ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the way in which strategic tools of public engagement and public participation are co-opted into the agendas of private capitalist structures, serving private interests of profiteering. It interrogates engagement, specifically exploring the ways in which communication is framed as public participation within top-down privatised systems, precisely to accomplish the strategic goals of mainstream private organisations. The chapter articulates public engagement as a private resource, attending to the interplays of power and control in shaping the discourses of public engagement. It argues that to the extent public engagement is situated within the ambits of private capital, initiated, conceptualised, designed, implemented and evaluated by private organisations, public engagement communicatively inverts the rhetoric of serving public interest to privatise these interests as profitable resources. It also interrogates the role of engagement within the communication management literature as well as its location within the dominant agendas of communication management to serve organisational objectives, converting public sites into private opportunities.
