Abstract
In 2019, several public relations scholars from Latin America developed the idea to present a panel at the International Communication Association (ICA) focused on current trends within Latin American PR theory and practice. Unsurprisingly, we were told at the time that was the first initiative of the kind within the PR division. So, following that ICA panel, we decided to push the boundary further, and we have successfully done so. Three years later, and in pandemic times, it is with great pleasure that we have accomplished the task of publishing a special issue on this critical yet underexplored topic in Public Relations Inquiry.
Following Mitchelstein and Boczkowski (2021), to have had the possibility of editing a special issue focused in Latin American public relations is powerful evidence of the current unbalanced global state of affairs in terms of centers of academic knowledge and scholarly inquiry. To be clear from the outset, who would dare imagine the need and relevance of a similar work focusing on public relations perspectives in North America or Western Europe? This can only happen, as stated by L´Etang (2008) and Culbertson and Chen (2013), because North American and European conceptualizations and trends have profoundly dominated public relations theory and practice on a global scale.
Structural constraints (language and access to the main hubs of knowledge) inhibited the recognition of the Latin American school of thought in the field of public relations. Indeed, the major academic conferences within our discipline take place in the Global North, while the vast majority of the leading journals are edited in the United States or Europe, with scarce presence of authors or themes from the other regions of the world. In turn, few studies focus on theoretical advances in the region of Latin America (Ferrari and França, 2011), which contributes even further to the absence at worst or marginalization at best of Latin American perspectives in the discipline. The few scholars that have been able to do publish research on theoretical advances in the region have faced significant challenges to their real autonomy of thought and action; for example, it has been argued that there is a colonialist influence in the body of knowledge of Latin American public relations (Molleda et al., 2018).
While it is positive to see recent studies such as Thelen’s (2021), which show a healthy increase in the number of English-written journal articles with a focus on the region since 2010—and especially since 2016—or initiatives that incorporate Spanish as an accepted language to submit in major communication conferences, the truth is that Latin American research in the field with global academic impact remains scarce.
It would be beyond the scope of this editorial to go into all the root causes of why this happens: what we can say is that we are not willing to validate the naturalization of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that have characterized our field of study so far.
Consistent with this intention, this special issue aims to present academic works that provide in-depth reflection and build a broader picture of the current state of the art of the public relations discipline in Latin America. First, we present pieces related to the state of the art and evolution of public relations practice in Latin America: these are the work of Álvarez-Nobell, Molleda, and Athaydes and the work of Navarro, Moreno, and Fuentes-Lara, respectively. Next, we feature articles that analyze, via a public relations lens, current corporate practices and strategies in Latin American contexts. These studies are exemplary cases that highlight the challenge and promise of organizational listening (Claro) and sustainability (Durán, Matus, Orozco-Toro, Vega & Avila). Suárez Monsalve offers a historical perspective on the development of public relations practice in the region and its interplay with academic advances in the field, which dovetails well with Sadi and Ferrari’s work that interrogates the current curricula of PR in Argentinian universities. Finally, we showcase two articles that approach Latin American public relations from more conceptual perspectives. In these papers, Miño and Austin refer to new perspectives of nation branding using the Chilean case and Labarca and Mujica offer a conceptual paper of trust as a contextual variable to take into account when analyzing PR in América Latina.
We would like to take the opportunity to unpack these articles further. The paper by Álvarez Nobell et al. presents the results of a massive survey of practitioners that explores regional trends in public relations management, the organization of the activity, as well as issues related to professional development. This is an important study as it delves, for example, into strategic elements such as professional development and its institutionalization in Latin America, the impact of fake news on practice, gender issues and pay gap, and work climate and stress, all of which are central to the evolution of the professional field in Latin America; while enabling comparative analysis with other regions of the world. The article concludes with a call to use regional theoretical frameworks—such as Porto Simões' micropolitics (1996, 2001)—to effectively begin to question the status quo of only using constructs born in other lands.
Meanwhile, Navarro et al. study the main factors affecting employee turnover rates among millennials working in the public relations industry across Latin America. The authors compare differences between millennials and previous generations. The findings are significant insofar as they show a positive relationship between job satisfaction, trust in the organization, work commitment, leader performance, supportive organizational culture, and turnover intentions of Millennials in Latin America, although at lower rates when compared to the two previous generations.
In her paper, Claro highlights the importance of organizational listening—a concept proposed by Jim Macnamara—within Chilean retail. She bases her qualitative analysis on five Chilean companies to explore corporate approaches towards the subject. The data show that despite the rhetorical intentions to engage with stakeholders through listening, it is impossible to assess the existence of a listening culture among the cases studied. Furthermore, there is a need to further elaborate architecture and processes that allow effective listening to the whole range of publics.
Durán et al. also tackle the relationship between public relations management and sustainability in three Latin American markets: Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile. Based on an online survey, the authors analyze large corporations and establish that for organizational sustainability to occur, relationship management emerges as a strategic asset. Their work allows them to quantify the relationship between the key communications variables of an organization and its publics, and those that indicate the level of development in sustainability.
As indicated above, Suárez Monsalve offers a historical perspective on the development of public relations practice in the region and its interplay with academic advances in the field. As she notes, the academic development has been guided, on the one hand, by a functional and instrumental focus triggered by the market’s need and, on the other hand, by the social, analytical, and critical approach that sought to influence the region’s social changes.
Another view is offered by the piece of Sadi and Ferrari. The authors analyze Argentinian university PR programs to verify the use of the general approaches and theories of public relations that exist on a global scale in the five main public relations undergraduate courses. To this end, they systematize 15 of the most influential perspectives and, through a qualitative study using a variety of methods, arrive at interesting results regarding the existing dependence on constructs that are foreign to the region and linked to the functionalist tradition.
Finally, we showcase the two papers that approached PR from new perspectives. On the one hand, Miño and Austin’s work examines a case study in Chile that sought to facilitate dialogue between the inhabitants of the southern country around their shared national symbols, traditions, and cultural artifacts to co-create the national brand. It explores the connections between nation branding and public relations research from key concepts within our field such as dialogue and co-creation of meanings. Its main contribution lies in offering an alternative path to the dominant practices around nation brand-building campaigns, in which more voices are sought rather than top-down representations that tend to include only the elites.
On the other hand, Labarca and Mujica’s conceptual essay intends to situate trust as a contextual variable to analyze the theory and practice of public relations. By analyzing Latin American’s levels of generalized and institutional trust, the authors argue the importance of incorporating trust as a culture-sensitive contextual variable in the analysis to enhance relationships between organizations and their stakeholders.
Finally, we want to sincerely thank the editors of Public Relations Inquiry for providing the opportunity and space for this research—to open a window to a vast and vibrant research on PR carried out in this giant region that is Latin America. Despite our different cultural and epistemological traditions, we Latin American scholars still have much to offer intellectually to the academic world. Hopefully, this will be the first of many publications in which Latin American scholars may showcase their scholarship and research insights.