The History of Public Relations Thought

Abstract

While the marketing discipline possesses a substantial body of historical research on marketing thought and theory, this is not the case with the PR discipline. A systematic overview on the development of PR theory from the 1970s to the 1990s has yet to be written (Nothhaft, 2011, p. 61). However, a broader interest in the epistemology and ontology of the discipline and in philosophical meta-disciplinary reflection has recently started to appear (Brown, 2012, 2015; Curtin, 2012; Radford, 2012).