In this together? Postfeminist discourses of women PR agency leaders

My paper draws on a discourse analysis of interviews with seven senior level female PR professionals, mostly London (UK) based. Participants were questioned about their positions as women leaders in PR as part of a broader study examining professional relationships. Discourse analysis involves identifying ‘subject positions’ (Edley, 2001); that is, how discourse constructs the self in relation to others, shaped by ideologies such as the ‘beliefs, values and practices of a given society and culture’ (Eriksson and Kovalainen, 2016, p. 238). The subject positions of each participant were considered in relation to neoliberal ideology which is ‘increasingly understood as constructing individuals as entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating’ (Gill, 2007, p. 163), as well as the commercial values of the PR agency including the client’s expectations of service: a culture that is ‘necessarily shaped… by the demands and the logic of the market and what constitutes permitted behaviour within the range of discourses on offer’ (Yeomans, 2016, p. 86). I was particularly interested in (post)feminist discourses that PR practitioners claimed through their ‘interpretative repertoires’ (Edley, 2001). I identified two discursive repertoires: ‘tensions achieving a work-life balance’, ‘resistance/acceptance of corporate masculinities’. These discursive repertoires are critically explored in relation to the broader literature on gender and organisation studies (e.g. Lewis, 2014; Gill, Kelan and Scharff, 2017), as well as the relatively undertheorised literature on feminism and public relations (Fitch, 2015). In focusing on feminism and public relations, this paper builds on the work of Fitch (2015) who has, exceptionally, argued for postfeminism’s potential for critical insights into the rejection of feminism while embracing some of its features such as individual choice and personal responsibility. The paper also responds to L’Etang’s (2015) call for studies that contextualise ‘women’ s labour in public relations with broader socio-economic factors’, the dominant factor in this paper being neoliberal ideology and how this has tamed feminism in the 21st century.