Public Relations and Neoliberalism

This book is about public relations. But it is also about how, a whole generation, has learned to think, to speak and to live within a market-driven neoliberal logic, using the distinctive language practices and vocabularies of 'PR'. To chart this cultural shift, a detailed historical analysis of the little-known Mont Pelerin Society and its followers in the twentieth century shows how the relationships that joined money, power and an ideological agenda impelled a partnership with public relations that led to its wider propagation and proliferation in society. Today, these conditions not only determine what or whose voices are heard but they form an iron grip on the public imagination, deafening us to the cries of those marginalized individuals and groups entrapped by circumstance and subject to fear, vulnerability, and hardship, or to the science that is critical to the planet's survival. As such, the book focuses on two of the most pressing global issues and public debates of present time: climate change denial and the elision of the human rights of people seeking to become members of a nation-state through, refugee status, political asylum, and immigration. Public debate determines politics, but all too often politics lags, or stumbles and falls, as the many voices jostling for attention in the contest of ideas become caught up in conflict and language games and fail to make any real mark at all. The distinctive language practices of PR organized around an all-encompassing, free-market based view of the world, make this new reality happen in ways that are sometimes counter-intuitive. In engaging with an original and integrated analysis of everyday language, its harnessing and its totalizing neoliberal effects, the book provides a panoramic critique of PR that will be essential reading for scholars and students of communication, culture, and politics--