ABSTRACT

A public relations theory would not be researchable without the premises and preconditions of epistemic and methodic theories. Reflecting on world society’s public relations, embedding all possible public relations subsystems, this chapter views methodological and epistemological public relations problems from the perspective of a system/environment theory-complementary to a functional analysis-both based on a human communication theory (Ronneberger & Rühl, 1992; Holmström, 1996). I do not believe in a universal public relations perspective. Instead, public relations is thought of as one of world society’s everyday public communication systems, with a special function, to distinguish it from journalism, advertisement, and propaganda, epistemically reconstructed with the help of system/environment theory, and methodically controlled with the method of functional equivalence (Luhmann, 1995, Chapter 1). We start off sketching public relations lay perspectives and professional perspectives, before emphasizing scholarly perspectives.