A Sociologist’s Perspective on Public Interest Communication

A month ago, May 28-30, 2024, I attended the Public Interest Communication Summer Institute. While it was an interdisciplinary conference and there were other people there from the field of Sociology, it was grounded in the field of Communications. I’ve already written in an earlier post about what we can learn from it in terms of organizing good conferences. In this post, I want to focus on what I learned from it as a sociologist and what I think a sociological perspective could bring to the table that seemed missing from the communications-centered perspective.

Synthesizing the various definitions that presenters gave of it, public interest communications (PIC) is a field that uses strategic communication grounded in empirical research and science to achieve sustained, positive social change beyond the interests of any one social group. It’s related to public relations (PR), but while PR focuses on improving the profitability of corporations, PIC is focused on long-term improvements to the common good.

I learned a lot from the presenters and my fellow workshop participants. Because PIC is interdisciplinary, many people present were engaging with things I don’t usually think about as a sociologist. One striking example of this is elaboration likelihood model (ELM) theory, which deals with cognitive dimensions of communications, something well outside most sociologists’ bailiwick. As explained by conference presenter Spiro Kiousis, you have to assess which target audiences are going to engage in central processing—that is, who will think deeply about the issue and your message—and which are going to engage in peripheral processing—that is, who will engage in heuristic shortcuts to think quickly about the issue. Different communication strategies will not only appeal to people of different social locations, ideologies, etc. but people who will give different cognitive bandwidth to your message.

There were also interesting discussions of applying social-scientific methods to help measure the success of individual campaigns, something I rarely hear sociologists explore.

At the same time, as a sociologist who works on questions of power, political economy, and movement strategy, I felt like there were a number of things that the PIC framework doesn’t sufficiently address.

The first thing is values. After a conversation about the definition of PIC in one of the workshops I attended, I raised the issue that while there was mention of the “public interest” and “positive social change,” there wasn’t any clear articulation of what those things are. Indeed, to some degree, the definition of PIC tries to dodge the question of values by emphasizing working for goals “grounded in research and science.” While empirical, social-scientific research is valuable in helping us to understand the causes and potential solutions to various social problems, how do we decide what constitutes a social problem? The consensus among sociologists is that what we consider a social problem is socially constructed—that is, it is ultimately a matter of values. One of the speakers gave the example that there is extensive evidence that widespread gun ownership increases violence instead of making people safer. But a gun-rights proponent could argue that gun ownership is necessary for freedom and violence is a necessary price to pay for such freedom. And how do we define freedom? Ultimately, any discussion of working for social change is grounded in values and we need to have explicit discussions of those values such as social justice.

The second thing that the PIC framework leaves under-discussed is a movement or campaign’s organizing strategy. One of my mentors in graduate school, @Charlotte Ryan, is fond of saying that you don’t have a communications strategy without an organizing strategy. (See her book Beyond Prime Time Activism.) It’s essential to communicate clearly, but you must know how your message interacts with your efforts to mobilize people. Many of the presenters at the conference certainly mentioned issues of organizing and coalition-building, but none of the ones I heard explored the issue in depth. But organizing is important. Among other matters, @Marshall Ganz shows in his study of the United Farm Workers, Why David Sometimes Wins, that how we organize matters. Specifically, a leadership with diverse life experiences and bodies of expertise and that is democratically accountable to their grassroots base generally engages in better strategic decision-making than a top-down and socially homogeneous leadership.

Finally, the PIC framework doesn’t explicitly discuss issues of power—how movements build their capacity to exercise power and the tactics they need to use to do so. A good communications strategy is certainly central to being able to exercise power effectively. If you can set the agenda by making new issues part of public discourse, that is a victory. If you can make your particular framing of the issue the center of public discourse (instead of your opponents being able to define the terms of the debate), that is an even bigger victory. But neither of these things, in and of themselves, bring about systemic transformation or even mildly reformist policy changes. At a bare minimum, you will need to effectively lobby policy-makers—which means not only clearly communicating with them but also doing things like bringing the pressure of organized groups of voters to bear. In my own research on the anti-sweatshop movement, I found that student activists usually could not pressure college administrators into adopting pro-labor rights codes of conduct for the companies that make licensed apparel without more confrontational tactics such as sit-ins or hunger strikes. Successful communication is central to staging a sit-in of an administration building while retaining popular support on campus. But a sit-in is effective because it disrupts the functioning of the school and coerces the administration into making concessions.

I see PIC as having important lessons for sociologists—but sociologists as also being able to enrich PIC.