ABSTRACT
To understand the "relationship" an organization has with its publics, scholars have drawn from a range of disciplines, including interpersonal and inter-organizational relationships, psychology, and marketing. This chapter talks about disciplines ranging from linguistics to organizational psychology and critical discourse analysis. It presents a case where the practitioners of a local authority meet to discuss how they will communicate a crucial decision to the organization's public and how they would deal with an unhappy activist public, the residents' group, which was, at a certain point, labeled by one of the public relations practitioners as "the rebels". Practitioners cannot manage the relationship without abridging on the freedom of the other person or parties to define and manage their activities in the relationship. Thus, public relations' desire for mutually beneficial relationships with publics, especially if strategically planned and managed, undermines the very mutuality desired.
