Gender and public relations: Making meaning, challenging assumptions

The idea of compiling an edited collection around gender and public relations was seeded at the ‘Radical Public Relations: alternative visions and future directions’ roundtable held at the University of Stirling in 2008. This meeting of international scholars had a shared purpose to paradigmatically challenge dominant positivist understandings of public relations and open new research agendas by paying attention to the social and political contexts in which public relations is conducted. Thematically, the roundtable focused on the cultural effects and critical power relations in and between public relations and society. This book furthers these aims by exploring gender within and through public relations in order to generate new strands of knowledge that will challenge the status quo. As such, the intention is to open new avenues of research and new ways of thinking about public relations