Liberating the Intellectual Domain From the Practice: Public Relations, Activism, and the Role of the Scholar

Unlike practitioners, public relations scholars must consider unintended consequences of public relations practices at the societal and individual levels. By extending the domain in this way, logical paradoxes involving activism and nomothetic models of public relations may be resolved through the introduction of critical theory. Use of critical theory illuminates the role of invisible clients in setting the public relations research agenda and in truncating our intellectual vision. Critical theory suggests ways to study activism from a new perspective that would enhance practices and further the evolution of the intellectual domain.