Algorithmic Public Relations: Materiality, Technology and Power in a Post-Hegemonic World

The shift in scholarly analysis of public relations towards critical, cultural and sociological readings of the field is a welcome development in an academic canon traditionally dominated by functionalist, managerial perspectives. It can be argued, however, that current critical and cultural readings draw impetus and analytical rigour from theories rooted in phenomenological and socially constructed components such as language, symbols and identity. This chapter argues that as a result of such focus, analyses of public relations have not kept pace with developments in critical, cultural and social scholarship, in particular the re-emergence of a new, or neo-materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010, pp. 1-4).

This chapter will align public relations scholarship with neo-materialist theories, such as the Foucauldian 'dispositif' (Foucault, 1980), Delueze and Guattari (1987) and DeLanda’s (2006) semio-material assemblages and the ‘critical sociology’ of Bruno Latour (2005). These approaches place a greater emphasis on the material – that is, philosophically realist – readings of the social and cultural realm in which public relations operates. The results of such analyses will identify and take account of the critical and cultural role played by hitherto over-looked material ‘objects’, such as software, physical infrastructure as well as bodily and institutional interaction in shaping the purely phenomenological aspects of communication.

The chapter will offer an initial exploration of the field by focusing on the increasingly socio-technical digital environment within which an increasingly significant volume of public relations operates (Zerfass et al., 2014; PRCA, 2014). Such a reading will develop and apply the concept of “algorithmic public relations” as a theoretical lens and examples of where and how algorithmic public relations can be said to operate will be provided and a series of questions interrogating the implications of such a notion will posed. These include: how might a renewed focus on non-human agency help us to understand the ways in which public relations power functions as a post-hegemonic force and does the growth in computational aspects of communication reinvigorate political economic analyses of public relations?