Public Relations

PRO285 Public Relations in Society

Storytelling Topic 10

Please sit next to someone in this lecture. Tell each other what you did over the weekend.

The public relations profession is all about narrating and storying since public relations is a

storytelling occupation (Elmer, 2011).

PR is storytelling

The stories that public relations professionals tell about themselves, their colleagues, their clients,

their organisations is a valuable source of meaning about the public relations profession

(Hodges, 2011; Elmer, 2011).

PR storytelling as research

A narrative/story is a piece of language that consists of states of affairs plotted together into

a meaningful whole through chronology/time and causality involving characters (Czarniawska-

Joerges, 1998; Lawler, 2002).

What is a narrative or a story?

Did you tell a story/narrative? Or did you re-state factual

events? Sit next to someone in this lecture.

Tell each other what you did over the weekend.

The truth of a narrative/story lies in its meaning not its accuracy (Gabriel, 2000), and therefore narrative can

capture the practice of PR in ways that no compilation of facts through surveys ever could (see Czarniawska,

1999).

story vs. facts

Narratives are seen to circulate culturally, to provide a repertoire (though not an infinite one) from which people can produce their own stories

or narratives (Lawler, 2002).

narrative and culture

Practitioners use poetic mechanisms to attribute meaning to characters, incidents and events

when they narrate their experiences.

Researching the practitioner’s world using narrative

techniques.

(Gabriel, 2000)

Motive Gabriel (2000) suggests that

how people attribute motive to organisations and their actor-agents (including themselves) can tell us much about the outcomes they hoped to achieve.

A community investment partnership we (BP) have is with a museum up north. This is where we have all our operations and that is where we do all our drilling work. It’s a really important area for our drilling operations so a lot of our community investment is actually situated up there…

Mary

Unity

Unity is a concept used to refer to the casting of people as a collective, as an entire class of people with undifferentiated motives (Gabriel, 2000)

A community investment partnership BP has is with a museum up north. This is where we have all our operations and that is where we do all our drilling work. It’s a really important area for our drilling operations so a lot of our community investment is actually situated up there…

Mary

Responsibility Gabriel (2000) suggests that

people and organisations (characters) are blamed and credited for certain activities. This can help us determine whether characters are villains, victims or heroes.

so, BP were one of the founding partners of the non-profit, I think we were the first supporter of the museum and that helped them go get funding from other partners and from government and so we have been partners with them for 8 years now and we are just looking at renewing it at the moment…

Mary

Character Qualities

Gabriel (2000) tells us that characters are attributed with positive and negative qualities. This can also help us determine whether characters are villains, victims or heroes.

...the youth organisation is really credible; they have got so much experience with young people. They have worked in one stop shops that have failed and they understand why it failed. They get all that stuff. They are just really credible, really great, wonderful people with amazing skills and experience and passion and heart...

Claire

Causal Connection

Where two or more incidents or events in a narrative are linked by cause and effect (Gabriel, 2000).

The non-profit used to have a fundraising day and we had [our corporation’s] employees go and help them fund-raise money, so there was some involvement there, but then they got rid of that fund- raising day so it kind of went back to just handing the money over and not much of a relationship... (Mary, 11:54)

Mary

Tell each other what you did this morning from the time you woke up until now.

Time

Objective-time is that modernist conception whereby, in the material sense, time has the ability to structure action; it is this concept that has driven the need for efficiency and production and that has made possible the need for control and function in

the modern organisation (Cunliffe et al., 2004).

Objective time

In the realm of psychological experience, quantifying units of time is a clumsy operation. It is the imprecise psychological clock, as opposed to the time on one’s watch, that creates the perception of duration that people experience (Levine 1997). From a subjective

perspective, time is the experience of duration because its measurement is influenced by human experience

(Cunliffe et al. 2004).

Subjective time

“The individual experience of duration passes more quickly (slowly) when experiences are pleasant

(unpleasant), are not urgent (urgent), are very busy (not busy)”

(Levine 1997: 37–48).

Subjective time

When you told each other what you did this morning from the time you woke up until now, did you tell

your experiences in an objective or subjective way?

Time

Progression over time Causality

Characters Deeper and more meaningful than facts

We can develop deep insights into PR professionals’ lives

Narratives/stories

Multiple story interpretation theory of competing organizational discourses

The potential for multiple interpretations

Plurivocality

Disney has created cartoon characters known the world over; Disney theme parks have higher

attendance than their competitors, and Walt Disney remains a hero of the American dream.

Boje, D. (1995). Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A

Postmodern Analysis of Disney

Lyotard (1984) assigned to postmodernism the task of breaking up the grand narratives,

disintegrating the one story into a mass of individual or localized accounts

Postmodernism and storytelling

A review of Disney storytelling reveals that many accounts do not fit the official story

So what is Walt Disney?

(Boje, 1995).

• Applying the Tamara metaphor, parallel storytelling organization processes are at work in and around the Walt Disney enterprise. The official story is being challenged by stories of: animators (Kinney, 1988), script writers (Shows, 1979), historians (Crafton, 1982; Marin, 1983), journalists (Taylor, 1987), postmodern researchers (Fjellman, 1992; Smith & Eisenberg, 1987; Van Maanen, 1992), and

unauthorized biographers (Eliot, 1993).

There is more than one story of Disney

(Boje, 1995).

There are contrary stories about Walt Disney and the so-called Magic Kingdom that do not fit the

universal tale of happiness.

Contrary/competing stories about Disney

(Boje, 1995).

Early official versions of how four animators left Disney characterize them as disgruntled employees lacking faith in Walt's vision

Competing stories about Disney

(Boje, 1995).

Walt organized less-skilled artists, mostly women, to do the inking work, at lower wages.

Competing stories about Disney

(Boje, 1995).

Stories from several long-term employees dispute the authorship of Mickey Mouse and even the

animation and cartooning skills officially attributed to Walt Disney. By most nonofficial accounts, Iwerks, not Walt, had the drawing talent, but Walt was the

story creator and business manager.

Competing stories about Disney

(Boje, 1995).

The official Disney stories privilege Walt as sole founder. They do not credit Roy Disney and Ub Iwerks as founding partners in the emerging

Magic Kingdom, even though both men devoted most of their lives to building it.

Competing stories about

Disney

(Boje, 1995).