Fantasy Theme Analysis Theory

Public relations executives must constantly deal with the challenge of divergent audience members who understand the world differently. When this happens, the challenge is to communicate with the audience(s) in such a manner that people with widely different backgrounds and understandings of the world all have the same understanding of the message. Ernest Bormann, originator of fantasy theme analysis theory (also called symbolic convergence theory), discusses precisely this concept. When a group of people are exposed to some communication stimulus, they often discuss it in such a way that they begin to share the same image of that stimulus. It is not a “fantasy” in the sense of dragons and fairy tales, but rather in the sense that members of a group come to share common perceptions of the world around them. Central to this theory is the notion that things that happen are not identical to our perceptions of what happens. For example, a sporting official may make a decision that is viewed as good by supporters of one team, bad by supporters of another, and differently still by audience members who have no particular allegiances. This article will give a general overview of fantasy theme analysis theory by explaining how it works in small groups and how it works in a mass public audience.

A small group might consist of anything from a sports team to a family to a project team in a corporate office place. Any small group will consist of members who think about the world differently. For example, consider a five-person project team at Corporation X. It is likely that both men and women will be represented on the team, and most corporations will have hired people from different races, ethnicities, regions, and religious groups. Each person's background does not go away when he or she joins the group, and many “team” projects will begin with a series of individuals doing related tasks. Although they would certainly be able to share memos, conversations, and other communicative forms with one another, group members would still enter the project as individuals who look at things in different ways.

This raises the question, however, of how some corporations and other groups form effective project teams that share a single goal and a single vision. As group members go about the process of meeting with one another and completing the other tasks that are necessary for accomplishing group technical goals, they begin to have stories in common. They might be able to tell stories of an unusual event that happened in a meeting or of success in meeting some objective, or even to make caricatures of a supervisor or some other figure they had all encountered. Each of these stories becomes a “fantasy chain.” With the telling of each of these stories, group members are better able to build some sort of common identity. Each “fantasy” (story or shared experience) then “chains” into another story until the group has enough in common to form a cohesive unit. This cohesive unit might be more effective in meeting whatever their objective is.

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