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Enacting Collaborative Public Relations 1

Enacting Collaborative Public Relations Through Emancipatory Politics

And Discursive Closure: A Structuration Analysis Of An Alliance For The Mentally Ill Organization

Stream 11: Communication and Collaboration

Zoraida R. Cozier

Purdue University

Purdue University San Marco California


NOTE: The author would like to acknowledge Diane F. Witmer, Dennis Mumby, Marifran Mattson, and Deborah Dillon for their guidance and insightful comments on this study. The author would also like to thank the participants of the study. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Zoraida R. Cozier, 1345 Corte Lira, San Marcos, CA 92069. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to [email protected]. A contact phone number is (760) 597-9672. The theoretical developments and findings reported in this paper are original and contribute to the body of knowledge in public relations and have not been published previously. The article is based on Cozier's dissertation directed by Diane F. Witmer, associate professor of communication at CSU, Fullerton.


Abstract

Collaborative public relations enforces a dominant ideology as it simultaneously integrates and conceals alternative ideologies. A structuration analysis (Giddens, 1979, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1993) drawn from a political lens (Deetz, 1992, 1995; Mumby, 1987, 1989, 2001) examined a National Alliance for the Mentally Ill's (NAMI) affiliate's boundary spanning processes as it executed its communicative role. The communicative role aims to balance the members' primary interests with the interests advanced by alternative and resistant ideologies (Cozier, 2001). The six-month ethnographic case study demonstrated that COAMI's communicative practices reinforced and constrained COAMI's "emancipatory politics" (Giddens, 1991). Members managed systems contradictions through forms of "discursive closure" (Deetz, 1992). An organization's collaborative public relations requires a degree of permeability governed by "access points" (Giddens, 1990).


The concept of "collaboration" is prominent in the public relations literature

(see for example, Grunig, 2000; Spicer, 1997), but it has not yet been fully explicated as a process achieved through communicative practices. Communicative practices and concomitant ideological tensions have been treated as unquestioned resources, despite the fact the effective negotiation of organization-public relationships hinges upon collaboration amidst divergent ideological discourses. Studies have demonstrated that collaboration is imbued with contradictions and tensions (Harter & Krone, 2001; Kirby & Krone, 2002; Medved, Morrison, Dearing, Larson, Cline, & Brummans, 2001).

Collaboration is a "key element of democratic societies" that facilitates symmetrical public relations (Grunig, 2000). Collaboration entails "communication that allows all participants a say in the creation of meaning" (Spicer, 1997, p. 252), and it has the potential to enhance public participation, understanding, and satisfaction (Kent & Taylor, 2002). The idea of symmetrical public relations presumes that collaboration and conflict are mutually exclusive (see Grunig, 2000). For instance, collaboration can not be achieved if an organization addresses one public's interests at the cost of another public's interests (Leichty, 1997).

Organizational members espouse divergent, and at times, conflicting ideologies that implicate the organization's public presentation. Ideologies are deeply-rooted structures that have the transformative potential to frame actors’ “horizons of relevance” (Schutz, 1967) by recasting meaning systems in ways that serve vested interests and implicate members’ self- and collective identities (Cozier, 2001). Ideologies are systems of representation that in turn, enact reification, hegemonic control, and mask contradictions to serve sectional interests (Giddens, 1979, 1993; Hall, 1985; Mumby, 1987, 1988, 1989).

An analysis of members' contestation of ideologies provides insight into an organization's public relations. Drawing from structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), Cozier (2001) conceived of public relations as a communicative force in society that serves to reproduce and/or transform an organization's dominant ideology, rather than solely adapt to a stakeholder group or public. Public relations communication entails the members’ negotiation of dominant and resistant ideologies that emerge at


both the interactional and institutional levels. The communicative role aims to balance the members’ primary interests with the interests advanced by alternative and resistant ideologies.

A structurationist approach emphasizes communicative practices involved in system reproduction. Communication is both the process and product of collaborative public relations. Members' communicative practices constitute collaborative public relations, which, in turn, generates the conditions and relationships that influence the members' communicative practices. Consequently, these members reproduce or transform the organization's public relations.

This study discovered how an organization's collaborative public relations both liberated and subverted publics, as it entailed advocacy and conflict-management strategies and tactics. I employed a structurationist analysis (Giddens, 1979, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1993) within a political orientation (Deetz, 1992, 1995; Mumby, 1987, 1989, 2001) to examine an organization's boundary spanning processes as it executed its communicative role. A structuration analysis explores how organizational members attain a sense of intersubjectivity or how members negotiate meanings, particularly "ideological meaning systems" (Deetz & Mumby, 1990; Mumby, 1989). Giddens’ works (1979, 1984, 1993) proposed that actors, as knowledgeable agents, continually negotiate meaning (signification), enforce power (domination), and constitute a normative order (legitimation) as they interactionally and institutionally create and sustain organizational environments. Furthermore, an "ideology critique" (Giddens, 1979) exposes the dominance relations and the ways that ideologies position self- and collective identities.

A brief description of the case study is presented prior to a discussion of the findings and implications.

Method

Procedures

Purpose of Study

This paper presents partial results of an ethnographic multi-site case study of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill's (NAMI) public relations efforts. NAMI is a social/political movement, comprised of over 1400 affiliates, that aims to eradicate the stigma of mental illnesses and advocate for clients or individuals with mental illnesses. More specifically, this naturalistic study explored how members of the Client-Oriented Alliance for the Mentally Ill's (COAMI), a NAMI affiliate, legitimated particular conceptions of mental illnesses. COAMI and other pseudonyms are used in this paper to protect the affiliate's confidentiality.


Case Description

NAMI affiliates range from closed, traditional family support groups to highly open and politically active groups that embrace client participation and the assistance of professionals. COAMI represented an atypical NAMI affiliate of clients that executed collaborative public relations to sustain its socio-political rehabilitation stance and its participation in community mental health initiatives. COAMI's client-driven orientation performed emancipatory politics, " a generic outlook concerned above all with liberating individuals and groups from constraints which adversely affect their life chances (Giddens, 1991, p. 210). COAMI's emancipatory politics demanded freedom for expression without government constraints and liberation from oppressive institutions. Moreover, COAMI’s institution of expression emerged across a seriality of encounters that manifested as meetings throughout southern California. An institution is a deeply embedded practice (Giddens, 1984). Subordinate organizations including Freedom, a self-help socialization organization, and Artists, a group of artists, poets, and actors, perpetuated COAMI's institution of expression.

Design

The ethnographic case study entailed five months of participant observation, one month of phenomenological and informal conversational interviews, and a document review. The case study utilized the tools of ethnography, including participant observation and interviews, but the study was bound to the emergent communicative practices that represented the areas of investigation.

Data Sources

Data sources included approximately 14 meetings, seven unstructured and four conversational interviews, documents, two video clips, additional informal interactions, and artifacts. In essence, I observed and analyzed how COAMI members jointly constructed and delegitimated conceptions of mental illnesses. I documented the interactions through field-notes, audio-recordings, and observation logs. The total field-notes from these interactions exceeded 230 pages. The length of the sample of transcripts selected for analysis approximated 139 pages.

Data Analysis

I utilized Huberman's & Miles (1994) classification and analysis strategies. NUD • IST, Nonnumerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theory building, served as the database for the data reduction, organization, and analysis phases. Two phases of the analysis entailed the constant comparative method (Huberman and Miles, 1994, p. 70) and critical organizational discourse analysis (Mumby & Clair, 1997, pp. 183-184).


The remaining sections summarize the (a) multiple ideological influences on

COAMI's highly permeable environments; (b) the negotiated ideologies and engendered contradictions; and (c) COAMI's boundary spanning processes (i.e. causal loops) that influenced and generated COAMI's collaborative public relations. The next section explicates the findings through supporting assertions.

Results and Discussion

The study examined how COAMI members produced public relations communication (i.e., negotiated ideologies) in everyday interactions, and how the public relations communication impacted COAMI's communicative role. Due to space considerations, a limited number of data clips is provided. The findings reveal that COAMI's high degree of permeability governed by "access points" (Giddens, 1990 ) resulted, in part, from a client-oriented perspective. Access points are the points that connect the systems of expertise to organizational members.

The first research question asked: "How did COAMI's dominant ideological meaning systems constituted through its communicative practices serve to rhetorically construct a shared reality that served a political function?" Assertions 1 and 2 demonstrate that the affiliate’s public relations communication and the engendered consequences of its socio-political rehabilitation enacted a transformative capacity over the members’ identities. This ideological stance, however, generated contradictions. COAMI developed a risk environment as it integrated divergent ideological meaning systems. Risk environments evolve “as the infusion of human knowledge into the material environment” (Giddens, 1990, p. 124). COAMI’s public relations communication constrained the most stigmatized clients’ identities. Key members managed the dangers of a risk environment by selectively filtering out particular access points. These key members engaged in "discursive closure" (Deetz, 1992) as they reconstructed clients’ behaviors to legitimate the medical and government's conceptions of rehabilitation.

COAMI's Socio-political Rehabilitation Stance Drawn from an Array of Ideologies Assertion 1: COAMI members' discursive and institutional practices enacted a socio-political rehabilitation approach that constructed a typification of an idealized client.

In the past two decades, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has sought to shift media attention to the medical aspects of mental illnesses which, in turn, aimed to change the media's preoccupation with stories of violence and mental illnesses. Societal perceptions of mental illnesses are critical to the identity construction of, and treatment options for, individuals with mental illnesses. This paper presupposes that scientific approaches of mental illnesses are in a pre-


paradigmatic state. Medical classifications of mental illnesses are ambiguous enough to encompass multiple interpretations. As family members, clients, and medical professionals need to make sense of medical classifications, they engage in an ongoing-collectively performed--discursive search to discern which behaviors manifest as part of an illness and which behaviors are due to their relative's state of rationality. Therefore, the ideologies that underlie scientific knowledge claims are sustained through an organization's communicative practices.

The next section outlines the predominant discourses or sources of expertise that permeated conceptions of mental illnesses.

Sources of Signification

COAMI's competing and supporting ideologies constituted an "ideological field" (Hall, 1985). A common aim of independence underlied each perspective of rehabilitation. COAMI members espoused the view that mental illness is a brain disorder that is consistent with NAMI’s Neurobiological Disorder (NBD) approach. But more prominent in COAMI’s practices were members’ constructions of mental illnesses that evolved from theoretical discourses of rehabilitation rather than etiological ascriptions.

Through ideological penetration, members positioned global realities into COAMI's local environments. COAMI's socio-political rehabilitation stance encompassed ideologies from four primary expert systems: (a) NAMI's neurobiological brain disorder (NBD) approach; (b) community care and social-political rehabilitation; (c) vocational rehabilitation; (d) medical rehabilitation; and (e) client groups. The neurobological brain disorder theory argues that functional impairments result from a malfunction in the central nervous system that causes an imbalance of brain chemistry (NAMI, 1997). Proposed treatment options include medication and institutionalization. The NBD perspective frames clients in terms of their symptomology and responses to medication. The community care and socio-political rehabilitation approaches foster client independence through access to resources, housing, and financial support (Breakey, 1990, p. 19). Furthermore, COAMI's identity politics positioned clients as victims of societal neglect.

The medical and economic forms of rehabilitation emphasize functional impairments and clinical treatments which situated clients as rational, highly functioning, and employable (Hahn, 1987). These approaches became evident in the government's outcomes orientation. The government aimed to assist the most organized and highly mobile clients. Other client groups also had the potential to influence COAMI's ideological stance (e.g., anti-psychiatry groups).

As board members employed these sources of signification, they invoked typifications of idealized clients. COAMI members integrated structures of


signification in conjunction with structures of domination and legitimation from the influential ideologies. COAMI members included medical professionals, family members, and clients. Seven predominant characteristics and four presuppositions of COAMI's socio-political rehabilitation emerged in this study.

Socio-Political Rehabilitation Stance

This socio-political rehabilitation approach constituted COAMI’s public relations communication. The prevailing characteristics are as follows:

1. An anti-establishment mentality.

2. An anti-sharing or therapy and anti-enabling approach.

3. Freedom for client expression.

4. A rejection of the mental/physical illness bifurcation.

5. Client representation: need for client empowerment through emancipatory politics.

6. Scientific/medical representation: pro-medication stance.

7. A sense of collaboration with family members and medical and educational professionals.

These characteristics overlap and are presented as separate merely for analytical purposes.

The presuppositions are listed below:

1. A client has the potential to be independent. COAMI board members subscribed to a socio-political orientation of rehabilitation which argues that individuals with disabilities need to be given equal opportunities to make decisions and participate in decision-making domains (Hahn, 1987).

2. Transitional clients can manage without the restricted environment of a board and care facility. COAMI operated the Living and Learning Place, a semi-independent residence.


3. A medical orientation underlies rehabilitation. Members privileged medical assessments and prescriptions. This membership rule distinguished COAMI from other client groups that excluded medical professionals.

4. Clients are able to reach their maximum potential (even if it means not being independent) (Breakey, 1990). COAMI aimed to develop or place clients in a pre-vocational capacity (e.g., sheltered employment) despite the emergent dilemmas.

COAMI board meetings acted as one venue through which the institution of expression, a discourse of clients’ needs and rights, was realized. Each client resident had the opportunity to become a house manager. Self-reports that broke down into storytelling provided clients with the opportunity to represent house residents and to monitor their own behavior. Biographical narratives enacted a transformative capacity and acted as “a central element of therapy”(Giddens, 1991) and altered the power structure characteristic of traditional NAMI affiliates. They introduced and enforced rules that enacted a normative order, and in turn, transformed their identities (Giddens, 1991). The extent to which clients had access to the rule-making processes indicated that COAMI members held an ideal vision of transitional clients.

The members' preferred meaning systems downplayed the notion that clients can not be independent and contrasted traditional NAMI affiliates. Traditional NAMI affiliates comprised of primarily family members maintained an old-timer stance that excluded client participation, displayed a resistance to systems of authority and medical professionals, and demanded "closed" meetings to guarantee confidentiality to family members. At times, an old-timer stance depicted a client as irrational and dependent (see Cozier, 2001).

Identity Politics

COAMI's public relations communication employed a liberal conception of client involvement. COAMI empowered clients by reframing their identities as capable, independent, and responsible individuals with treatable illness who have been mistreated by societal institutions: a frame salient to target audiences (e.g., politicians). The rigid medical model of mental illness and clinical prescriptions did not fully describe how to foster client emancipation within social and political realms. COAMI members’ collective understandings developed a shared identity (i.e., disabled) that fostered coalition building.

Assertion 1 discussed how the presence of three expert systems -- family, client, and medical -- empowered clients through an open participation framework. This therapeutic environment facilitated a socio-political ideology that managed oppositional discourses. Assertion 2 illustrates that a duality of structure emerged through COAMI's socio-political rehabilitation stance that emancipated the clients in


transition as it simultaneously imposed constraints on clients' identities, quest for independence, and expression.

Negotiated Ideologies through Discursive Closure

Assertion 2 posits that in COAMI's encounters, the practices designed to empower clients generated ideological tensions that impinged upon clients’ emancipatory aims.

Contradictions exist "in the midst of, and as a result of, the structuration modes of system reproduction" (Giddens, 1979, p. 141). In this study, a primary contradiction evolved as a clash between COAMI’s political function of emancipatory politics and the publics' expectations of rehabilitation. Primary contradictions "enter into the structure of what that system is” (Giddens, 1979, p. 143). The discursive penetration of two opposing forces generated contradictory meaning systems that produced secondary contradictions. The communicative production of socio-political rehabilitation presumed a client identity that negated it. Constraints emerged from the forms of discursive closure that attained false consensus (Deetz, 1992). Discursive closure suppresses potential conflict and privileges particular voices (Deetz, 1992). COAMI's membership requirements delegitimated alternative ideologies and limited client participation. Three of these membership requirements included: (a) the penetration of governmental influences, (b) pro-medication stance, and (c) public disclosure.

Governmental Influences. Despite the fact that COAMI was primarily funded by private sources, COAMI needed to uphold its principles to several public constituent bases such as government and mental health organizations. Given COAMI's anti-establishment stance, the mobilization of governmental meaning systems needed to be intricately woven into the affiliate’s mission and tied to clients’ motivations. The leader and other board members introduced and enforced the government's outcome-driven and vocational-centered rehabilitation goals. At one COAMI board meeting, Jackie described a community action grant and a conceptualized Request for Proposals (RFP):

A letter of intent would give you time to prove that what you are doing is measurably successful. In other words, if we had the money to do a study in terms of what happens to people who moved here, and how they uh, succeeded, and what they are doing now because of the program we have. . . . We can apply that philosophy to any one of the programs that we're involved in . . . . So the question we want to ask is do we want to go for this money, do we want to give ourselves an opportunity to have that kind of research around one or all of our programs?


Through identification (Burke, 1969), Jackie attempted to build association by matching the government’s conception of rehabilitation to this affiliate’s philosophy. A medical professional and a family member on the board concurred. Incorporating the conceptions of the government's approach to rehabilitation “neutralized”(Deetz, 1992) the assumptions that underlied this research approach and reified the government's scientific knowledge claims. Neutralization is one form of discursive closure which positions one value system as “the only possible one”(p. 191).

Dominant members utilized paradoxical constructions (e.g., strange loops) to manage the tensions. Strange loops entail “a pattern in which a reversal of meaning at some level occurs when one follows the chain of implications from context to text and back to context” (Branham and Pearce, 1985, p. 25). Through this rhetorical device, Jackie gained members’ adherence to a privileged value system. She conveyed the impression that clients' participation was critical to the decision-making process. Yet, most client board members were not included in this decision-making process. The strange loop enacts a “paradox of authority [which] underlies any attempt by an agent perceived to be in a controlling role who wishes to promote self-determination among others subject to his or her authority” (Branham & Pearce, 1985, p. 26). Jackie and family members solicited the support from other board members, but Jackie’s subsequent messages that showed that she and others made the decision for the group diminished the opportunity evoked by this solicitation.

Clients on the board invoked a discourse of resistance against government controls. William explained, ”It's been my experience when the government gives you money, usually they want their quarter.” Segment 1 displays one of Toni’s Freedom reports in this board meeting. Toni expressed concerns over being a “one-man” team. These sentiments displayed constraints imposed by the government’s conception of a client. Although the other members responded with the discursive practice of teaching coping methods, this discursive practice mobilized resources to disqualify clients (Deetz, 1992). Disqualification, as Deetz (1992) explained, occurs when individuals’ experiential realities are suppressed to enact discursive closure. This practice acted as a fitting response to this exigency by reframing clients’ discrepant realities.


Segment 1 COAMI Board Meeting

Toni(client): I have my doubts whether they have the ability to do it. I reserve the right to be wrong.

Jackie (chair): That's okay, what you need to talk about Toni: People are not sure if understand; it's nebulous to

them. Diana (family member): They will be given complete directions. Toni: In the past, either forget or can't complete it for

different reasons.

Toni’s employment of strange loops in his response revealed a redeveloped self-concept of clients that emphasized clients’ limitations. This became evident in Toni's objections: “Clients are too ill” (not shown above) and "I have my doubts whether they have the ability to do it" (shown above).

Jackie explained to the board that this government organization wanted “to have proof that self-help works.” Jackie later added, “They want to see results-oriented reports and outcomes and that’s the big name of the game now, you know, what are your performances and outcomes.” Jackie wanted to apply this to Freedom, a socialization center. The implications of this mode of domination became evident as a sector of clients resisted the change. This represented one source of a contradiction that acted as a “clash between the prevailing structure and the evolving one” (Putnam, 1985, p. 162). Toni eventually left his leadership position due to the transformation of Freedom to a vocational rehabilitation organization.

These newly-formed structures of signification served to bind members’ knowledgeability through forms of discursive closure. On the surface, vocational rehabilitation appeared to meet COAMI’s rehabilitation goal to attain independence. But the government officials’ unwillingness to fund transitional client groups such as Freedom displayed the system’s hierarchical positioning of clients. A follow-up interview with a state administrator revealed that the county mental health system’s administrators drafted the request for proposals based on the system’s desired conception of a client. This administrator argued that the recipient of the grant for self-help needed to be aligned with a vocational organization and would not fund clients who were just socializing. For this reason, the leader of COAMI and other


board members suggested that members of Freedom work with the local department of vocational rehabilitation. Despite the fact that the government raised the bar for the maximum potential of clients, key members of COAMI still enforced the government's approach. This approach countered clients’ initial efforts to form a socialization center and did not account for clients’ needs such as the need for transportation to places of employment.

Through discursive closure, key members enacted the ideological function of making sectional interests appear universal (Giddens, 1979). The leader acted as an access point to this government organization as she persuaded members to incorporate this conception of rehabilitation into the philosophy of Freedom. By the end of the case study, Freedom's mission statement and new brochure defined Freedom as a self-help center with a vocational component. In a follow-up interview, Toni dissented with this approach, "People just they saw too much of uh, too much similar to a day treatment center."

In contrast to the affiliate’s "participation ideal" (Deetz, 1992), the masking of the discrepancy between clients’ experiential realities and the dominant sector’s experiences inhibited the attainment of mutual understanding. The dominant sector’s therapeutic approach functioned to distort understanding by reconstructing Toni’s experiential realities. This practice reified an ideology that defied this affiliate’s institution of client expression and concealed systems contradictions.

Pro-medication Stance The endorsement of a pro-medication stance became critical to COAMI's (a) involvement in community mental health initiatives, (b) alignment with medical organizations, and (c) role in NAMI. The pro-medication stance emerged as a source of tension that reflected divergent conceptions of and treatments for mental illnesses. This discursive practice of reconstructing behavior recast clients’ behaviors through a medical orientation. This pattern emerged through members’ careful orchestration of narratives. Narratives invoke an organizational ideology that enforces realities to sustain power relations that influence the organizing processes (Mumby, 1987; Putnam, 1985).

A source of tension evolved in relation to the existence of a resident’s functional deficit or a resident’s deviant act. Medical aspects of rehabilitation emphasize an individual’s functional impairments. Segment 2 displays how COAMI members’ rhetorical acts discursively positioned the source of residents’ incomprehensible acts in terms of the consequences of mental illnesses and noncompliance with their medication schedule. A recurrent pattern displayed how the dominant sector employed charmed loops to reconstruct the clients’ questionable


acts. In a charmed loop, text “X” reconstructs “context ‘A’ to a compatible context ‘B’” (Branham and Pearce, 1985, p. 23).

In a discussion over cleaning the refrigerator, Laura, as house manager, invoked a depiction of Jim, her housemate, as a “packrat” who cluttered up the refrigerator. Jackie solicited a report from Laura. "Jim is like a hoarder, he is like a packrat, and he takes food out of the garbage," Laura claimed.

Segment 2 COAMI Board Meeting Laura (house manager): Oh that's another issue I had to talk to everybody

about. Jim, when he first moved in, about a month after moved in his doctor put him on a trial prescription of Risperdal. It was in a trial packet, a packet you know the pop out packet?

Tina (med. Prof.): Mm-hm. Laura: One milligram tablets and he would bite a piece

off of a one milligram tablet and put the rest in a in back the cellophane, and I've heard him say um things like, you know, I said Jim did you take your meds? And he goes oh yah, yah, uh, uh I can't you know he says, I can't take it in the morning because I don't eat and it upsets my stomach so he doesn't take it in the morning.

[omitted a brief segment of the conversation] Laura: It's probably not the right medication for him. It

might overly sedate him. Jackie (chair): Not necessarily. Ray (family member): It has, the body has to get used to it.


A medical lens reconstructed Laura's depiction of Jim, and thereby, reconstructed context A to context B. Members implied that Jim’s non-compliance with medications may have led to the recurrence of his symptomology or may have been the reason that he has not developed living skills (e.g., cleaning). Ray later solicited assistance: “Can somebody work with him and explain to him about the medication?” (not shown above). Ray believed that the appropriate course of action entailed compliance with medication schedule. The discursive practice of teaching learning skills also sustained principles of rehabilitation.

At the end of the case study, Toni’s sentiments revealed his dissenting opinion over the affiliate’s medical orientation:

Well, you know after two or three months, the side effects may go away. Two to three months is a long time. And there is no guarantee that the side effects are going away. Also they pass it off as if it is highly scientific, and it isn't. They don't know what causes brain disorders. They don't know why the medication worked. They don't know which medication works. They can't tell you which dosage is going to work, so you know, so how scientific is it? And it's easy to prescribe a pill, and it is hard to live with it. . . .

The absence of this anti-medication stance and these suspicions of scientific knowledge claims demonstrated that key members omitted this oppositional voice to institute a medical approach.

In this case, charmed loops emerged through a discussion of the consequences of mental illnesses. The medical reformulations of Jim’s actions served to dismiss deviant acts. As Branham and Pearce (1985) claimed, charmed loops perpetuate “established parameters” and they “generate expectations and standards of appropriate performance” (p. 23). COAMI members’ discursive act of reconstructing behavior masked members' inability to reconcile what constituted a functional deficit versus what constituted a deviant act. Through neutralization, members of the dominant sector reified medical expertise to set forth preferred options.

Public Disclosure

COAMI's socio-political rehabilitation required public disclosure to sustain its collaborative approach to public presentation. This approach concealed a segment of clients' needs for anonymity. A source of tension emerged through the discursive practice of facilitating public presentation. A system contradiction which entailed a clash between the prevailing goals and their constraints (see Putnam, 1985). Members disagreed over the mode of public presentation due to their experiential


realities. The dominant sector of COAMI employed modes of domination and structures of legitimation to sustain COAMI’s open participation framework. In contrast, the closed approach, a discourse of resistance, exhibited the ironies associated with clients’ attainment of independence.

Toni, a client board member, first disclosed his rejection of the principles of COAMI’s ideology by contesting to a portrayal of mental illness made by medical professionals reflected in COAMI's humorous buttons. Jackie enacted the institution of client expression, but also began to block Toni's propensity to object to COAMI’s forms of self-expression. Toni opposed other clients’ position on humor for therapeutic ends.

After a debate over the sale of buttons, Toni shifted the topic to the constraints of public disclosure:

Segment 3 COAMI Board Meeting

Toni: You can't, you're not going to be able to find houses, somebody, I've gone to houses and told people I'm Schizophrenic, and they don't want to, they don't want me in the house. I need a doctor's reference, and you know uh, it's stigmatizing. If I had diabetes, they would let me rent there, but if I am mentally ill, no, we don't want you here, got to get a doctor's; it's a double standard.

Tina: Right.

Jackie and Tina, a medical professional, concurred, but also displayed a reluctance to alter the membership requirement of going public with one’s illness. Incidentally, members often referred to Toni as the "secret" leader. Jackie shut down the conversation in an attempt to sustain the affiliate’s sense of openness. “I'd like to put this subject on hold,” Jackie exclaimed. This statement filtered out an access point that represented a perspective of a client who strived for independence in the mainstream world.

Jackie’s reluctance to take action in accordance with Toni's experience negatively sanctioned Toni’s opposition to COAMI’s institution of expression. COAMI then marginalized a client’s voice that represented both individuals who experienced stigmatization and the ironies of clients’ public disclosure. Toni’s reluctance to go public and failure to subscribe to COAMI's government and medical orientation countered the group’s membership requirements.

Assertion 2 illustrated how COAMI's membership requirements permeated this affiliate and influenced members’ actions and public presentation.


Politics of Others: Bounded Expression

Toni’s exit from the organization demonstrated that COAMI’s institution of expression marginalized individuals who questioned COAMI’s stance. Furthermore, COAMI members' mobilization of resources sustained the idealized client and bounded members’ expression through a negative side of the dialectic of control. As Giddens (1979) argued, “Those who in a large unquestioning way accept certain dominant perspectives may be more imprisoned within them than others are, even though these perspectives help the former to sustain their position of dominance” (p. 72).

Assertion 2 demonstrates that COAMI's identity politics reified expert systems that, in turn, undermined emancipatory politics by denying the open expression and formation of particular clients’ experiential realities. The "mutual knowledge" (Giddens, 1984) built up in COAMI's interactions established a motivational context that influenced their responses to systems contradictions. Through a duality of structure, the institution of expression, as bounded, facilitated empowerment as it imposed constraints on clients’ identities. This process is consistent with Weick’s (1995) proposition that as organizational members enact their environments and define their identities, they choose their constraints (pp. 162-168). The consequences of the enablements and constraints of COAMI's communicative practices are presented in Assertion 3.

COAMI's Public Presentation and Identity Management

An analysis of public relations as a reproduction circuit, a “series of reproduction relations, governed by homeostatic causal loops or by reflexive self-regulation” (Giddens, 1984, p. 376), reveals the structuration processes or the transformation and reproduction of systems. The systemness of a social system is analyzable through a system’s causal loops (Giddens, 1979, p. 141). Assertion 3 outlines COAMI’s causal loops that explicate how COAMI executed collaborative public relations as it managed the contradictions and generated organizational environments.

The second research question asked: “How did COAMI's dominant ideological meaning systems impact, COAMI's public presentation. This question addressed how COAMI's dominant ideology affected its public presentation. Public presentation includes public communicative practices and the presence and absence of public-institutional interactions.

Assertion 3 posits that COAMI’s communicative practices that enacted a socio-political rehabilitation both fostered a sense of agency in the clients that mobilized them to go public and established constraints on clients’ identities. COAMI members embedded its socio-political rehabilitation stance into its public interactions.


COAMI's public presentation entailed the management of the affiliate’s environmental constraints and opportunities to sustain its dominant ideological stance. The legitimation of a socio-political rehabilitation stance aligned COAMI with other systems. Emancipatory politics enabled the members to reframe their identities and maintain organizational boundaries. Members managed discourses of support and resistance by employing cooptation, bridging, and buffering strategies. Cooptation occurred when COAMI members extended their meaning systems, particularly as members from other organizations were recruited to serve on the board of COAMI. Bridging entailed the development of alliances with other organizations and individuals to manage access points that imparted competing and/or similar ideologies. The process of buffering entailed filtering out access points to enact modes of domination over oppositional discourses and to implement COAMI's identity politics.

The causal loops demonstrate that COAMI’s interactions evolved as key access points managed the recursive meaning systems of mental illnesses among COAMI and other systems. The socio-political rhetoric positioned clients as independent, competent individuals who could freely express themselves and engage in political participation processes. But the socio-political rehabilitation produced a client identity that counteracted the desired typification of clients. Furthermore, clients’ self-imposed labels generated an identity crisis.

Causal Loops

Three causal loops display the enablements of COAMI's communicative practices on its public presentation:

Public expression. The first causal loop can be expressed as COAMI’s institution of expression constructed a client identity evident in COAMI’s public communication. First, client expression required the inclusivity of diverse client segments. Cultural Echoes a publication that reflected a diverse array of cultural attitudes of mental illnesses bound through a discourse of resistance. Second, Abe, a client, expressed client empowerment in a newspaper article, “Art is hope. We change our own problems; other people can’t do it for us.”

Third, the socio-political rehabilitation ideology engendered a victimization status through which clients managed their identities and invoked self-imposed labels. In the a promotional video, a client explained, “We are cultural heretics; we would have been burned at the stake." In addition, the clients’ anti-establishment rhetoric crystallized at a protest conducted at the Annual American Psychiatric Association meeting.

Alliances with medical organizations. The second causal loop emerged from the members’ subscription to a socio-political rehabilitation approach imposed by


COAMI’s publics. This led to clients’ legitimation of a medical orientation and the development of alliances with medical and scientific organizations. COAMI’s pro-medication stance became evident in the APA protest, video, and news debuts. As Jackie’s revealed in an interview:

Well, it would be wonderful if some clients who don't need as much medication as others who have become very vocal and very militant almost about getting off medication, back off and be realistic. That's okay for them, but it is not okay for people who are terribly ill.

Despite COAMI's positive relations with the anti-psychiatry sector, the affiliate’s staunch pro-medication stance took precedence.

Stakeholder Participation. The third causal loop emerged from COAMI’s political function of emancipatory politics. This loop describes clients' stakeholder participation. This affiliate’s aim to seek equality, justice, and participation engendered clients’ discourse of resistance in public venues. Client representation enacted a dialectic of control as clients pursued unprecedented client roles that fostered their independence and relationships. For instance, both the COAMI president and COAMI clients (a) served on the Consumer Task Force, a watchdog organization; (b) participated in political engagements in which they sought legislative changes; (c) and collaborated with other NAMI affiliates.

The unintended consequences of COAMI's public relations communication also generated constraints on COAMI's mission.

Modes of subjectification. As the public relations communication masked contradictions, this affiliate’s dominant ideology imposed constraining modes of subjectification. Modes of subjectification, as Fraser (1989) explained, entails “the ways in which various discourses position the people to whom they are addressed as specific sorts of subjects endowed with specific sorts of capacities for action”(p. 165). The unintended consequences reproduced particular conceptions of mental illnesses. First, COAMI’s atypical NAMI affiliate status engendered a misperception of the organization’s identity. While COAMI’s radical approach affirmed clients’ needs to manage their own identities, COAMI’s affiliation with NAMI remained invisible to outsiders.

Second, clients incorporated the victimization status into their anti-discrimination rhetoric and self-imposed labels. This discursive process indicated the level of penetration and naturalization of COAMI’s rehabilitation stance on clients' identities. Naturalization involves “the treatment of the socially produced as given in nature” (Deetz, 1992, p. 190).


Organizational Environments

This analysis illustrates how COAMI’s organizational environments evolved as knowledge environments. Knowledge environments emerge as ideological meaning systems are drawn from expert systems and reappropriated in social systems (Cozier, 2001). Members managed the recursive meaning systems between the local and global environments to produce desired conceptions of mental illnesses. In other words, members enacted these environments as they aligned with, or rejected, alternative ideological meaning systems. Members attained a false sense of intersubjectivity when the affiliate’s dominant sector represented preferred sets of meaning systems as universal, and thus, capitalized on the "latent strategic production" (Deetz, 1992, p. 174) of its ideological stance.

Collaborative Public Relations

Collaborative public relations is accomplished through an organization's communicative role. The three assertions demonstrated that COAMI's communicative role evolved as COAMI's representational practices managed the interests of clients in transition with the interests advanced by board members, alliances, and funding sources. The findings demonstrate that COAMI's communicative role perpetuated a socio-political rehabilitation stance, but its transformation denied a sector of clients' experiential realities and restricted their expression.

Theoretical Implications

A structurationist perspective of public relations is based on the life cycle of system reproduction rather than a linear chain of isolated variables that neglect the pertinent contestation of ideologies. The execution of collaborative public relations requires a degree of permeability governed by access points. The boundary spanning processes manage these points of ideological penetration. Across organizational environments, members generate the motivational context for decision making and an action orientation that influences the organization's public presentation. An organization’s communicative role is political because these practices conceal the contestation of ideologies that recreate members’ shared experiences and institute a collective identity. More research is needed to refine the relationship between the communicative role and public participation and to discover segmentation approaches.


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