As public relations (PR) scholarship matures, so does its historical imagination. For decades, the historiography of PR has been structured around a relatively stable canon: Anglo-American pioneers, corporate institutionalization, progressive professionalization and the gradual refinement of techniques and ethics. This narrative has been generative, providing coherence, identity and pedagogical clarity. But the narrative has also produced silences because it has elevated certain actors while marginalizing others, foregrounded particular national trajectories while rendering alternative developmental paths peripheral and treated Western professional logics as implicit benchmarks against which all other histories are measured.
This special issue contributes to an ongoing and necessary project: the decentering of the PR canon. The contributions gathered in this special issue of the Corporate Communications: An International Journal (CCIJ) collectively demonstrate that PR did not emerge along a single evolutionary line, nor did it crystallize uniformly around Anglo-American models of corporate communication. Instead, PR developed within diverse political economies, ideological systems and cultural formations. These contexts did not merely adapt a pre-existing model; they reshaped, reinterpreted and in some cases redefined what PR meant and what it was for.
Decentering the canon is not an act of revisionism for its own sake. Foundational histories have often traced the profession's development through US institutionalization, corporate expansion and the consolidation of professional associations (Cutlip, 1994; Lamme and Russell, 2009). Decentering the canon is, thus, a methodological and theoretical intervention. Historiography is never neutral. What we choose to archive, celebrate and teach becomes a source of symbolic capital within the field. Canon formation confers legitimacy on certain actors, institutions and conceptual frameworks. As a result, writing history is also an act of field construction. To revisit and broaden the historical record is therefore to redistribute recognition and to recalibrate the intellectual coordinates of PR scholarship.
This call to decenter the canon builds on longstanding debates within PR historiography. Scholars have long argued that the dominant Anglo-American narrative risks flattening the complexity of the field's global development (L'Etang, 2008; McKie and Munshi, 2007). In my previous editorial on the history and professionalization of PR, I argued that historical inquiry is central to understanding how professional legitimacy is constructed and institutionalized (Topić, 2024). Yet professionalization itself has often been narrated through Western institutional logics, accreditation systems and corporate expansion. To revisit history now is, therefore, not simply to expand the archive but to interrogate the power structures embedded in canon formation and to question whose trajectories have been normalized as the profession's “natural” evolution. From a Bourdieusian perspective, canon formation functions as an accumulation of symbolic capital, where certain actors, national traditions and institutional pathways acquire legitimacy through repetition and citation, while others remain structurally peripheral (Bourdieu, 1994).
Several contributions in this issue showcase how PR took shape within non-Western and non-liberal democratic contexts. Research on Saudi Arabia demonstrates how the development of PR was intertwined with oil economies, state formation and Western corporate influence yet unfolded according to local political and cultural dynamics. The Yugoslavia case reveals a distinct “third way” socialist model in which communication was embedded within self-management and decentralized governance structures. These cases challenge the assumption that PR is inherently tied to liberal capitalism or that professionalization necessarily follows a Western trajectory. Similarly, examinations of African internal communication and Thai tourism campaigns reveal how state and organizational communication operated within postcolonial and nation-branding frameworks that cannot be reduced to imported templates. These histories foreground the negotiation of identity, sovereignty and representation in contexts marked by geopolitical asymmetries. In this sense, decentering PR history parallels broader calls within the social sciences to provincialize dominant knowledge systems and to recognize how intellectual authority is geographically structured (Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007). In doing so, they unsettle the notion that Anglo-American theory provides a universal explanatory lens.
Even within European contexts, the picture is far from homogeneous. Analyses of Greek nongovernmental organizations and Turkish trade union mobilization show that PR has long been deployed as a tool of activism, social change and worker solidarity. These histories complicate the dominant corporate narrative of PR as primarily managerial or reputation-oriented. They demonstrate that strategic communication has been equally central to collective action, democratic contestation and the shaping of public spheres from below.
Historical work on wartime propaganda and morale building further destabilizes comfortable binaries between PR and propaganda. The entanglement of persuasion, education, morale management and ideological advocacy reminds us that the moral boundaries of the profession have always been contested. Such cases do not simply recount episodes from the past; they showcase enduring tensions in contemporary debates about trust, legitimacy and the ethical foundations of strategic communication.
Taken together, these studies reveal that PR has never been a singular project. Rather, it has been a field structured by competing logics: economic, political, cultural and activist. In Bourdieusian terms, PR can be understood as a field in which different forms of capital – economic, social, cultural and symbolic – are accumulated and contested (Bourdieu, 1986; Topić-Rutherford et al., 2025). The canon that has historically dominated PR historiography privileged certain configurations of capital: corporate influence, managerial authority and professional accreditation rooted in Western institutions. By contrast, the histories assembled in this issue foreground alternative configurations: activist credibility, state authority, postcolonial identity, gendered pathways to influence and labor mobilization.
The inclusion of a “her-story” perspective in this issue further illustrates the necessity of decentering. The examination of Caroline Hood's career demonstrates how women navigated structural constraints and mobilized social and cultural capital to build professional legitimacy in mid-20th-century PR. Such accounts complicate the founder-centric narrative that has long characterized PR history. They reveal how professional authority was constructed relationally, often within gendered hierarchies that shaped access to opportunity and recognition.
Decentering the canon also invites reflection on misalignment within the field. Contemporary scholarship frequently documents perceived gaps between normative ideals of PR and lived professional realities, between ethical aspirations and organizational pressures, between relational rhetoric and instrumental practice, etc. Such tensions have been discussed in relation to legitimacy, professional identity and organizational pressures within the field (e.g. Edwards, 2018; Topić, 2024). Historical analysis shows that such misalignments are not new anomalies but structural features embedded in the field's development. Activist campaigns, state propaganda efforts, corporate image management and professionalization initiatives each reveal tensions between public interest, organizational survival and political power. Recognizing these historical continuities enables a more nuanced understanding of present-day legitimacy struggles.
Importantly, decentering does not entail rejecting established narratives altogether. Rather, it requires situating them within a broader constellation of histories. Anglo-American developments remain significant, but they no longer function as the unmarked default. They become one trajectory among many. This shift transforms comparative research from a model-export framework into a dialogue among plural histories.
The implications extend beyond historiography. Teaching PR history through a decentered lens reshapes how future practitioners understand their profession. It challenges the implicit assumption that legitimacy is secured through alignment with Western professional standards alone. It encourages recognition that strategic communication practices are always embedded within specific socio-political contexts. It also invites students and scholars to see PR not merely as a technical discipline but as a socially situated practice deeply entangled with power, identity and governance.
For research, a decentered historiography opens new agendas. It calls for archival work in underexplored regions, oral histories that recover marginalized voices and comparative analyses that resist teleological narratives of professionalization. It encourages methodological pluralism and theoretical experimentation. By integrating perspectives from sociology, political economy, postcolonial studies and gender analysis, PR history can become a site of conceptual innovation rather than a repository of descriptive accounts.
Decentering the canon also requires reflexivity regarding academic gatekeeping itself. Journals, citation networks and language hierarchies shape which histories circulate internationally and which remain locally bounded. If PR history is to become genuinely plural, editorial practices, review processes and research collaborations must similarly expand beyond established centers of scholarly production.
As Editor-in-Chief of CCIJ, I am delighted to host scholarship that expands the intellectual horizons of the field. The articles in this special issue do more than document national cases. They collectively demonstrate that PR history is not a settled archive but an evolving conversation. By decentering the canon, they redistribute symbolic capital within the discipline and affirm that legitimacy in PR scholarship depends on pluralism rather than uniformity.
The future of PR history lies not in consolidating a single narrative but in embracing multiplicity. The field's past is richer, more contested and more globally interconnected than previously acknowledged. To recognize this is not merely to correct omissions; it is to strengthen the analytical foundations of the discipline itself. In decentering the canon, we do not fragment the field; we make it more complete.
