Discursive Technology

Discursive technology refers to communication expertise focused on maintaining or transforming established social, economic, political, and cultural practices and power relations in organizations, social groups and institutions, or society at large. Judy Motion and Shirley Leitch (1996) featured the concept as part of the argument for applying critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical approach to examining the role of public relations in society. In this approach, practitioners are seen as discourse technologists, whose technical skills, such as research, campaign planning, message design, and issue framing, are deployed to maintain or transform discourses.

Public relations as discursive technology follows the critical thought developed by Michel Foucault and Norman Fairclough, two of the key figures in the field of CDA. Discourse is understood here as a form of social practice. Discourse refers to the view that the use of language in social contexts necessarily either reproduces established power relations and accepted regimes of truth (and knowledge) or challenges and resists them. Any instance of communication can be seen as an act of strategic engagement with the social world through representations of the world, social relations, and identities that are embedded in language. Critical discourse analysis recognizes that discourse is a mechanism for social domination and sets out to reveal how power and inequality are produced and reproduced through language.

Applying this approach to public relations has implications for how the practice is conceptualized as well as the type of topics chosen for scholarly investigation. At the theoretical level, established approaches to public relations built around concepts of propaganda, persuasion, two-way symmetrical communication, and the liberal democratic notion of the marketplace of ideas (an open public space where ideas can be publicly tested through debate) are problematized by the Foucauldian understanding of discourse. Kay Weaver, Judy Motion, and Juliet Roper (2006) articulated key points on which the discursive technology position is built.

First, behavioristic models of communication effects that underpin theories of persuasion do not fully explain public response to messages because they ignore the way in which language or discourse creates what can be perceived as rational and legitimate. Second, the notion fundamental to discussions of propaganda that truth exists outside language or discourse is shown as untenable; consequently, substantive distinctions between public relations and propaganda are obliterated. Third, accepting the Foucauldian conception of power both an oppressive and a positive, productive force offers public relations theory a more satisfactory insight into the way language use resonates simultaneously across individual, institutional, and societal levels. That communication or discourse is a strategic site for both domination and resistance is highlighted by proponents of the discursive approach as key to public relations inquiry and practice and also in global and international contexts.