Public Sector

Simply, the public sector is that part of society that is not the private sector. Or, conversely, the private sector is that which is not inherently public. The private sector is generally thought about as private decisions and actions by individual and corporate persons. Thus, in contrast, the public sector is that which is not private, that which deserves to be done and thought because it is in the interest of all people—natural or artificial. In that balance between the public and private sectors, a crucial nexus is the point at which the private violates public expectations and public interests. Likewise, theorists are concerned at which point the public sector intrudes incorrectly into private activities, choices, and preferences. Knowing and managing this balance is one of the tasks of public relations practitioners and is, perhaps, the most profound rationale for the profession and its practice.

Public relations theory building over the past several decades has generated a considerable body of literature suggesting new perspectives and processes for public relations. A key concept in this theory building has been the questioning of the definition of publics and the public as they affect public relations in normative and positive theories and models. James E. Grunig has argued, “A positive model is a theory that describes and explains how public relations is practiced. A normative model explains how public relations should be practiced” (2001, p. 13). Perceptions about “publics” and “the public” in both types of empirically based and normative theories has a significant impact on the understanding of how public relations should be practiced and how public relations is practiced.

In an opening discussion in their textbook This Is PR, Doug Newsom, Judy Vanslyke Turk, and Dean Kruckeberg quoted Lucien Matrat's perspective on public relations. Matrat said,

Establishing public relations policies means, first, harmonizing the interests of an enterprise with the interests of those on whom its growth depends. The next step is putting these policies into practice. Newsom, Turk, and Kruckeberg moved the argument by quoting Matrat further: “This means developing a communication policy which can establish and maintain a relationship of mutual confidence with the firm's multiple publics” (2004, p. 2). This perspective on multiple publics is reflective of much of the scholarly definitions of public relations. Individually, these groups are defined as publics. Much of the research and practice has been focused on defining the precise nature of these groups (publics) and to effectively relate with them and to move away from the concept of the public. The dominance of the “publics” perspective is illustrated by Scott Cutlip when he stated “there is no such thing” as the general public (1994, p. 360).

In 2001, critical scholars Shirley Leitch and David Neilson took issue with the dominance of the perspective and deconstructed the basic theory of publics and presented a revised version of the concept. Leitch and Neilson deconstructed the concept that there is no general public by using the theoretical frameworks of Habermas (1962/1991). In Habermasian terms, there is “the public” and “the public sphere” (Leitch & Nielson, 2001, p. 130). From this perspective, “The public is made up of all the citizens of a nation. The public sphere, as distinct from the private sphere, is the ensemble of public spaces available for debate between citizens” (2001, p. 130). Leitch and Neilson suggested that these public spaces may be a community meeting or a public chat room on the Internet. Leitch and Neilson argued that public relations theory and model building that is centered on the concept of publics is heavily weighted in favor of organizations and attempts to abandon the concept of the [Page 705]democratic processes within society. This, they stated, is detrimental to society and also may be detrimental to the very organizations that marginalize or ignore the discussions among members of the society.

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