Beyond the Cultural Turn: A Critical Perspective on Culture-Discourse within Public Relations
Résumé
In 1992, Sriramesh and White (1992) pointed to the importance of culture for public relations. Two decades later, public relations scholars had answered their call in force (e.g., Bardhan & Weaver, 2011; Carayol & Frame, 2012; Edwards & Hodges, 2011; Sriramesh & Vercic, 2012). Sriramesh and other PR scholars have criticized much previous public relations research for its focus on the work of Hofstede and cultural characteristics that are apparently common across countries (Sriramesh, 2009), rather than approaches which present culture as a social phenomenon on the level of the social group (Frame, 2012), or as a communication resource or tool-kit (Swidler, 1986). Sriramesh has argued for a multi-level approach examining the political culture, economic culture, societal and organizational culture, media culture and activist culture of a country and the links between these and public relations. Culture can thus be seen as an antecedent for public relations practice, while public relations also exercises an influence on all of these cultures (Sriramesh, 2012).The debate surrounding the place of culture in PR research and practice should also be repositioned in the context of wider discussions surrounding the concept in the social sciences. Building on the historic (and opposing) approaches of culture as a system of values (Weber, Parsons) or meanings (Geertz, 1973; Swidler, 1986; Alexander, 2003), various definitions can be found in PR research today. However, critical voices in anthropology and other sciences (Dervin & Machart, 2015) denounce a concept which understates individual differences and often favours a static, deterministic vision of culture, rather than a dynamic one of culture as a constantly-negotiated social process.In this paper, we apply this vision to the field of PR, arguing that although the “cultural turn” has been salutary in many respects, it finds its (opposing) limits in (a) political correctness (from “culturally” neutral messages to accusations of cultural appropriation or viral communitarian backlashes) and (b) essentialising identities and reinforcing imagined (homogenous) communities. Indeed, PR plays a role in building/maintaining social consciousness of “cultural differences” both in the way it classifies audiences along cultural lines (structural determinism) and through the messages it produces which often tend to flatter audiences’ (stereotyped) preconceptions of society. It is thus essential for PR theorists and practitioners alike to adopt a critical stance in front of their own and their colleagues’ uses of “culture discourse” within the field, questioning its epistemological and even ideological underpinnings.Once the limits of these simplistic uses of the concept have been identified, the paper will focus on a more complex vision of culture and its role in society. Building on work done by Giddens (1984) or Bauman (1999) on culture as a structuration process, we will focus on its social role as as a “system-generating mechanism” that creates “knowledge-making groups […] within which individual choice and creativity are produced” (Hartley & Potts, 2014, p. 23). Such process-based perspectives place communication and story-telling, indeed, public relations, at the centre of their analysis and, in this sense, public relations can itself be studied as a process of cultural reproduction (Frame, 2013). 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