The Subaltern and Public Relations

The term subaltern, literally someone of a subordinate rank in the military or in the general workforce, was brought into political, cultural, and literary scholarly circles by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, who called groups of marginalized people the “subaltern classes.” These groups were outside the political framework and were not heard in public discourse.

A collective of postcolonial South Asian historians led by Ranajit Guha (1982) drew on the Gramscian term to build a whole genre of historiography called subaltern studies that focuses on [Page 892]history from the point of view of the subaltern classes as opposed to the mainstream histories of the elite.

In public relations scholarship, the subaltern studies perspective has opened up at least two lines of scholarly inquiry. First, it has exposed the disproportionate emphasis of mainstream public relations theory and practice on the needs of elite publics. Second, it has pointed to the active resistance of publics ignored or marginalized by the dominant discourse.

In highlighting public relations’ bias toward some publics, Debashish Munshi and Priya Kurian (2005) suggested that public relations

In a complementary piece, Munshi and Kurian (2007) talked about how public relations practices of corporate social responsibility too often privilege a dominant coalition of corporations, states, and financial institutions by failing to record the voice of the subaltern who deals with the economic, social, and environmental impacts of globalization.

In a critical exploration of the discourse of civil society in public relations literature, Mohan J. Dutta (2005) studied the “democracy promotion” strategies used in the Philippines, Chile, and Nicaragua and showed how these strategies were linked to the neocolonial agenda of expanding Western markets. He argued that the “capitalistic machinery” of civil society “works to exclude the subaltern” (p. 280). As Dutta and Mahuya Pal (2011) concluded, “those marginalized sectors of society who don't matter” to neocolonial agendas “are left out of the discursive space” (p. 214).

At the same time, subaltern studies also points to the potential of resistance from subaltern publics who “seek to transform oppressive global structures through globally-connected networks of global solidarities” (Dutta & Pal, 2010, p. 365).

Drawing on protest movements in different parts of the world, Dutta and Pal (2011) pointed out that it “is in these spaces of resistive practices that alternative imaginations of public relations as a field of engagement that imagines the possibilities of structural transformation … can become possible” (p. 205).

If public relations is seen “both as a hegemonic instrument and a tool for resistance” (Edwards, 2011, p. 29), the subaltern studies approach provides an intellectual framework to study not only the ways in which elite publics exercise their dominance in public relations practice but also how subaltern publics resist such dominance through their own narratives. Incorporating the subaltern studies framework in public relations theorizing can especially help bring greater nuance to studies of activist publics. Furthermore, drawing on subaltern perspectives could allow scholars to “look at the processes and practices involved in participation of marginalized subjects in countercultural movements that exist outside the realm of the very public sphere conceptualized by the civil society projects” (Dutta, 2005, p. 286). In sum, subaltern studies perspectives guide public relations researchers and practitioners to new ways of looking at business and society and make them more aware of the need to listen to voices of publics at every level.

...