ABSTRACT
Emotion in public relations scholarship remains a neglected phenomenon. Using emotional labour theory as an interpretive framework, this chapter presents empirical findings from interviews with UK regional PR agency practitioners (PRPs) to explore how they experience, practise, and understand their professional relationships with agency managers, clients, journalists, and colleagues. The study, which took place between 2008 and 2011, involved sequential, in-depth interviews with six participants, producing a total of 12 interview transcripts, which were analysed thematically. Practitioners learned to become skilled emotion managers, highly attuned to the different expectations of agency directors, clients, and journalists. Both men and women practitioners were found to engage in identity work in which they discursively distanced themselves from the stereotypical aspects of PR work and aligned their performances and identities with a masculine notion of a profession. While the findings are limited to a sample of six participants in an English region, they imply that the structuring of agency PR takes place at the level of PR firms: indeed, I argue that the ‘professional project’ itself, including PR education, should recognise the importance of emotional labour, identity management, and gendered relational skills in agency PR professional relationships, as well as who is required to perform them.
