Legitimacy for Sale: Constructing a Market for PR Consultancy

Företagsekonomiska institutionen Department of Business Studies Legitimacy for Sale Constructing a Market for PR Consultancy Anna Tyllström Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Sal X, Universitetshuset, Biskopsgatan 3, Uppsala, Tuesday, June 11, 2013 at 13:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Abstract Tyllström, A. 2013. Legitimacy for Sale: Constructing a Market for PR Consultancy. Företagsekonomiska institutionen. Doctoral thesis / Företagsekonomiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet 162. 235 pp. Uppsala. Categories are semantic objects that create order in markets. By categorization, market actors and products become comparable and understandable to various audiences. This thesis examines the construction of the product category of public relations (PR) consultancy in Sweden; a market that has arisen, become economically successful and gained recognition over the past thirty years, but which still lacks the legitimacy and clarity normally thought of as basic criteria of market categories. Using a semiotic framework and a mixed-method approach, I explore category construction 1) over time, and 2) in practice. In generalized terms, my findings suggest that market categorization processes cannot be understood without taking into account the characteristics of the product being categorized. Whereas ambiguity surrounding labels, denotations and connotations is normally regarded as incompatible with categorization, such fuzziness should be expected to be intrinsic in markets for professional service products like PR consultancy, where the product itself often thrives on, and continuous- ly creates, ambiguity. For instance, the lack of clarity and lack of legitimacy in the Swe- dish PR consultancy market are found to be both logical outcomes, and enablers, of visibilization and amalgamation, referring to PR consultants’ conscientious management of visibility, and tendency to span boundaries in constructing their services, respectively. Categorization in the traditional sense is further hampered by the dominant label of “PR consultancy” being stigmatized, i.e. suffering from “sticky” negative connotations. In the cultural context of Sweden, the emergence of a PR consultancy market has also meant commodification, i.e. the introduction of something hitherto not sold into a sphere of exchangeable things. In this process, PR consultancy seems to have gotten “stuck” between the sphere of salable and unsalable things, as the product is widely sold but continues to be contested across various audiences. Again, my analysis puts this difficulty of PR consultancy finding legitimacy in relation to the product category’s actual content, i.e. rendering legitimacy to others. Finally, I argue that the emergence of PR consultancy, by providing a market place for corporate legitimacy, might be understood as a case of a cognitive-cultural market logic on the rise, characterized by struggles for organizational visibility and semiotic sophistication. Keywords: PR consultancy, Legitimization, Legitimation, Social Construction of Markets, Public Opinion, Organization Theory, Market Categorization Anna Tyllström, Uppsala University, Department of Business Studies, Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. © Anna Tyllström 2013 ISSN 1103-8454 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-198847 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-198847) Acknowledgments Despite being a lonely endeavor, a doctoral thesis is indeed the result of communal effort. Many people have helped in shaping this book. My greatest gratitude go to my informants, busy people who have taken their time (in many cases with a very high hourly wage as an opportunity cost) to respond to puzzling questions. A few courageous individuals have even let me in on their daily activities, tolerated me following them around and spoken to me about what they were doing, and why. I have promised not to name you, but without you, this book would never have been possible. Thank you. My supervising committee also consists of four persons without whom this book would not be. Nils, if you hadn’t bumped into me outside McDonald’s at Norrmalmstorg in May 2008 and lured me back into academia, I might have been working elsewhere right now (as a consultant now, for all I know). Your intellectual curiosity is of a very rare kind; I do not know anyone to whom a beautiful argument matters so much, and academic seniority so little. You always took my arguments seriously, even when I said utterly stupid things. For this I thank you. Lars, you taught me how easy it is to make decisions when you just trust yourself enough to make them. Without your clear di- rections and extremely good judgment, I would have spent much more time hesitating, and less time writing. Roy, you offered me a second academic homestead in Alberta and in classical Canadian manner, you gave me important lessons in cultural bilingualism. Your love for words and sense of elegance in research has been truly inspir- ing. (Greimas’ semiotic model is the only piece of advice I ever got from you that was square!) Linda, I do not know how many pages you have read, how many editing tricks you have shared or how many times you have cheered me. Your confidence, in me and in time, has been astounding. I will hold your patience and diligence as an exam- ple. Thank you. Outside my committee, a few people have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help me. Stefan Jonsson has been generous with his time, and given incommensurable input, especially on the commen- surable stuff. Marie-Laure Djelic provided me with extremely detailed and wise comments on my final seminar; I hope you find traces of them in the next few hundred pages. Mike Lounsbury’s unambiguous feedback on an earlier version of this book made me stand my ground, but also rethink important choices. My colleagues at the O-sektor in Uppsala and in the MEMAC pro- ject have provided a fine research environment. The same goes for SCORE earlier and the SMORG group in Alberta – all different research contexts with different cultural codes. I am thankful for all of them. Handelsbankens Research Foundations have offered me valua- ble support to conduct research, both here and in Canada. Special thanks go my fellow PhD Students in Uppsala and in Al- berta. To my sisters in research, Noomi Weinryb and Liv Fries; we have shared thoughts and texts since I was in my teens! I hope we will continue doing so for a long time to come. To Lianne Lefsrud, whose grandparents left Småland and crossed the Atlantic some 90 years before I did; thank you for being my good friend and colleague Over There. To Emilia Kvarnström and Anna Ljung; the quality of the coffee, the pressure in the coffee machine and the timing of the arri- val of the fruit basket are not petty details when writing a dissertation. We know this. HAKKA (The Artist Association for Full-time Working Women) has been a candy store of ideas – an experimental arena to discuss them but also to perform them. My closest circle of family and family-like friends, consisting of various individuals (last time I counted there were twenty of you? Or twenty-two?) age 3 to 72, you know who you are to me: a cloud of love and deep roots. Finally, Rasmus – you have transcribed my interviews, formatted my figures, and made me countless gluten-free lunchboxes. This, in its own right, is excellent. But you also taught me something concep- tually more difficult to fathom than most of the theory presented in this book (which, as you readers will tell, is not always easy). Here it goes: Life is what is going on all the time. Even when say, writing up a thesis. Sounds easy? It is not. For sharing that life, and for bringing zen and passion into it, in equal portions each day, I thank you. (And for the gluten-free lunch boxes, of course.) Uppsala, May 2013 Anna Tyllström Contents Acknowledgments .................................................................................................... 3 List of Figures ........................................................................................................... 9 List of Tables .......................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 1. A Market Category Emerging .......................................................... 13 Lingering Problems: Lack of Legitimacy and Lack of Clarity................... 15 Why Markets Emerge ...................................................................................... 17 How Markets Emerge ....................................................................................... 24 Aim and Research Question ........................................................................... 27 Outline of the Thesis ....................................................................................... 28 Chapter 2. A Semiotic Approach to Product Categorization ......................... 31 How Products Are Made: Commodification as a Cultural process ......... 31 Product Categorization and Meaning ........................................................... 33 A Semiotic Model of Categorization ............................................................. 38 Chapter 3. Designing a Study of Product Categorization ............................... 45 Studying Meaning Construction .................................................................... 45 Data Collection and Analysis ......................................................................... 54 Media

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