'Public Relations in the World of Finance'

Public relations in financial markets came into its own after many Western economies liberalised during the 1980s. Public relations became an important means of building credibility in and shaping attitudes toward financial markets. This chapter explores PR activity throughout the world of finance - from wholesale finance (the 'factory floor') to retail finance (the 'shop window'). The chapter examines critiques of PR activity in both areas

Fintech’s transparency-publicity nexus: Value co-creation through transparency discourses in business-to-business digital marketing

This article engages with the critical study of contemporary publicity by examining transparency as a strategic project to platformize financial services. The article contributes to understandings of transparency as value co-creation in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Through field-level discourse analysis, the article shows that transparency is contingent primarily on the nature of the market, in this case, a platformized industry, which valorizes transparency as part of a regime of data-sharing and open access. Transparency is further contingent on the market actor: actors with lesser status and market legitimacy are more likely to seek to co-create transparency with market actors of greater or similar status and legitimacy. The article concludes that in commercial spaces, publicity’s relationship to transparency is not only determined by market logic, but that all market logics are being drawn further toward a technological definition of transparency as “shareveillance,” as more segments of economic life become platformized

AI Hype: Public Relations and AI's doomsday machine

This chapter broadens current professional debates by highlighting a different but vital relationship between the PR profession and AI, one in which PR professionals – acting as AI cheerleaders – are deeply implicated in generating AI hype. My discussion explores recent market studies research on disruption and hype cycles, before delving into the latest, somewhat disturbing phase in AI’s hype cycle, in which end-of-the-world scenarios are invoked to stimulate a climate of fear around AI. The chapter concludes by exploring some ethical concerns with promoting AI and automation as humanity’s inevitable future

Critical Reflections on the Field

In this chapter, we argue that the effect of public relations on society merits further attention from scholars and practitioners. In particular, the advent of digitisation, algorithmic technologies and AI more generally, have been under-examined. In these areas, greater reflexivity and scrutiny of how such tools are used in the industry, and the ways it might perpetuate or challenge their in-built biases, is sorely needed. In a communications landscape characterised by the co-existence of digital utopias, post-truth politics and fake news, we suggest that the challenges raised by these new technologies relate to two key issues: voice and diversity, both of which are deeply affected by digital technologies. The industry’s capacity to adequately reflect on its role in enhancing or limiting these inequalities depends on adopting a renewed ethics in pedagogy and practice that adequately equips practitioners with the reflective and analytical skills to not only use digital technologies, but also to account for their effects as part of the arsenal of communications tactics in the 21st century

Public relations' role as trust strategist: a specialist niche evolves from turbulence

Trust production is evolving into an area of specialist knowledge, evidenced by the recent proliferation of trust surveys, such as the Edelman Trust Barometer. Following recent global market turbulence, public relations has increasingly promoted its role as ‘trust strategist, able to maintain, manage and restore trust. Using the site of the UK investment management industry, this exploratory paper argues that trust production involves a complex series of discursive material and material trust practices enacted by a wide range of experts, not just public relations professionals. At the same time, a discursive understanding of trust production could improve public relations’ professional influence

Trust in the shadow banking system: ratings agencies and discursive power

The purpose of this paper is to consider a less visible form of trust production which led to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. In many ways, the financial crisis was the first to result from a breakdown of assurance mechanisms, or generators of trust (Yandle, 2008). In other words, this particular global crisis was, at its core, a crisis of trust. What is also unique, though less adequately discussed, is that the global financial crisis was initially triggered not by a loss of public trust, but by an internal loss of trust between actors within the financial system itself. I refer specifically to the breakdown of trust between visible financial system and the ‘shadow’ financial system, the latter representing a sizeable portion of the system that is largely invisible to the public eye. For the purpose of this paper, I define organisations as “sites where members subject themselves and one another to various practices, where discourse sustains mutually reinforcing patterns of power and powerlessness” (Conrad and Haynes, 2001; 65). Power resides in these discursive practices, including the organisational knowledge formation and claims about it. In his discussion of trust in trans-organisational relations, Bachmann (2001), looks at the complex social processes involved in inter-firm relationships, and finds that firms operating within national boundaries have a shared world of institutional arrangements which govern the forms of trust relevant when engaging in specific relationships with each other

Trust management through discourse: Power and persuasion in financial services

The globe’s corporate power elites view trust as indispensable to economic growth (Tyler and Stanley, 2007; DeVita, 2007; Korcynski, 2000). They also view the loss of trust as a cost or ‘tax’ to business (Murphy, 2003; Rendtorff, 2008; Khodyakov, 2007). Consequently, corporate elites use their capitalist power to socialise trust (Kincaid, 2006) in order to increase profits. Corporate elites acquire power through specialised knowledge that ordinary consumers find difficult or impossible to fathom. Elites then leverage their knowledge/power by taking on more and more risk on behalf of consumers (Rendtorff, 2008), and packaging that risk in products and services. In response, consumers employ trust as a way to reduce uncertainty and complexity when purchasing those products and services. Hence consumers accept the power of corporate elites and other authorities in global capital systems (Rendtorff, 2008)