BiblioVault - Books about Public Relations

Culture Incorporated

Museums, Artists, And Corporate Sponsorships

Mark W. Rectanus

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

An exposÃ© of the hidden costs of corporate funding of the arts. Photographer Annie Leibowitz collaborates with American Express on a portrait exhibition. Absolut Vodka engages artists for their advertisements. Philip Morris mounts an "Arts Against Hunger" campaign in partnership with prominent museums. Is it art or PR, and where is the line that separates the artistic from the corporate? According to Mark Rectanus, that line has blurred. These mergers of art, business, and museums, he argues, are examples of the worldwide privatization of cultural funding. In Culture Incorporated, Rectanus calls for full disclosure of corporate involvement in cultural events and examines how corporations, art institutions, and foundations are reshaping the cultural terrain. In turn, he also shows how that ground is destabilized by artists subverting these same institutions to create a heightened awareness of critical alternatives. Rectanus exposes how sponsorship helps maintain social legitimation in a time when corporations are the target of significant criticism. He provides wide-ranging examples of artists and institutions grappling with corporate sponsorship, including artists' collaboration with sponsors, corporate sponsorship of museum exhibitions, festivals, and rock concerts, and cybersponsoring. Throughout, Rectanus analyzes the convergence of cultural institutions with global corporate politics and its influence on our culture and our communities. Mark W. Rectanus is professor of German at Iowa State University.

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Image Makers

Advertising, Public Relations, and the Ethos of Advocacy

Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Talking dogs pitching ethnic food. Heart-tugging appeals for contributions. Recruitment calls for enlistment in the military. Tub-thumpers excoriating American society with over-the-top rhetoric. At every turn, Americans are exhorted to spend money, join organizations, rally to causes, or express outrage. Image Makers is a comprehensive analysis of modern advocacy-from commercials to public service ads to government propaganda-and its roots in advertising and public relations.

Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota explore the fashioning of the apparatus of advocacy through the stories of two organizations, the Committee on Public Information, which sold the Great War to the American public, and the Advertising Council, which since the Second World War has been the main coordinator of public service advertising. They then turn to the career of William Bernbach, the adman's adman, who reinvented advertising and grappled creatively with the profound skepticism of a propaganda-weary midcentury public. Jackall and Hirota argue that the tools-in-trade and habits of mind of "image makers" have now migrated into every corner of modern society. Advocacy is now a vocation for many, and American society abounds as well with "technicians in moral outrage," including street-smart impresarios, feminist preachers, and bombastic talk-radio hosts.

The apparatus and ethos of advocacy give rise to endlessly shifting patterns of conflicting representations and claims, and in their midst Image Makers offers a clear and spirited understanding of advocacy in contemporary society and the quandaries it generates.

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Public Relations and Marketing for Archives

A How-To-Do-It Manual

Russell D. James

American Library Association, 2011

Public Relations and the Press

The Troubled Embrace

Karla Gower

Northwestern University Press, 2007

We are living in what one author describes as “highly promotional times.” Governments and corporations, nonprofits and special interest groups, all have spin doctors trying to turn the news to their advantage. This increasingly incestuous connection between the practitioners of public relations and journalism has resulted in a troubling shift in power. Public Relations and the Press examines how this shift came to be and explores the questions it raises about the role of media in a democratic society and the future of journalism.
A democracy works when individuals have access to reliable information upon which to base decisions—information that in our day comes from the mass media. But what if journalists do not have the wherewithal to question their sources and evaluate the information they provide? This, Karla K. Gower explains, is precisely what happens when economic and competitive pressures shift power from the journalist to the source—and the source, not the journalist, controls the flow of information to the public. Gowers describes a situation in which people, “informed” by practitioners of public relations, do not have sufficient information to make valid decisions. At stake is the core credibility of the press itself, and therefore the essential claim of journalism to a privileged role in a democratic social order.

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Reputation Analytics

Public Opinion for Companies

Daniel Diermeier

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A scientific approach to corporate reputation from the field’s leading scholar.

Public opinion is a core factor of any organization’s success—and sometimes its failings. Whether through crisis, mismanagement, or sudden shifts in public sensibility, an organization can run afoul in the span of a Tweet.

In Reputation Analytics, Daniel Diermeier offers the first rigorous analytical framework for understanding and managing corporate reputation and public perception. Drawing on his expertise as a political scientist and management scholar, Diermeier incorporates lessons from game theory, psychology, and text analytics to create a methodology that has immediate application in both scholarship and practice.

A milestone work from one of social science’s most eminent scholars, Reputation Analytics unveils an advanced understanding of an elusive topic, resulting in an essential guide for academics and readers across industries.

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Taking the Risk Out of Democracy

Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

Alex Carey

University of Illinois Press, 1995

Alex Carey documents the twentieth-century history of corporate propaganda as practiced by U.S. businesses, and its export to and adoption by Western democracies like the United Kingdom and Australia. The collection, drawn from Carey's voluminous unpublished writings, examines how and why the business elite successfully sold its values and perspectives to the rest of society.

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What Were They Thinking?

Crisis Communication: The Good, the Bad, and the Totally Clueless

Steve Adubato, Ph.D.

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Some corporations spend millions of dollars on so-called "crisis communication plans." Others offer lip service, avoiding the subject like the plague. They simply hope for the best, praying that they never face a crisis. Either way, as Steve Adubato says, "Wishful thinking is no substitute for a strategic plan."

Nationally recognized communication coach and four-time Emmy Awardûwinning broadcaster Steve Adubato has been teaching, writing, and thinking about comm¡unication, leadership, and crisis communication for nearly two decades. In What Were They Thinking? Adubato examines twenty-two controversial and complex public relations and media mishaps, many of which were played out in public. Among cases and people discussed are:

The Johnson & Johnson Tylenol scare: Perhaps the best crisis management ever
Don Imus: Sometimes saying "sorry" is too little too late
Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: Authority does not put you above questioning
Bill O'Reilly: Know when to stop defending yourself and save face
Former EPA Administrator Christie Whitman: Proof that your written words can come back to haunt you
Hurricane Katrina: A natural disaster that led to a larger governmental disaster
The Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal: Denial won't get rid of the skeletons in your closet

Arranged in short chapters detailing each case individually, the book provides a brief history of the topics and answers the questions: Who got it right? Who got it wrong? What can the rest of us learn from them?

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