'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

Central banking in risk discourses: ‘Remaking’ the economy after crisis

This chapter explores risk discourses by deconstructing public recriminations made during a 2008 Congressional hearing into the global financial crisis and the role of US regulators, including the nation’s central bank, better-known as ‘the Fed’. However, the chapter repositions the Congressional hearing as part of the Fed’s own risk management of the US economy. The chapter begins by exploring risk discourses in wholesale financial markets, as well as central banks’ techniques for managing attendant risks. The chapter then provides a brief background to the US Federal Reserve, before setting out the methods and materials for deconstructing US Congressional hearings as discursive events, closing with a discussion of themes arising from testimony given by Alan Greenspan, renowned economist and former Chair of the US Federal Reserve

AI cheerleaders: Public relations, neoliberalism and artificial intelligence

Public relations’ (PR) professional habitus is defined by a relentless focus on optimism and futurity. This professional habitus renders PR indispensable to the corporate world after crisis, when new, potentially controversial, growth strategies must be sold-in to stakeholders. This article argues that PR’s professional habitus is heavily influenced by neoliberalism, an ideology which ‘confidently identifies itself with the future’. The discussion is timely, as 21st-century neoliberal capitalism becomes redefined by artificial intelligence (AI). The article combines PR theory, communications theory and political economy to consider the changing shape of neoliberal capitalism, as AI becomes naturalised as ‘common sense’ and a ‘public good’. The article explores how PR supports AI discourses, including promoting AI in national competitiveness and promoting ‘friendly’ AI to consumers, while promoting Internet inequalities. The article concludes that the PR profession’s myopia regarding the implications of promoting AI and neoliberalism is shaped by poor levels of diversity in the PR profession

Sensemaking in an online community after financial loss: Enterprising Jamaican investors and the fall of a financial messiah

Online communities are popular sites for collective sensemaking. This study explores sensemaking in one such community following the closure of Olint Corp, a highly successful Jamaican investment club. After Olint’s disbanding, Jamaicans reconnected through online communities to make sense of their financial losses, to make sense of Olint – seen variously as an altruistic endeavour, a global currency trader, or Ponzi scheme – and to make sense of themselves as enterprising investors. This narrative inquiry unveils their rich, multi-voiced, fragmented storying of Olint and its founder, once praised as a ‘financial messiah’

Thought Leadership as a trust strategy in global markets: Goldman Sachs’ promotion of the ‘BRICs’ in the marketplace of ideas

Thought leadership has become an important means of building trust in global markets. The term, used to describe the intellectual firepower assembled and published by organisations, is frequently linked with public relations (PR) activity. This article examines Goldman Sachs’ highly-successful campaign to promote the BRICs concept, exploring the firm’s use of thought leadership as a trust production strategy. It is concluded that trust production is a shared performance by a range of experts, including PR practitioners. This shared performance helps promote certainty in companies’ skill and experience, paving the way for new products and processes, market expansion, and company profits

'Rating agencies as a corporate governance mechanism: Power and trust production in debt capital markets’

The chapter explores the voluntary corporate governance role played by credit rating agencies, closing the ‘trust at a distance’ gap which might otherwise hinder fundraising in debt capital markets. The chapter draws on Giddens’ system trust theory and Foucauldian perspectives of knowledge/power to unpack trust production as a discursive process in financial markets.The texts analysed illustrate the influence of rating agencies in producing trust as well as mistrust in debt instruments

Producing trust in country financial narratives

This chapter explores how economists at Goldman Sachs deployed proprietary research and ‘thought leadership’ to contest and transform existing discourses of emerging markets as ‘risky and volatile’ by building trust in the BRIC nations as stable, rational investment cases. The chapter uses conceptualizations of system trust, power and knowledge to examine the ways in which the BRIC constituted a series of purposive acts that ‘carried’ (Fairclough, 2006; 70) both trust and mistrust to specific places in the financial system in order to protect the status of the financial experts recommending emerging markets investments