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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
As Greenwood has so well remarked, to offer a certain look belonging to the life sciences to the understanding of the public relations strategic and tactical function in organizations is not such a novelty. All the ideas belonging to what we could call a theoretical paradigm for PR centered in a more or less a systemic view, tend to import for the social organizations the metaphors of the natural world (Greenwood, 2010; Cutlip and Center 1952; Cutlip, Center, and Broom, 1994: Broom and Sha, 2013). It seems however that these authors have tended to see their contributes much more as reflections on the professional practices than proposals for a theoretical paradigm for Public Relations.
In the last decades of the 20th century a lot has been written in the social sciences in general, and not specifically in PR, that has had a great impact on the way we understand our lives and especially our human societies. We are thinking about works as the Social Construction of Reality as well as texts that belong to the realm of what we might call postmodernism. The impact, especially, of social constructivism (1966) in the area of the applied communications cannot be overridden. In this paper we’ll try to confront these ideas and offer a naturalistic approach to the field following some of the main arguments developed by John Searle (1995) in the Construction of Social Reality. His project, a naturalist even though not materialist project tends to answer a lot of issues about language, mind and society. In his last books he has offered some insights in what has been called a philosophy of society. A lot of his endeavour rests in a naturalistic account of language, first seen as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality, and secondly as the foundation of all institutional facts. Another important concept that Searle has rescued in his last writings is the gricean notion of speaker meaning. In PR we try to understand the “speaker” not as an individual but as an organization, being precisely one of the PR main tasks to be able to communicate on behalf of a group. It will be argued in this paper that it might be interesting to question how we understand the concept of language and communication in PR and it will be proposed a naturalistic approach to both the concept of language as well as to the concept of organizations, that is, social institutions. (Searle, 1995)
If we might agree with Wilson (2019,107) that “(...) only one of the multitude has reached the human level of intelligence and social organization. With this singular event, everything on the planet changed" we tend to have some difficulties in taking his proposals as the best explanation of our human societies, especially if we are thinking about cultural or moral issues. We might agree however with Searle (2013, 10347) “that is not to say that we cannot do more than we have done with Darwinian modes of explanation”.
Description
Comunicação Aceite. Congresso adiado para 2021, devido a COVID-19
Keywords
Public Relations Corporate Communication Naturalistic IPL/2019/MECC_ESCS
Citation
Eiró-Gomes, M., & Raposo, A. (2021). A “naturalistic” approach to Public Relations. Comunicação a apresentar na Conference "Evolutionary perspectives on Public Relations, Strategic Communication, and Organizational Communication: an interdisciplinary Conference", University of Vienna, Viena, Áustria.