Trading in Politics: Rhetorical Strategies of Sacrilizing Public Relations Services

• In Event: 118 - Section on Economic Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Cultural Analyses of the Economy

Abstract

We draw on Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred, which is deeply meaningful and cannot be touched by everyone, and profane, which serves instrumental purposes and can be accessed by anyone, to understand the contestation over the status of the evolving industry of professional public relations and lobbying (PR) services in Sweden. Public relations services can be understood as an expression of the historical trajectory of liberal capitalism in which many previously ‘sacred’ objects and practices, in this case influence over the governance of a democratic society, become increasingly ‘profane’ – that is subject to instrumental manipulation and available to be priced, bought and sold in the market. Empirically, we identify rhetorical strategies through which public relations professionals attempt to re-inject notions of sacredness in their practices. Re-sacrilizing PR services offers advantages to PR professionals, since it removes the practice from criticism and increases the autonomy and power of those performing it. However, sacrilizing a profane economic activity requires advocates to re-structure deeply anchored cultural codes that divide the world into the sacred and profane. We use structural semiotic and narrative analyses to identify three rhetorical moves through which sacralisation is attempted: 1) adopting sacred textual templates, 2) omitting profaneness, and 3) semiotic replacement, i.e. the act of transposing elements from sacred realms onto the profane thereby altering the cultural system within which they are anchored. We close by discussing the generalizability of this case for other industries and occupational groups.

Authors

• Anna Tyllström, Uppsala university

• Klaus Weber, Northwestern University