The processes-to-end(s) paradox of public relations

Abstract

Public relations researchers, theorists, and practitioners should integrate professional practice with research topics, themes, concepts, theories, contextual intelligences, strategic processes, moral judgment, and functional practices by addressing the end(s) that public relations serves in community. Disciplinary intelligences feature outcomes that yield to specialized knowledge-based, processually achievable, intellectually justifiable, strategically valuable, and morally serviceable practices that constitute culture, society, and community. In that communitarian spirit, this paper draws on established research streams and strategic process-to-ends paradigms to argue that unique knowledge serves to collaboratively assist the constitution of community as place in search for order. Public relations’ unique knowledge, constantly refined and critically guided, adds strategic, emergent force to human’s communitarian imperative. This communitarian rationale for the constitutive paradigm reasons that as individuals, organizations and communities engage to communicate they communicate to organize through narrative continuity. Organizations, individuals, and groups engage on the winding path of agonistic, emergently epistemological and ontological cultural and societal moments to seek order in the public interest. Reputations (identities), complexes of relationships (institutionalized identification) and textuality of narrative continuity empower community members co-manage resources in service of shared interests’ license to operate.