ABSTRACT
Hutton (2001) justified his call for identifying PR’s core purpose in order to defend against the encroachment of marketing. Elsewhere, the field’s failure to find a commonly agreed definition for PR has often been seen as a major drawback in its quest for academic and professional legitimacy. Cropp and Pincus, for example, tackle “The mystery of public relations: Unraveling its past, unmasking its future” and what they term “the field’s fuzzy and continually gerrymandered boundaries” (2001, p. 189). Despite such assertions that PR needs a clearer definition to be effective, some confusion in the discipline is partly the result of a fight for its jurisdiction and future. Other confusion is partly a consequence of limited knowledge of the past of PR and of how versions of that past have been deployed by PR practitioners and theorists to serve current ends. Histories involve an account of live struggles.
