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Breaking boundaries
Jacquie L'Etang, Jordi Xifra and Timothy Coombs Public Relations Inquiry 2012 1: 3 DOI: 10.1177/2046147X11422664 The online version of this article can be found at: http://pri.sagepub.com/content/1/1/3

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PRI1110.1177/2046147X11422664EditorialPublic Relations Inquiry

Editorial

Breaking boundaries
Jacquie LEtang, Jordi Xifra, and Timothy Coombs

Public Relations Inquiry 1(1) 36 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2046147X11422664 pri.sagepub.com

When public relations scholars turn their attention to the history of the academic discipline, they will doubtless explore the emergence and remit of academic journals in the field, alongside paradigmatic debates and the role of key academics and schools of thought. The launch of a new journal is a portentous moment, stimulating self-conscious reflexivity and sense of time, as T. S. Eliot remarked, There came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time (Eliot, 1961: 119). This is the right moment for Public Relations Inquiry as more scholars become interested in widening agendas, evidenced by recently published and ongoing projects in social theory, critical and cultural perspectives. Public Relations Inquiry provides a place for those that pursue divergent themes and ways of thinking about public relations. For some of us it fulfils a dream long held and the outcome of struggles for legitimacy, but more importantly, Public Relations Inquiry provides an outlet and focus for creative work in public relations that can catalyse the field in the future. Eliots critique of modernity and secularism in Choruses from The Rock is pertinent to Public Relations Inquirys identity as a space that both permits challenge of dominant trends and received truths, and opens up humanitarian agendas. As editors we envisage a journal that encompasses humanities and social sciences; that reflects diverse forms of writing and intellectual engagement; that crosses disciplines and raises new questions about public relations, drawing in scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures to correct existing imbalances. We wish to encourage more experimental and reflexive forms of research and writing, to facilitate the in-depth presentation and analysis of qualitative data and to generate innovative topics for debate. In short, we want to drop a stone into the lake that can generate ripples within and beyond the public relations discipline. Our intention is to deliver a top quality discursive space for contributions that can enrich understanding of, and debate within, the field of public relations. We aim to create a broadly based debating space and welcome international contributions from the fields of public relations, media, communications and cultural studies, anthropology, political communication, sociology, political science, strategic studies, law, organizational studies, management and marketing, and from others whose work links to communications,
Corresponding author: Jacquie LEtang, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK. Email: j.y.letang@stir.ac.uk

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Public Relations Inquiry 1(1)

for example in art and design, literature, music, tourism, sport. In this way we intend to connect public relations and public communication to a wide range of cultural references and geo-political issues and debates. Contributions that reflect on problems in the academic and practice fields and their implications may draw on sources from humanities and social sciences, including: philosophy, history, social psychology, literature, film, psychoanalysis. Methodological diversity and creativity are encouraged because Public Relations Inquiry aims to be a dynamic academic forum strongly characterized by humanistic and qualitative social science. The inclusion of essays will give the journal a unique and distinctive character that will enhance scholarly expression in the public relations discipline through conceptual analysis and philosophical debate, presented in a variety of research styles and forms, including those that are reflexive and critical. We will publish research that is methodologically transparent and fully justified, and will make available sufficient space to showcase qualitative work. Public Relations Inquiry will energize the field through advanced theoretically driven understanding of the nature of public relations in promotional culture, its philosophies, ideologies and societal dynamics. Public Relations Inquiry will debate issues of central concern to all public relations scholars and will include the widest range of academic opinion to encourage more reflexivity within public relations, and between public relations and adjacent disciplines. In planning this issue, we began by publicizing our initiative at conferences and also approached a few scholars whose work we thought might help in opening up a number of avenues for exploration and subsequently subjected their work to rigorous peer review. Between the confident statements of the editorial proposal submitted to the publishers, and the production of an artefact lie multiple authorial interpretations of the editors imaginations and wish-images. These interpretations have manifested themselves into creative productions, some of which are presented in this issue. The first issue of any publication is an auspicious moment for authors, editors and readers alike. We expect our opening issue to signal forthcoming change that can transmute the public relations discipline through the publication of philosophically driven full-length articles that present in-depth conceptual analysis and argument. Our first article, by Lee Edwards, proposes a new formulation for public relations, which, she argues, is necessary in the increasingly divergent and multi-paradigmatic context of public relations research. She suggests that while competitive diversity is a sign of welcome maturity, it may lead to an emphasis on differences, rather than commonalities, to the detriment of the discipline. Consequently, her project is to develop a definition that speaks to both functional and non-functional scholars. Her discussion of paradigms inadvertently justifies the launch of this journal by pointing out that that paradigms exclude or devalue work that does not fit with the assumptions of foundational achievements. Edwards analysis proceeds to meta-theoretical discussion of existing definitions and underpinning assumptions, which leads to a new understanding of public relations as flow that, she argues, transcends the existing paradigms. The second article in this issue, by Patricia Curtin, employs philosophical argument to analyse the concept of paradigm in depth before proceeding to outline a particular paradigmatic schema for the field comprising post-positivist, constructivist, critical/ cultural, and postmodern paradigms, building on Guba and Lincolns

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(1994) articulation. Her analysis highlights two significant instances of semantic incommensurability: the meanings surrounding the words relationship and power. Curtin argues for a multi-paradigmatic approach and suggests that adopting a Kuhnian perspective requires the creation of an inclusive research environment within public relations that values all paradigmatic approaches. Gary Radfords submitted article explores public relations in a postmodern context, in particular examining the alternate ways of speaking about public relations that provide a range of stories and narratives and the way that these contextualize other narratives derived from public relations practitioners and academics in a way that produces conflict and uncertainty:
The postmodern account of meta-narratives is based upon notions of competition, contradiction, conflict and confusion. The goal is not to transcend this conflict and confusion, but rather to describe and embrace this condition as the way things are in the postmodern condition. The same is the case for the narratives used to describe, explain and position public relations.

Radfords article provides a broad overview of significant features and assumptions of modernism and postmodernism together with a discussion of arbitrariness and contingency in relation to reality, knowledge and truth. He uses these concepts to present an understanding of the significance of public relations amidst contemporary uncertainties and challenges those who focus on postmodernism as a source for functional application, consequently critiquing the metanarrative of effectiveness. Juliet Ropers article also focuses on narratives and discourses in her discussion of competing discourses in New Zealand in relation to emerging environmental policies over a decade. In a way, her article is set in the context of country branding and positioning, risk and reputation, with a strong focus on ideology, contextualized within a neoliberal context. Her analysis explores the evolution of a range of key government and business discourses, highlighting competing themes. Our final article challenges the common form and style of writing in public relations and is thus a significant inclusion in terms of signalling our editorial intent. Robert Browns article draws on literary and rhetorical traditions in the humanities to explore problems of epistemology in public relations in relation to underlying philosophic issues. His article resonates strongly with themes covered in earlier articles in its linkages to the legitimacy of multiple perspectives, ethnocentrism, power, scepticism and critique, yet his treatment has a potent alchemy through its philosophical and literary connections and poetic reflections that re-position public relations inquiry. David McKie reviews three books and raises some provocative issues for the publishers of public relations texts and highlights the absence of strategic public relations texts that actually deliver on the promise of a strategic approach. We close this opening editorial with an acknowledgement and appreciation of our publishers, Sage. In particular we wish to give thanks for the wisdom and guidance of Mila Steele, our Commissioning Editor who saw us from the inception of Public Relations Inquiry in 2009 through its gestation and birth in 2012. This biological analogy implies change as well as the passage of time. Philosophers of time have sought to understand the nature of time; its questionable existence; the extent to which it flows or

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is tense-less; and the distinction between time and perception of time, the last made apparent in Eliots lines:
A moment in time, but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time made the meaning (Eliot, 1961: 119).

Temporality has a place in public relations scholarship in terms of the disciplines consciousness, its focus on relationships and connections to policy, and increasing sense of history and historiography that contribute to its self-identity. Public Relations Inquiry is demonstrably the place for this sort of philosophical inquiry, and it is time for public relations scholarship to embrace the unknown and liberate new meanings. References
Eliot TS (1961) Choruses from The Rock. In: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 119. Le Poidevin R and McBeath M (eds) (1993) The Philosophy of Time (Oxford Readings in Philosophy). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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