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Editor’s essay: Change and resistance

As a doctoral student two decades ago, I was rooting around a library at the University of Maryland looking for different ways to think about “symmetry,” because something about the original notion of public relations being practiced in a “two-way symmetrical model” (see Grunig & Hunt, 1984) felt “off” to me, like it had to many others (e.g., Leichty, 1997; Murphy, 1991). In that library, I stumbled across research by Emmy Noether (1882–1935), whose mathematical equations proved “that symmetry—or change—can only exist simultaneously with conservation or invariance” (Sha, 2004, p. 391). These equations came to be known as “Noether’s Theorem” (Alekseevskii, 1988; Byers, 1999; Ne’Eman, 1999; Noether, 1987). But what struck me even more than Noether’s mathematical brilliance was her persistence in demonstrating it continually against the rigid resistance (and outright discrimination) she faced as she did her work, simply because she was female and Jewish (see Byers, 1999; Noether, 1987). As I have asserted before, the implication of Noether’s Theorem for public relations (at least to me) was that “an organization can behave “symmetrically” while maintaining certain beliefs, principles, or purposes that will never be relinquished” (Sha, 2004, p. 391). And just as the duality of symmetry and conservation resonated with me decades ago, the duality of change and resistance is something that I think about constantly today. Perhaps my pre-occupation with change and resistance is because both phenomena seem to permeate our quotidian existence in ways more visible, more concerning, and more outrageous than in recent history. And I’m not just talking about the political landscape.