australasian, have started the reassessment. I am drawn to the feasibility of putting ideas of power relations, instead of concepts of communicative symmetry, at the heart of a descriptive explanation of PR in pluralist, liberal democracies with competitive markets and vigorous civil societies. Grunig’s paradigm has turned the academic gaze too quickly towards communication studies. The task is to turn it, instead, to political studies, particularly towards pluralism and interest intermediation .