Reviewer

Burton St. John III, University of Colorado-Boulder

Author: Kevin L. Stoker
Publisher: Routledge, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-138-67194-2
Number of pages: 172
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315616650

In my over 30 years of professional involvement with public relations as both a practitioner and then an academic, one thing that has stood out is the continual drive for public relations to “prove” itself as a meaningful contributing force to clients, society, and the people who work within the field. This has always struck me as slightly odd – that is, discourse about similar fields like marketing, advertising, and journalism has simply not hit such a chord of desperation. Relatedly, Kevin L. Stoker, a professor and director of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, provides a significant insight: public relations’ drive to assert its value operates within paradox. That is, there is always a contravening element to what public relations says it does. When it claims it helps build relationships between organizations and publics, it inherently fails to acknowledge that it 1) does not have control on how those stakeholders see the nature of such a claimed relationship, and 2) contradicts itself by excluding other audiences that may be meaningful. Together, these elements point to a paradox endemic to core claims that public relations makes about its worth, says Stoker. It is apparent that Stoker is pointing to public relations experiencing a disorientation of purpose that is too often unacknowledged.