Wrangling in the Marketplace or Bartering in the Bazaar? Adapting Metaphors for Public Relations’ Societal Role

ABSTRACT

The marketplace of ideas metaphor has long influenced how scholars and practitioners understand public relations’ role in U.S. discourse and democratic society, yet it is rarely questioned. We argue that the unacknowledged aspirations and Western, capitalist values embedded in the marketplace of ideas could cloud understandings of public relations in society and absolve practitioners of certain consequences of the discourses they put forth due to the function of the invisible hand symbolism operating within it. This work draws mostly from rhetorical and marketplace theory in public relations, including fully functioning society, to present five central limitations of the marketplace metaphor. A case example of U.S. discourse about trans women in sports showcases the shortcomings of the marketplace metaphor in practice. We introduce the bazaar and other compatible metaphors to inspire alternative, figurative thinking about societal communication and address some of the limitations we present, though we also ask questions about the marketplace of ideas to improve its fit with contemporary public relations. This essay offers theoretical and practical contributions by extending metaphors to explain practitioner responsibility in societal discourse and outline the importance of suiting metaphors to particular public relations contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• marketplace theory
• metaphor
• public relations
• rhetorical theory

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on previous drafts of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While many interpretations of the marketplace metaphor relate to contemporary legal and economic interpretations of the marketplace of ideas, some scholars also trace it back to the agora of ancient Greece. Because the agora was a market-adjacent town hall, symbolizing both the physical meeting space and the congregation of people engaged in discourse (Mark, 2021), there is some overlap between the agora and bazaar. There is also some benefit of considering the agora in lieu of the marketplace of ideas to align with values of democracy, accessible political participation, and reasoned rhetoric. However, the agora excluded many people aside from leaders of a household (Damiris & Wild, 1997; Rathnam, 2023) and is grounded in highly reasoned, seasoned, and oftentimes inaccessible rhetoric and rationalist thought. Given these limitations and how closely they overlap with those we point out about the marketplace of ideas, we considered the agora and its relationship to the rhetorical critiques of this essay but did not integrate the agora as a potential metaphorical alternative.