Enlightenment and Modernity

In northern and central Europe, public relations is rooted in the concepts of enlightenment and modernity. In German-speaking countries, it is still called Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, which is literally translated as “working in [the] public sphere” and can be defined as “working for the public, with the public, and in public.” In many other European countries, public relations is also referred to as an organization's obligation to “relate to [the] public sphere.” Öffentlichkeit is seen as an outcome and therefore, a quality of public communication in society; it means “which people talk how about [Page 296]what.” Although some normative elements can be found in these sociological approaches, this view differs from the community-building approach developed by Dean Kruckeberg and Kenneth Starck in 1988, who defined public relations in a normative way, as the social conscience of an organization that contributes to mutual understanding among groups and institutions and brings harmony to private and public policies. This definition reflects a premodern approach to public relations.

In many European public relations approaches, the concept of legitimation is used to describe how an organization, as the exponent of one of the institutions in the social system, coproduces public policies and thereby the empirical realization of institutions. An organization is legitimate as long as there is no public discourse concerning its legitimation. Although the social sciences have been used to define the concept, legitimacy is neither a moral nor an ethical principle but, rather, is related to the empirical issue of what is good and justifiable for the members of society. “The legitimacy of an organization is a measure of the extent to which the public and the public sphere at a given time and place find the organization sensible and morally justifiable” (Munck Nielsen, 2001, p. 19). It is therefore a fundamental empirical and not a normative approach and is rooted in a modernist approach to society.

Franz Ronneberger and Manfred Rühl stated in 1992 that, in managing the communications of an organization, management cannot avoid having an empirical function in the development of society. Ronneberger claimed earlier that clarifying the different perspectives in public discourse, thereby furthering the development of public opinion, is the most important role of public relations. Werner Faulstieg sees public relations as interaction in society itself: It makes something publicly known and creates public discourse. Thus, we may argue that communication management is part of the “social structure of public meanings” because of its social construction of community. In this way communication management is defined as part of the larger societal communication system, much like journalism and advertising. Most of the German and Danish public relations researchers, such as Hans-Jürgen Arlt, use such a social science paradigm, which can be seen as an outcome of modernist thinking.

At the end of the 18th century, reasoning was seen as a fundamental human activity for the first time. Descartes said, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, thus I exist) and emphasized individual power to create a rational world. The same idea was expressed by philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who explained that in a modern world people should no longer act as national subjects of the powerful but as citizens who are able to rule the world themselves by citizenship and rational thinking and acting. Traditional authority, according to George Ritzer in 2000, became unacceptable and “irrational, that is, contrary to human nature and inhibitive of human growth and development” (p. 12).

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