Melissa Aronczyk

A look at how public relations has dominated public understanding of the natural environment for over one hundred years. In A Strategic Nature, Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza examine public relations as a social and political force that shapes both our understanding of the environmental crises we now face and our responses to them. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century. More than spin or misinformation, PR affects how institutions and individuals conceptualize environmental problems -- from conservation to coal mining to carbon credits. Revealing the linkages of professional strategists, information politics, and environmental standards, A Strategic Nature shows how public relations restricts alternative paths to a sustainable climate future.

As public and private sectors become stakeholders, nation-states become corporations, interests become strategic objectives, and identities become brands, branding emerges as a key feature of the pervasiveness of market logic in today’s world. Branding Latin America: Strategies, Aims, Resistance offers a sustained critical analysis of these transformations, which see identities deliberately (re)defined according to the principle of competition and strategically (re)oriented towards the market. Through context-sensitive case studies that foreground a specific, under examined set of practices and concepts, this volume draws particular attention not only to the reconfigurations of citizenship, identity, and culture according to an insidious logic of market competitiveness, but also to the ways in which different actors resist, survive, and even thrive in such a context. In so doing, it illuminates the ambivalent relationships between the local, national, and global; the individual and collective; the public and private; and the economic, political, and cultural landscapes that characterize contemporary Latin America and the wider world.

National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers and strategic communications experts to help them "brand" their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate more coherent and cohesive identities, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. But what actually happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century. This book is about how nation branding became a worldwide phenomenon and a professional transnational practice. It is also about how nation branding has become a solution to perceived contemporary problems affecting the space of the nation state: problems of economic development, democratic communication, and especially national visibility and legitimacy amidst the multiple global flows of late modernity. In this book, Melissa Aronczyk charts the political, cultural and economic rationales by which the nation has been made to matter in a twenty-first-century context of global integration.

National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers and strategic communications experts to help them "brand" their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate more coherent and cohesive identities, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. But what actually happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century. This book is about how nation branding became a worldwide phenomenon and a professional transnational practice. It is also about how nation branding has become a solution to perceived contemporary problems affecting the space of the nation state: problems of economic development, democratic communication, and especially national visibility and legitimacy amidst the multiple global flows of late modernity. In this book, Melissa Aronczyk charts the political, cultural and economic rationales by which the nation has been made to matter in a twenty-first-century context of global integration.