Performance and Persona: Goffman and Jung's approaches to professional identity applied to public relations
Introduction
Public relations is engaged with issues of identity as (a) a commodity created for clients and employers; (b) its own ‘contested terrain’ as a field; and (c) the professional identity of practitioners. The first of these is central to practice, given “the public relations activity of large organisations today … is identity-related in that each organisation must work to establish its unique ‘self’ while connecting its concerns to those of the ‘cultural crowd”’ (Cheney & Christensen, 2001a, p. 234). Others have engaged with the production of organisational symbols and discursive identity (Grunig, 1993, Mickey, 2003, Roper, 2005) and the creation of identities for individuals (Motion, 1999). The identity of the field (b) has been explored as a jurisdictional issue (Hutton, 1999, Hutton, 2001, Hutton, 2010), a ‘contested terrain’ (Cheney & Christensen, 2001b), and more recently as an argument for a public relations identity as a social practice in a complex society, centrally involved in concepts such as trust and legitimacy and issues of power and language, to be investigated from a constructivist perspective (Ihlen & Verhoeven, 2012). This continues and develops discussions about the paradigms that shape its research and self-understanding (Curtin, 2012, Edwards, 2012, Pieczka, 1996). There has been debate around the content of identity for public relations practitioners: for example whether practitioners see themselves as ethical guardians or advocates (Baker, 2008, Bowen, 2008). Literature concerning roles (White and Dozier, 1992, Zerfass et al., 2013) could also be grouped under the heading of identity and others have explored how practitioners identify or distance themselves from public relations as a profession (Jeffrey & Brunton, 2012). Less scrutinised is the means by which professional identity in public relations practitioners, both collectively and individually, is produced. One exception is Edwards’ (2010) use of Bourdieu to articulate how PR identity is gendered and racially defined; another is Curtin and Gaither, 2005, Curtin and Gaither, 2007 use of the circuit of culture (see below) to examine public relations identity as one element in a dynamic set of fluctuating relationships. This paper considers literature regarding the production and maintenance of professional identity, then examines two, apparently incompatible, approaches to such work, before returning to public relations theory and practice in the concluding remarks.
Section snippets
Professional identity
Professional practice can be seen as the notion of practising a profession, as in medicine or law; the idea of practising professionalism, that is enacting aspects of identity associated with being or been seen as a professional; there is also the moral–ethical quality, the sense of ethical responsibility in one's practice; and opposition to ‘amateur’, implying some reward for services (Green, 2009a, pp. 6–7). This paper is primarily concerned with the second of these, enacting a professional
Goffman's performance
The sociologist Erving Goffman is being rediscovered and reinterpreted as an insightful commentator on our anxious times (Jacobsen, 2010), as his ‘micro-sociology’ continues to resonate across the half century since publication of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), which is the text explored in this paper. This explores how individual and team performances are constructed and maintained; Goffman talks about impression management in professions as a “‘rhetoric of training’,
Jung's Persona
Jung described the public face of the individual as the Persona, drawing on the Greek masks of ancient drama. Persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, a kind of mask designed to ‘impress and conceal’ and to meet societal demands (Jung, CW7, paras 305–309). As the ego gravitates to the public ‘approved’ view, unconscious activity starts to compensate. The personal unconscious is structured around archetypal images, the templates of which are
Comparing Jung and Goffman
There are interesting convergences in Jung and Goffman's work, including shared phenomenological approaches to their deeply humane observations. Goffman's ‘face’ is very close to the Jungian Persona, the public self-image of the individual and a key element in constructing an identity. Both sense the reverse of that image too; Goffman describes practices and routines which represent the ‘underlife’ of organisations, citing the power of ‘discrepant roles’, and his backstage space resembles the
Implications for public relations
Goffman and Jung, despite their conflicting worldviews, offer a complementary understanding of identity, which is here revisited from a public relations perspective using the categories suggested earlier: (a) a commodity created for clients and employers; (b) its own ‘contested terrain’ as a field; and (c) the professional identity of practitioners.
As Johansson (2009) argues, we could use Goffman to examine how organisations ‘perform’ their roles, and revisit Motion's (1999) exploration of the
Conclusion
This paper has explored a range of literature, from public relations scholarship and beyond, concerning professional identity, in order to illustrate the contribution that the sociological observations of Goffman and the psychological reflections of Jung might make to public relations identity, whether as a commodity for others or for our own profession and practitioners. Together these writers illuminate the inner and outer aspects of identity, suggesting several avenues for further research,
References (56)
Rethinking power in public relations
Public Relations Review
(2006)Saints and sinners: Competing identities in public relations ethics
Public Relations Review
(2012)Image and substance: From symbolic to behavioral relationships
Public Relations Review
(1993)The definition, dimensions and domain of public relations
Public Relations Review
(1999)- et al.
Professional identity: How communication management practitioners identify with their industry
Public Relations Review
(2012) Personal public relations: Identity as a public relations commodity
Public Relations Review
(1999)Organisational identities, identification and positioning: learning from political fields
Public Relations Review
(2005)- et al.
Health literacy for improved health outcomes: Effective capital in the marketplace
Journal of Consumer Affairs
(2009) The model of the principled advocate and the pathological partisan: A virtue ethics construct of opposing archetypes of public relations and advertising practitioners
Journal of Mass Media Ethics
(2008)- et al.
Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi
(2004)
Pascalian meditations
Outline of a theory of practice
An invitation to reflexive sociology
A state of neglect: public relations as ‘corporate conscience’ or ethics counsel
Journal of Public Relations Research
The end of the professions? The restructuring of professional work
Symmetry and its critics
Organizational identity: Linkages between “internal” and “external” organizational communication
Public relations as contested terrain: A critical response
Mapping the organizational psyche: A Jungian theory of organizational dynamics and change
Public relations and philosophy: Parsing paradigms
Public Relations Inquiry
Privileging identity, difference and power: The circuit of culture as a basis for public relations theory
Journal of Public Relations Research
International public relations: Negotiating culture, identity and power
Waiting for Goffman
Lapham's Quarterly
Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman
‘Race’ in public relations
Defining the ‘object’ of public relations research: A new starting point
Public Relations Inquiry
The shadow of excellence: A Jungian approach to public relations ethics
Review of Communication
Cited by (21)
Construction and presentation of communication consultancy expertise: Turkish perspective
2018, Public Relations ReviewCitation Excerpt :Literature in both fields has produced considerable work on impression management through rhetoric, labelling of specific services, symbolism, and professionalidentity construction (Alvesson & Anders, 2002; Sallot, 2002; Bruning & Ledingham, 2002; Sturdy, 2004; Johansson, 2007 Fawkes, 2014). In the PR context, the relevance of impression management has been underlined and utilized for understanding or discussing the identity construction of PR as a field (Ihlen & Verhoeven, 2012; Fawkes, 2012, 2014), and for examining ‘relationship management’ as a major PR practice (Johansson, 2009; Brown, 2010; Tsetsura, 2010). The construction of a professional PR consultant/consultancy identity through impression management has also been investigated, but mainly through a gender perspective (Tsetsura, 2010; Jeffrey & Brunton, 2012 Yeomans, 2013); leaving the construction of external PR consultancy expertise somewhat understudied.
Still a lily-white field of women: The state of workforce diversity in public relations practice and research
2017, Public Relations ReviewCitation Excerpt :The heightened and often contentious public debate about race, gender, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation in America and international settings requires that organizations – both advocacy and capital-based organizations – have an understanding of the identity issues that affect or are affected by their surrounding communities, particularly through their professional “habitus” (Edwards, 2010). Practitioners delivering organizational news (Ramsey, 2016) and messages and forging stakeholder relationships must have an understanding of how identity matters in public relations relationships (Fawkes, 2015; Waymer, 2012). Practitioners’ social-cultural identities like gender, race, age, class, nationality, and sexual orientation affect how they perform as public relations practitioners and specifically, the messages they create for vast groups of people (Curtin & Gaither, 2007; Waymer, 2012).
‘This is a stage’: A study of public relations practitioners’ imagined online audiences
2017, Public Relations ReviewCitation Excerpt :Public relations practitioners use social media outside of their formal workday to further their organization’s mission and particular campaigns, develop new skills, and advance their own career and personal brand (Bridgen, 2011). Both Bridgen (2011) and Fawkes (2015) have suggested that the demonstration of professional expertise extends well beyond traditional work hours in this field. Even when PR practitioners communicate about work through their personal social networking accounts outside of their official organizational roles, they still act as informal social mediators on behalf of their organization (Himelboim, Golan, Moon, & Suto, 2014).
Gendered Voices Effect in Social Drones
2023, Lecture Notes in Networks and SystemsPerforming the policy cycle
2023, Policy as Practice: Making Sense of Governing