Corporate voice and ideology: An alternate approach to understanding public relations history

•This article explores the relationship between public relations history, the corporate voice, and ideology.•Public relations history, particularly the corporate voice, shaped particular ideologies about the corporation, and helped to position the corporation as a dominant institution in society.•Public relations history reveals how the corporate voice produced ideological constructions that legitimated corporations and their interests.•Public relations practices produce ideology and they are informed by particular ideologies.•Consideration of ideological theory expands traditional understandings of public relations.

Scholars in the U.S. generally agree that the origins of corporate public relations correspond to the rise of the U.S. Industrial Revolution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This essay explores the under-theorized relationship between ideology and public relations by examining the role of the corporate voice in public relations history. Evidence suggests that public relations counsel, serving as the corporate voice, created messages that produced and reproduced certain ideological meanings about the corporation. These ideological meanings provided important guidance on how members of the public should think about, relate to, and experience the corporation as a necessary, natural and benevolent organization in society. By incorporating ideological theory as an analytical tool to study public relations history, this article explores an important, but not often studied aspect of public relations history – the development and use of the corporate voice as a site of ideological production.