Reconfiguring the Risk Landscape: The Role of Public Relations

Abstract

Public relations literature seems narrow when it deals with the profession’s engagement with risk, mostly concentrating on questions of managing threats to organizations’ reputations. However, there is an opportunity for it to open itself to considering the theoretical and practicerelated issues arising from hazards and the broad spectrum of vulnerabilities publics see arising in today’s "risk society". There is room for reconfiguring the public relations landscape to better reflect the scope of contemporary risk anxieties and attempts to influence them through communication. This adjustment would produce an altered concept of public relations, one envisaging PR moving beyond advocacy of the interests of risk producers to contributing constructively to a more democratic and open approach to risk debates.