Critical discourse analysis: A search for meaning and power

To be perfectly candid, our early scholarship was driven by a desire to criticize, as well as critique, public relations. With backgrounds in government and environmental activism, we shared political experiences that placed notions of power and resistance at the centre of our understanding of public relations. Yet, as we explored North American public relations scholarship, it became clear that the fi eld lacked theories and methods for analysing power relations. There really was no choice from the outset of our academic careers we had to seek out alternative explanatory concepts and research methods to theorize public relations. From our political perspectives, a very diff erent approach was called for that would open up the fi eld of public relations scholarship and practice for critique. Although the Excellence project off ered an idealized view of public relations and normative insights for best practice, it did not resonate with the more complicated, pluralistic practices that we had observed and engaged in. Why, we wondered, were discussions of politics and activism seemingly absent from public relations scholarship? Where were the interrogations of power and resistance that underpinned our own experiences of public relations? Further, we wanted to theorize public relations as a system of meaning production that reinforced or intersected with power relations. For this challenge, the rhetorical scholarship of Toth and Heath ( 1992 ) provided frameworks for exploring meaning-oriented perspectives and established conceptual starting points. The key task, then, was to determine how to introduce notions of politics, power and resistance into public relations scholarship that would intersect with the extant rhetorical work on meaning production and sense-making.