Popular Culture and Social Change: The Hidden Work of Public Relations
by Kate Fitch, Judy Motion

This brand-new book opens up critical scholarship on public relations in that it moves beyond corporate understandings and perspectives to explore alternative and eclectic communicative cultures, in part to consider a more optimistic conceptualisation of public relations as a resource for progressive social change. Fitch and Motion identify the ways in which public relations both draws on and influences the production of popular culture by creating, promoting and amplifying particular narratives and images. The chapters in this book range across topics such as fashion, race activism, protest music, aesthetic labour and zombies to consider how public relations creates popular cultures that are deeply compromised and commercialised, but at the same time can be harnessed to advocate for social change in supporting, reproducing, challenging or resisting the status quo.

Drawing on critical and sociocultural perspectives, Popular Culture and Social Change is an important resource for researchers, educators and students exploring public relations theory, strategic communication and promotional culture. It investigates the entanglement of public relations, popular culture and social change in different social, cultural and political contexts in order to better understand the (often subterranean) societal influence of public relations activity.

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