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This article re-examines debates about transparency in journalism by using a sociological framework that analyses how transparency is held in a dynamic tension with secrecy. I use a specific empirical case study as the grounding for my analysis and then proceed to expand its scope to consider significant developments in transparency in the media. I take as my case study the relationship between UK journalists and public relations (PR) practitioners. Specifically, I analyse the ways in which press releases are shaped by PR practitioners, targeted at journalists, and are taken up by journalists in a UK news media context in which such ‘information subsidies’ may be becoming ever more prevalent. Reframing transparency as one element in a compound phenomenon (the secrecy−transparency dynamic), I argue that practices of both transparency and secrecy are not merely situated within social contexts but are active in creating society and social relations. This approach pays close attention to how power operates in this shifting dynamic and offers new challenges for thinking about journalism’s role in society.

This chapter examines the multi-layered and shifting relationship between promotional industries, capitalism and market society through the analytic lens of economic ‘value’ and social ‘values’. Rather than offering an overarching account of the media’s interface with capitalism, market society and consumer culture this chapter focuses on the role of promotional industries in shaping changes in the relationship between ‘value’ and values’, and the implications of such changes for promotional industries such as advertising, marketing, branding and public relations. The chapter argues that shifts in the ways in which economic value interfaces with a range of social values creates a new playing field which impacts upon the work of promotional industries in significant ways while simultaneously increasing the social, economic and political impact of promotional industries’ work.

This book investigates the relationship of secrecy as a social practice to contemporary media, news cultures and public relations. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s theorisation of how secrecy produces a ‘second world’ alongside the ‘obvious world’ and creates and reshapes social relations, Anne Cronin argues for close analysis of the PR industry as a powerful vector of secrecy and an examination of its relationship to news cultures. Using case studies and in-depth interviews, as well as recent research in media and cultural studies, sociology, journalism studies and communication studies, the book analyses how PR practices generate a second, shadow world of the media sphere which has a profound impact on the ‘obvious world’. It interrogates both the PR industry’s and news culture’s role in shaping social relations for a digital media landscape, and those initiatives promoting transparency of data and decision-making processes.

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political as power relations, party politics, and political projects such as marketisation and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of a depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated, and the more compromised practitioners may feel.

Record numbers of academic staff, particularly from under-represented groups, are considering alternative careers, frequently citing “neoliberal” shifts contributing to overwork, burnout, and precarious positioning as emblematic of higher education (HE) in “crisis” (McKenzie, 2021). This qualitative, interdisciplinary cultural sociology project foregrounds the experiences of academic staff in early 21st-century English HE with the aim of bringing new understanding to the continued prevalence of inequalities in this environment. Data was generated in 2017-18 through semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of 29 academics, highlighting the role of identity in who ‘fits the world’, ‘blossoms’, or ‘dies’. The research explores systemic inequalities and power, which are considered through the lens of belonging in relation to ideals and values circulating in English HE culture stemming from both traditional “ivory tower” and contemporary “neoliberal” cultures. Data analysis informed three core concepts—“unbelonging”, the “proper academic”, and “legibility zones”—and proposes that to avoid a sense of unbelonging an individual must be legible as a proper academic by achieving particular forms of success across various sites of belonging, which are divided into three zones: institutional/administrative, ideological/philosophical, and individual/biographical. The thesis argues that some belonging sites bind into over-arching and inter-related narratives, creating cumulative ideals that are profoundly exclusionary but not always or entirely “neoliberal”. One such narrative is that of the “true academic” or “academic’s academic”, a sub-type of the proper academic constructed through the core beliefs “academia is a vocation”, “knowledge is inherently good”, and “proper academic practice is single-minded and altruistic”. Together these contribute to the widespread but subtle cruelties of unbelonging and illegibility, fostering individual anxiety and (re)producing systemi

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political as power relations, party politics, and political projects such as marketisation and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of a depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated, and the more compromised practitioners may feel.

This article offers a sociological account of how we might analyse the relationship between contemporary practices and discourses of secrecy on the one hand and those of transparency on the other. While secrecy is often framed in popular and political discourses as the antithesis of transparency, in reality their relationship is more complex and co-constitutive than may initially appear. The article argues that understanding the interface between secrecy and transparency as a socially embedded dynamic can offer public relations scholarship productive avenues for both theoretically-oriented research and empirical studies. In its role in the management of the secrecy−transparency dynamic, PR plays a significant role in actively creating social relations. This article aims to provide resources for assessing the strength of this dynamic in acting to structure social, political and economic relations, and offers new perspectives on how techniques employed to manage the secrecy−transparency dynamic – including public relations – are both embedded in such relations and act to shape them.

This article offers a sociological account of how we might analyse the relationship between contemporary practices and discourses of secrecy on the one hand and those of transparency on the other. While secrecy is often framed in popular and political discourses as the antithesis of transparency, in reality their relationship is more complex and co-constitutive than may initially appear. The article argues that understanding the interface between secrecy and transparency as a socially embedded dynamic can offer public relations scholarship productive avenues for both theoretically-oriented research and empirical studies. In its role in the management of the secrecy−transparency dynamic, PR plays a significant role in actively creating social relations. This article aims to provide resources for assessing the strength of this dynamic in acting to structure social, political and economic relations, and offers new perspectives on how techniques employed to manage the secrecy−transparency dynamic – including public relations – are both embedded in such relations and act to shape them.