Public relations in a postmodern world

Abstract

This article uses Holtzhausen’s dichotomy of public relation’s modernist principles and the public’s postmodern expectations as a means of framing a discussion of public relations in a postmodern world. The following questions are addressed: What does it mean to say that public relations is modernist and its public is postmodern? What are the implications of this dichotomy for the ways in which public relations practice and scholarship are spoken about and understood? Drawing upon the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Umberto Eco, it is argued that a postmodern perspective allows one to consider public relations as a narrative; that is, a way of talking about the world, the people in that world and public relations’ relationship with those people. The use of postmodernism here is intended to foreground the ways in which pubic relations is talked about, and the implications of these ways of talking.

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