Public governance is increasingly mediated by algorithmic decision systems and artificial intelligence (AI). While public governance refers to the broader institutional practices through which collective authority is exercised, AI governance designates the more specific arrangements—ethical, technical, and regulatory—through which algorithmic systems themselves are managed; the two are connected because AI governance now reshapes the communicative conditions under which public governance is legitimated. Although prior research has examined AI governance from ethical, technical, and regulatory perspectives, limited attention has been given to how algorithmic authority is communicatively constructed and evaluated. This article reconceptualizes public relations (PR) in algorithmically mediated public-sector environments as legitimacy infrastructure rather than symbolic communication. Drawing on legitimacy theory and core PR traditions—including dialogic communication, organizational listening, transparency, and relationship management—the article argues that in the algorithmic state, PR evolves from strategic messaging to legitimacy infrastructure, becoming embedded in the conditions under which algorithmic authority is experienced and evaluated. It introduces the Legitimacy Infrastructure Model (LIM), which identifies four relational domains—value framing, justificatory signaling, narrative positioning, and trust calibration—through which legitimacy is formed when authority is embedded in socio-technical systems and encountered through system outputs prior to dialogue. The model extends PR theory by reframing legitimacy as a continuous relational accomplishment under infrastructural authority, articulating testable theoretical propositions, and clarifying the advisory and design-sensitive role of communication leadership in AI-enabled public institutions. In doing so, the article positions PR as a constitutive capability shaping how institutional authority is interpreted and evaluated in datafied governance contexts.
Animal agriculture is at the centre of political and social debate due to its negative environmental, ethical, and social impacts. This article analyses the public controversy triggered by the “Less Meat, More Life” campaign launched by the Spanish Ministry of Consumer Affairs to raise awareness about meat consumption and megafarms. Using Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), the study examines how actors competed to shape the dominant interpretation of megafarming in Spanish mainstream media as a result of this campaign. By analysing 270 press articles from 10 Spanish newspapers, the study maps the coalitions of actors that emerged in public discourse, the main arguments they advanced, and how they sought to influence the framing of the debate. The findings reveal the presence of both critical and supportive coalitions, with the former being more prominent and diverse. The study also finds that political and economic arguments dominated the debate, rather than those related to environmental impacts or animal ethics. This debate reflects imbalances in media visibility, which depends not only on journalistic filtering but also on the capacity and power of the actors involved to defend their interests. This research contributes to interdisciplinary studies of communication by showing that the construction of a media-driven social debate involves both journalism and public relations.
Pakistan's vulnerability to natural disasters, exemplified by the catastrophic 2025 floods, underscores systemic gaps in disaster communication and community resilience. This study examines how Public Relations Officers (PROs) perceive and implement disaster communication strategies in Pakistan's unique context, a setting marked by bureaucratic fragmentation, resource constraints, and sociocultural complexities rarely addressed in Global North-centric Public Relations (PR) literature. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, analysing interviews with 11 PROs and 3,347 communication outputs (December 2020-March 2021), to investigate if Pakistan's contextual factors shape PROs' perceptions of their disaster communication roles. Findings reveal a critical misalignment between PROs' neoliberal framing of resilience (as individual responsibility) and the structural realities of at-risk communities. While PROs emphasise early warnings, the quantitative analysis shows 78% of communication was reactive in that it focused on post-disaster relief rather than preparedness. The study identifies four systemic barriers: (1) bureaucratic delays in message dissemination, (2) over-reliance on top-down communication, (3) lack of audience research, and (4) coordination gaps between agencies. Building on dialogic and resilience-oriented PR models, this study proposes a Contingent Communication Framework that emphasises culturally grounded dialogue, participatory engagement, and relational PR. Practical recommendations include integrating community feedback mechanisms, hybridising digital/traditional communication channels, and decentralising PR decision-making to address Pakistan's infrastructural and cultural constraints.
This article theorises how activist public relations operates within a Portugal-based node of the contemporary psychedelic movement. Drawing on agonistic and critical public relations, legitimacy is approached as a situated and contested accomplishment through which credibility and epistemic authority are negotiated in practice. Using a qualitative single-case design, the study analyses a comprehensive website corpus ( N = 313) and four role-central interviews. Findings demonstrate a hybrid choreography that coordinates pre-event digital cues, co-present encounters, and curated post-event afterlives. This choreography is sustained through temporal anchoring (cadence, cycles, annual anchors) and narrative care informed by ethics of care, including privacy safeguards, harm-reduction framing, and a deliberately non-promotional tone. Place-framing and selective partnerships further root claims in Portuguese publics and enable adjacent legitimacy while maintaining clear boundaries against treatment provision. The article contributes by specifying how place-based community infrastructure is sustained through hybrid and temporal repertoires, and by showing how care-oriented curation can widen credible voice while bounding exposure so that testimony functions as public reason rather than spectacle. Practically, the findings suggest designing communication as a sequenced arc from outreach and reminders to convening and documentation, followed by resource-oriented recaps, supported by predictable rhythms and explicit privacy and harm-reduction protocols.
In this study, we advance public memory in public relations scholarship by adding clarifying and re-etching actions to the list of processes (blurring, erasure, or etching) encapsulated in the public memory dialectic. Additionally, we offer PR of Witnessing and PR of Sanitizing to the PR tools of clarifying and re-etching; PR of Witness and PR of Sanitizing serve as a set of contexts and rhetorical clues that scholars, critics, and practitioners alike can use to sense the distinction between re-etching and clarifying efforts that are intended to reckon with or cleanse public memory. Via critical essay, we interrogate the remarks by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the public event signing as well as the promulgation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Proclamation. Additionally, we interrogate President Donald J. Trump's "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" Executive Order. By grappling directly with the politicalization of public memory, we move beyond analysis and classification strategies to provide a more robust lens for engaging the massively entrenched power systems behind the highest levels of public memory debate, such as those regarding the United States' complicated history with race and discrimination.
India's multilingual landscape presents political public relations (PPR) practitioners with both strategic opportunities and communicative challenges. Campaigns often rely on Hindi and English, but regional languages such as Kannada and Tamil are also used to assert identity and push back against Hindi and English dominance. This article draws on 56 hours of video from ethnographic fieldwork and ten semi-structured interviews with social media teams at two South Indian political parties during the 2019 general election. Using Ethnographic Communication Analysis (ECA), it examines an everyday professional interaction through critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and gestural analysis. The findings show how multilingualism functions as a site of symbolic struggle, where practitioners negotiate belonging, exclusion and representational legitimacy. Humour, code-switching, and language-based microaggressions emerge as communicative tactics of solidarity and resistance. By foregrounding the Global South context and adopting a multimodal ethnographic approach, this study extends critical public relations scholarship by showing how multilingualism is used in the reproduction of power and inequality.
The field of public relations is inherently stressful, and burnout, a progressive occupational syndrome marked by emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of ineffectiveness, is a significant issue within this context. This autoethnographic study addresses the research question: "How do individual and organisational factors in the public relations sector contribute to burnout, and what role did these elements play in the first author's personal experience?" Using analytical autoethnography, we explore the first author's lived experience of burnout within a government public relations role in Australia. By combining the Three Dimensions of Burnout framework which emphasises emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of ineffectiveness with insights from the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this paper analyses how burnout manifested through both micro-level individual responses and macro-level organisational factors. Key stressors included excessive unrelated tasks, limited autonomy and inadequate organisational support. Moreover, this study introduces "confusion" and "frustration", otherwise "confrustion", as a combined additional proposed dimension of burnout, capturing the disorientation often associated with this condition. Ultimately, this paper advocates for changes in public relations education and workplace environments, emphasising the importance of balancing job demands and resources to protect professionals from burnout, promote workers' rights, and encourage sustainable work-life balance.
The following paper is an autoethnographic, autobiographic self-study, a rarely used method in public relations, of my experience in overseeing employee engagement for faculty and staff in my college. By adopting the cocreational employee engagement framework, I explore and uncover some of the complexities that underpin employee engagement in higher education, which is an underexplored context in public relations. Through narrative, insights demonstrate the connection between employee voice and the cocreational framework, where committee efforts were dedicated to making employees feel psychologically safe enough to express their thoughts and feedback. In other words, this approach helped college members join in the actual process of meaning making. However, feedback is only valuable when it is followed by action, and action is directly linked to active listening. The narrative also revealed that in adopting and implementing the cocreational employee engagement approach, the inherent power dynamics were hard to avoid, which presented a key tension to overcome. Implications from this autobiography for theory and practice are included.
This study examines the discourse about employees and employee engagement in public relations trade publications amidst the rise of the virtual workplace. Through a critical discourse analysis of PR Week and Strategies & Tactics, this research uncovers a top-down, instrumental discourse on employee engagement. The analysis reveals a prevailing objectification of employees, where discourse centered on their productivity, efficiency, and utility to organizational goals, even when discussing well-being and inclusion. The voices of non-managerial employees are largely absent, and engagement is positioned as a leadership tool to extract value, often at the expense of employee autonomy. This paper contributes to public relations scholarship by interrogating the ethical and participatory shortcomings of engagement strategies, as evidenced in the industry discourse, and calls for a more inclusive, co-creational approach that centers employees' humanity and lived experiences.
This study analyzes the reasons that drove several multinational public relations agencies to set foot in different financial cities within Latin America between the 1990s and 2000s. During this period of time, countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, strengthened their democracies and significantly opened their economies to the world. Within this context, this study employs global cultural flow theory; particularly the concepts of ethnoscapes , finanscapes and mediascapes , to theorize on the reasons that led these multinational public relations agencies to invest time, money, and human resources in these economies. Through 16 in-depth interviews with seasoned public relations professionals from these agencies, plus a qualitative content analysis of media coverage on the region published in PRWeek , this study seeks to contribute to the growing literature at the intersection of public relations and neoliberalism, theorizing on the why and how these global firms expanded their businesses to Latin America in a quest for new clients and publics to serve.
This article reports on a study that examined the relationships between Israeli pro- and anti-vaccination advocates during the 2018-2019 measles outbreak from a social marketing perspective. The analysis is based on interviews with leaders from both pro- and anti-vaccination groups, observation at an international conference, and a netnographic analysis of social media discourse. The findings indicate a lack of communication between social marketers who promote vaccination and anti-vaccination groups, with both sides largely avoiding engagement or listening to each other's perspectives, whether online or offline. This absence of interaction contributed to polarization and misunderstanding, highlighting the challenges for social marketing when involved parties strategically choose not to listen or communicate in highly polarized contexts.
The adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) among communication practitioners and researchers surged after the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. This adoption has long been called for, driven by expectations of efficiency and productivity gains as well as concerns about being outpaced by adjacent fields. As the initial hype around GAI fades, a more balanced understanding of AI's promises and perils can emerge. While previous research on the perils of AI has emphasized ethical concerns such as job displacement, the potential spread of mis- and disinformation, immoral communication, and intensified social injustice, one critical issue remains largely unaddressed: the socio-ecological harm of AI use. While often perceived as immaterial, AI relies on a vast physical infrastructure, demanding the extraction and depletion of non-renewable resources, consuming extreme amounts of energy and water, and generating significant 'e-waste'. This paper brings these overlooked costs of AI to the forefront, urging practitioners to critically engage in exploring pathways for fostering socially responsible and environmentally sustainable AI practices.
This study explores the professionalization of public relations in the Middle East by analyzing how sociodemographic characteristics, work-related variables, and career development experiences shape practitioners' perceptions of their field. Based on survey data collected from respondents in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, the findings suggest that involvement in experiential learning activities predicts perceptions of professionalization. While membership in professional associations supports a public service orientation and ethical commitment, holding leadership positions or occupying influential roles within organizations does not consistently translate into greater professional identification. Notably, individuals working in the non-profit sector perceive lower levels of professional recognition than those in corporate and governmental settings. Job satisfaction appears to play a more critical role in shaping perceptions of professionalism than years of experience alone. These results highlight the importance of integrating educational strategies and workplace initiatives that reflect both international standards and the socio-cultural context of the region to support the ongoing development of public relations as a strategic and professionalized field in the Middle East.
Public relations, both as a profession and as an academic field, has increasingly sought to make its activities more culturally sensitive. Although significant advancements have been made, public relations theory and practice lack a focus on cultural safety: an approach to interacting with individuals of different cultural backgrounds that starts with the individuals and their cultures, and results in a feeling of safety for those individuals, as defined by those individuals, throughout each interaction. This paper argues that the successful integration of cultural safety into public relations involves a focus on listening, by practitioners to individuals and groups, as it is the crucial ingredient in understanding the perceptions of safety of diverse publics. Prioritising cultural safety necessitates a significant shift in culturally oriented public relations practice and theory, as it involves placing diverse individuals and listening at the heart of public relations efforts, especially ones that involve interpersonal interactions. Integrating cultural safety into public relations thus involves a shift in power dynamics within public relations activities and, specifically, a shift into culturally safe power-with relations. Drawing on interdisciplinary cultural safety theories, this paper presents a novel framework for developing culturally safe public relations.
In the 21st century, sports have become a key soft power tool, with terms like "sportswashing" critiquing Gulf states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia for using mega sports events (MSEs) to improve global reputations. This paper challenges dominant narratives to examining their distinct sports strategies: Doha integrates sports into its National Vision 2030 to promote economic diversification and modern Islamic identity contesting Western norms, demonstrated by the FIFA World Cup's broad international support; Riyadh uses sports to assert regional leadership and support domestic reforms under its Vision 2030, reflecting Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman's call for a "modern Islam, open to the world." The study argues that prevailing Global North framework like soft power and sportswashing inadequately capture the political and cultural complexities of Gulf sports diplomacy. The paper draws on non-Western geoeconomics perspectives while also providing space for thinkers such as Kautilya, and Ibn Khaldun, critiquing epistemic bias in international relations and advocates for a pluralistic, context-sensitive understanding that recognizes Gulf sports diplomacy as a culturally grounded assertion of Global South agency in shaping global narratives.
This study examines the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in public relations within the UAE's government communication sector, using the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as complementary frameworks. Semi-structured interviews with communication professionals reveal that AI tools, such as sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, and chatbots, enhance strategic planning, stakeholder engagement, and operational efficiency. Adoption is shaped by perceived usefulness and ease of use (TAM), as well as subjective norms and perceived behavioral control (TRA). Multi-level leadership, from top-down policy support to mid-level implementation, is critical. However, concerns persist around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and limited regulatory oversight. The study highlights the need for ethical governance, capacity-building, and cross-sector collaboration. By situating these findings within the UAE's socio-political context, the research contributes to broader debates on ethical and effective AI integration in public relations and affirms the analytical value of TRA and TAM.
