Authenticity statement: Drafted with Claude based on our What If Manifesto and research, reviewed and edited by Ana and Thomas.
A manifesto has to say what it is leaving behind. These six refusals are not slogans; each names a belief the field still runs on, and gives the reason it no longer holds.
1. That there is no alternative
“There is no alternative” — TINA — is not an analysis. It is a narrative, and one our own industry helped write (for fans of Adam Curtis, this is a cracker), now recited about AI with special conviction. The market-based framing of business, politics, and society is roughly a hundred years of construction, maintained daily in the language of commercial promotion (Bernays, anyone?). Critical scholars of public relations have traced exactly this: how promotional culture and PR language naturalise a particular economic order until it looks like weather rather than choice (Cronin, 2018; Demetrious, 2022). What was constructed can be renegotiated. In our teaching and writing, we flip the acronym — from TINA to THEMBA (hope or trust in southern African languages), there must be an alternative.
2. That tame means can solve wicked problems
Standard operating procedures, SMART objectives, and KPIs are adequate for tame problems, and only for those (see earlier post). Applied to wicked ones, they produce well-managed failure and a false sense of security. Most corporate attempts to tame ecological or societal crises with compliance toolkits end as washing, however well-meaning the people involved.
3. That the seat at the table justifies the theatre
A measurement paradigm built mainly to prove a department’s worth to management is not accountability. It is performance (as in dramatic and theatrical being busy, not in terms of stuff achieved). After decades of it, the share of departments rating themselves excellent has barely moved — a striking non-result (do check all the past research of the Excellence Monitors; also check Buhmann et al, 2019 review of the search for measurement standards).
Joanna Fawkes (2015) named the deeper problem as the profession’s “shadow”: the gap between its self-image and its practice. Jim Macnamara and Anne Gregory (2018) argued the way out is to expand evaluation beyond message-tracking toward genuine listening . Holistic, societal accountability asks harder questions than any dashboard can answer.
4. That persuasion is a word for other people
Advertising persuades. Propaganda persuades. And we in PR, apparently, merely “relate” and “engage” (we don’t even convince, or plead, or haggle, or debate). This laundering deceives no one and corrodes trust in everyone. The field’s image problem is not that it persuades — every democracy runs on persuasion — it is that it will not say so. Naming the intent is the first move toward legitimacy, not away from it.
5. That efficiency is a purpose
Efficiency is a ratio, not a reason. The dominant AI story in practice — faster content, more of it, streamlined workflows, optimised engagement — answers questions nobody asked, and treats handing relational work to machines as progress. Meredith Broussard’s term for this reflex is technochauvinism: the belief that a technical solution is always the best one. It mistakes the tool for the task. Critical PR scholarship has shown how the field cheerled AI adoption in just this register (Bourne, 2019), and computer scientists have warned that large language models generate fluent language with no understanding behind it — “stochastic parrots” (Bender and colleagues, 2021). Efficiency can be worth having. It is never the point.
Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later firm, is the cautionary case now. In 2023 it replaced around 700 customer-service roles with an OpenAI-built assistant and reported that the bot did the work of all of them. By 2025 the company reversed course: it found the AI lacked the empathy and nuance that customer relationships actually run on. Satisfaction fell, and it began rehiring humans. But note how it came back — not by scrapping the AI, but by building a hybrid: AI handles routine, high-volume queries; people handle escalation, complexity, and the moments where trust is on the line. That is close to the metamodern move this manifesto argues for — AI as a companion, not an oracle. Klarna arrived at it the expensive way, after mistaking the ratio for the reason.
6. That the organisation is the protagonist
The classic value-creation plot casts the organisation as the star, stakeholders as the applauding audience, and society as the set. That story is exhausted (and for quite some time now - read Sachs’s Winning the Story Wars to see how old this “trend” is and while you’re at it check out Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces).
Once you move past the single project, the protagonist is neither the organisation as an entity nor the communication department (such beautiful stories and examples are out there - has oldies but goldies here). Economist Mariana Mazzucato (2021) makes the parallel case in economics: value is co-created across many actors, and pretending one actor produces it alone distorts everything downstream. It is time to focus on the humans and their stories.
What are your refusals?
Refusing is the easy half. The manifesto’s harder claim is that responsibility cannot be delegated — it has to be held at four levels at once. That is the next post.
References
Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 610–623). ACM.
Bourne, C. (2019). AI cheerleaders: Public relations, neoliberalism and artificial intelligence. Public Relations Inquiry, 8(2), 109–125.
Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. MIT Press.
Buhmann, A., Macnamara, J., & Zerfass, A. (2019). Reviewing the ‘march to standards’ in public relations: a comparative analysis of four seminal measurement and evaluation initiatives. Public Relations Review, 45(4), 1-16.
Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.
Cronin, A. M. (2018). Public relations capitalism: Promotional culture, publics and commercial democracy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Demetrious, K. (2022). Public relations and neoliberalism: The language practices of knowledge formation. Oxford University Press.
Fawkes, J. (2015). Public relations ethics and professionalism: The shadow of excellence. Routledge.
Forbes / Entrepreneur. (2025, May). Klarna reverses AI push and resumes hiring human customer-service agents after a service-quality backlash; adopts an AI-plus-human hybrid model.
Macnamara, J., & Gregory, A. (2018). Expanding evaluation to progress strategic communication: Beyond message tracking to open listening. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 12(4), 469–486.
Mazzucato, M. (2021). Mission economy: A moonshot guide to changing capitalism. Allen Lane.
Sachs, J. (2012). Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future. Harvard Business Review Press.
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