ABSTRACT
Strategic silence – as any communication strategy – is a form of indirect communication. Strategic silences are concrete applications of communicative silence. As strategic communication, public relations (PR) is essentially indirect communication. The failure of the discipline of PR to outline and integrate the category of silence into its theory, is partly due to the lack of a multi-layered macro-model of indirect communication. The stigma of silence rests on the legitimate democratic-liberal suspicion of the muzzling effects of oppression – of silencing communication. But there is also an ideological bias against silence, which serves the capitalist markets. As attribution theorists suggest, the metaphor of silence as malfunction has evolved from a specific socio-cultural way of thinking and acting into a naturalised worldview in global capitalism. An accidental hegemon in the history has attributed it to other groups as 'universal truth'.
