Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political strategists, market research firms, think tanks, lobbyists, media advisors, third party mobilizers and 'grassroots' organizers, social media gurus, and other communication specialists have flourished in size and influence and transformed the role of communication in social, political, and economic life. Critics decry the expansion of professionalized communication, impugning the public relations (PR), polling, advertising, and marketing industries for overpowering the media with a torrent of sound-byte journalism, spin control, and 24-hour campaigning, and thus undermining the political process and civic discourse (e.g., In his research note, featured in this issue, Matt Soar uses war terminology ("commercial carpet bombing") to characterize the impact of the ad industry, in particular, on the civic landscape: "[a] city skyline awash in prominent logos," he writes, "is indicative of a profound imbalance between the wants of marketers and the needs of citizens." Others are less discouraged by the rise and intensification of promotion and publicity in the public sphere and see potential for expanding, rather than restricting, the democratic process. One recent book argues that we have entered a period of "public relations democracy" in which more news sources operating outside the traditional institutions and arenas of power are exercising influence over how media report on political, cultural, and economic affairs Such "pluralist optimism" brings to mind Ray Hiebert's famous statement that "without public relations, democracy could not succeed in a mass society" (1966, p. 7). 1 The growth in PR, and the professionalization of promotional communication generally, can be attributed to myriad cultural, political, and economic forces: the broader changes associated with globalization, including the development of new information and communication technologies; the emergence, expansion, and contestation of market capitalism (in its neo-liberal and other guises); the increasing importance of symbolic and promotional labour; and the revitalization of the public sphere, where new, emerging forms of grievance and risk are defined, contested, and amplified (e.g., The articles, research notes, commentaries, and reviews that appear in this special issue address continuities and changes in public relations and professional communication practice. We argue that against the backdrop of these changes, communication (especially persuasive and instrumental forms of communication) has become a more salient feature of the cultural landscape of late modern society. In different ways, the issue takes up the challenge of rethinking public relations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".