Anne Surma

The nebulous practices and tropes of ‘neoliberalism’, the rather loose political movement that has propelled the idea of ‘market society’, as well as commodified notions of the ‘individual’ and ‘freedom’, remain deeply embedded in contemporary public debates and cultural activity, including in public relations (Surma and Demetrious, 2018). Under neoliberalism, human subjects are normatively understood as rational and competitive market actors; private and public domains are reconceived as markets; and ethical questions are recast as principally monetised or calculable concerns. This is no more evident than in current debates about energy and climate and about refugees (Demetrious, 2019; Surma, 2018)...

On 9 December 2017, The Saturday Paper published ‘A Letter from Manus Island’, an essay and manifesto written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and refugee being held on Manus Island with hundreds of other men. Boochani writes in a radical, ‘poetic’ voice that makes the ordinary strange again, as he talks of love, the interdependence of human beings, and the strength to be derived from acts of solidarity. He challenges not only the prevailing vituperative tenor of contemporary public rhetoric, but also the dehumanising discourses within which humanitarian practices in Australia, and in the west more broadly, operate. This paper is written as a letter, in direct reply to Boochani’s own. It is inspired by Lilie Chouliaraki’s critique of contemporary practices of humanitarianism and the ways in which politics, the market and technology have transformed ‘the moral dispositions of our public life’. It explores the unsettling effects and provocative insights presented by Boochani’s poetic voice – the refugee as human subject and agent rather than victim or object of pity (or hate). The paper thus reflects on our conventional responses to the ethical call to solidarity from vulnerable subjects and imagines how we might respond otherwise.

In reaction to the opening up or redrawing of the world’s borders – virtual and real, material and ideological –the language of conventional western political communication seems to become increasingly dogmatic and even strident. In this paper, I argue that critical cosmopolitanism provides a framework within which students, teachers, researchers and practitioners can explore contemporary issues represented in the writing of literary fiction as a means of critiquing the limited and limiting vision of such political writing. I outline a critical cosmopolitan orientation to approaching, practising and reviewing writing practices in the global public domain, primarily an ethical and relational endeavour, alert to writers’ obligations to (often distant and unknown) others, as well as to the complexity and ambivalence of those relationships. The paper then explore show Lloyd Jones novel, Hand me down world, serves to trouble the text of the Australian Government’s ‘No to people smuggling’ campaign. As a means of disrupting its (non-fiction) other, fiction writing can offer us ethical, political and aesthetic insights into imagining alternative relations between subjects situated within and moving across shifting borders.

The notion that contemporary society as a knowledge economy is undergoing profound transformation has implications for the occupation of public relations, as well as the professional and personal identities of public relations practitioners. With the increasing erosion of once clear demarcations between people, time, space and communication technologies, public relations practitioners experience increasing tensions in their encounters between self and other, private and public, economic and cultural factors. We are interested in how women in public relations undertake identity work as a way of responding to these pressures, notably at the point where their home and work lives intersect. In interviews and focus groups conducted in Perth, Western Australia, women of different ages and career backgrounds related their experiences of juggling multiple roles including worker, mother, partner, friend, parent or grandparent. The findings reveal a set of complex identity constructions that indicate that some women are successful in separating professional and personal identities, while others are unable to resist work as an all-encompassing activity and as the marker of a meaningful identity. To develop as a public relations practitioner involves not only the social expectations of what it means to be a professional coupled with an individual’s presentation of themselves in public relations. It also involves a changeable relationship that expands over the whole life situation, including career trajectories and family life stages. A recognition of this set of circumstances prompts further research questions in relation to public relations and its specific influence on gendered, identity and relationship practices, and has significant implications for the profession more broadly.

This paper offers a critique of conventional approaches to so-called 'reputation management': the business function concerned with influencing, often through diverse communication practices, stakeholders' perceptions and estimation of an organisation's economic and social practices. Reputation is frequently described and valued (from management as well as from conventional public relations perspectives) in terms of an organisation's visibility: its capacity to be seen to be (doing) good through various textual media including corporate responsibility reports, speeches and presentations, news media reports, and so on. Hence there is a significant connection between rhetorical practices and reputation management. Drawing on cultural theorist Vivian Sobchack's (2004) work, I suggest that textual rhetoric can and should be more than a form of visibility. Rather, it can also be a crucial form of social and ethical practice, the meaning and value of which are dialogically negotiated by organisations and stakeholders. To this end, I argue that texts cannot simply manufacture or reflect reputation. Like language, reputation is not an objective entity, but is envisioned by ongoing practices and their negotiated and subjective evaluation by an organisation and its stakeholders. I draw on selected texts (including Nike's most recent corporate responsibility report) to support the discussion. 1

Murdoch University’s public relations program attracts a significant number of international students. Up to 60% of students in some units come from Singapore and Malaysia. While many spend at least one year in Australia as part of the three year degree, students in both countries may complete the entire degree offshore from 2007. The authors rewrote a second year public relations unit with the aim of making it more relevant for local and international students. This posed particular challenges in terms of pedagogical and conceptual approaches. For instance, there are cultural and linguistic issues which influence the ways students learn, and which have particular implications for a unit which expressly aims to consolidate students’ professional writing skills. There are also implications for public relations theory, which tends to be dominated by Western concepts and models, and public relations practice, which varies in different countries. This paper offers a reflection on the issues we addressed in the redevelopment of the unit, as well as some suggestions for future teaching and learning practices

It is familiar fact of contemporary practice in business ethics that many _business and public sector organizations have embraced the articulation of codes of ethics and conduct as indispensable to successful management. Increasing statistics for the number of businesses with a code of ethics1 indicate strong support for their importance. Ninety percent of Fortune 500 firms and almost half of US companies have codes, mission statements or practice statements (Brien 1996), While surveys of UK businesses suggest more than fifty percent of respondents have codes (Kitson and Campbell 1996). It is not so clear, however, how many of these organizations would endorse the view that ethics can be encapsulated in systematic, precise and determinate statements, or that codes can provide answers to ethical problems. In this paper we suggest that some of the practical difficulties associated with the implementation of codes of ethics may be due to certain misconceptions concerning the function and significance of codes. In the first section we explore the way in which the connection between the use of codes, and the requirement for uniformity and control of ethical behavior, is held in place by a number of assumptions relating to the 'function of codes. We explain how this framework for ethics tends to alienate code users…

This paper argues far a reconceptualisatian of the theory and practice ofprafessianal writing, thraugh an examination of the Australian Government's written submission to the Senate Inquiry in response tothe Bringing Them Home report. The Government's text is shown to function os a corrective rather than as a reply, and thus to distract the dialogue about reconciliation in Australia. The paper suggests that Derrida's notion ofiterability can be harnessed in the process ofre.evaluating the principles, aims, and functions ofprofessional writing.

This paper sets out to claim the discipline of professional writing as a legitimate and significant area of pedagogy, analysis and research, and not merely (as it is often crudely misperceived or, in the current climate, legitimised) as a market-driven, instrumental field, whose raison d’etre is simply to teach students rules, formulae and mnemonics for writing pithy documents that ‘sell’. Professional discourse, now proliferating in the print and electronic media, regularly interweaves a complex of languages - those of specialist and public/general knowledges, of information and persuasion, of public and community relations, of law and regulation, of citizenship and morality. It seems to me to be crucial that we provide a space for students to develop as critical writers and readers of those cultural texts, which to such a great extent regulate and organise our environments of government, industry, institution, community and home.