Strategic interventions in sociology’s resource mobilization theory: Reimagining the #MeToo movement as critical public relations

Highlights

• Outlines the potential for engagement between critical public relations scholarship and theories of social movements.

• Reframes the Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT) of Sociology by infusing it with the key principles of critical PR.

• Provides insights into how social movements such as #MeToo can reach out to diverse and marginalized publics.

Introduction

In correcting mainstream public relations’ myopic focus on corporate and organizational interests, the emerging field of critical public relations (see e.g. L’Etang, McKie, Snow, & Xifra, 2016) has provided a much broader vision for public relations (PR) scholars and practitioners. Indeed, critical scholars have called for public relations to be situated “in the larger context of citizenship, the values and ethics that inform it and the attitudes and behaviours that characterize it” (Munshi & Kurian, 2016, p. 405) and to facilitate advocacy for activist-led social causes (e.g., Dutta, 2011; L’Etang, 2016a).

Making the case for public relations to be a vehicle for social change, we argue that critical PR scholarship can intervene in and reframe the Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), one of the most important sociological theories for the study of social movements. In recent years, some PR scholars (e.g., Bentele & Wehmeier, 2007; Edwards, 2018; Edwards & Hodges, 2012; Waymer, 2012), have engaged deeply with sociology. We extend this engagement by exploring how critical PR can refine RMT as a framework for analyzing activist publics in social movements. In particular, we assess the relevance of RMT in understanding contemporary digital movements and how it can be significantly re-theorized to deal with some of the most critical issues of our time.

RMT has been deployed previously to study social movements that have used social media as a tool for communicating with geographically spread out and politically constrained publics as, for example, in the case of the Arab Spring and the Tunisian Revolution (Breuer, Landman, & Farquhar, 2015; Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011). In such instances, digital technologies facilitated street protests and actual physical gathering of participants. In a study of the use of social media by community and voluntary organizations in New Zealand, Zorn, Grant, and Henderson (2013) refer to “resource mobilization chains” to show how processes of mobilizing a resource, whether tangible or intangible, are never unitary; rather “the ability to mobilize one resource directly influences the capacity to mobilize other resources” (p. 669). However, there has been little scholarly attempt thus far to evaluate RMT as an analytical framework to study movements that function primarily in the virtual world. We address this issue by focusing on the worldwide #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment to illustrate the potential for reimagining RMT by infusing it with critical PR scholarship.