Along the government–media frontier: Press secretaries offline/online

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Elena Johansson,Karl Magnus Johansson
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2759

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Along the government–media frontier: Press secretaries

offline/online

Elena Johansson

1

| Karl Magnus Johansson

2

1

Department of Journalism, Media and

Communication, University of Gothenburg,

Gothenburg, Sweden

2

School of Social Sciences, Södertörn

University, Huddinge, Sweden

Correspondence

Karl Magnus Johansson, School of Social

Sciences, Södertörn University,

141 89 Huddinge, Sweden.

Email: karl.magnus.johansson@sh.se

Funding information

Foundation for Baltic and East European

Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), Grant/Award

Number: 1296/3.1.1/2013

While the position of press secretaries to ministers has become routinized, we still

know little about their everyday life in the political executive. This article, based on

in-depth interviews with press secretaries and an inventory of social media use con-

ducted among ministers and press secretaries in Sweden, explores what press secre-

taries do and the roles and functions they fill. It addresses the overarching question

of what it is really like to be government press secretary. It engages with this ques-

tion through a combination of methods, mapping, and explaining patterns of behavior

across related fields and strategic spaces. We argue that existing research and role

typologies, while still useful, must be developed by accounting more for how press

secretary work changes through new techniques and digitalization. We conclude that

press secretaries fill a mix of roles and these are quite stable, but social media impacts

on the daily routine of the press secretary and are a part of the work that is difficult

or impossible to control. In addition, this study of Swedish press secretaries helps to

redress a geographical imbalance in political communication (system) research where

the focus usually is on Anglo-American-based scholarship and systems.

KEYWORDS

digital, executive, press secretary, role, Sweden

1|INTRODUCTION

The title of this article draws inspiration from the book “The Wages of

Spin”by Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's chief press secretary.

Ingham (2003), p. 16 suggests that the so-called spin-doctors are

required to patrol the turbulent frontier between government and

media. Here we will call them press secretaries, less pejoratively. The

central concern of this article is the political executive press

secretary—the variety of roles and functions that press secretaries

perform. The rise of communications staff suggests that these staffers

are really needed, indeed institutionalized.

We define government “press secretary”broadly and simply as

the staffer who carries out press secretary work as part of their

everyday activity in a national executive, either in the executive

center or at a line ministry. What the work entails is what we try to

find out.

Therefore, what we are talking about here is the name of a func-

tion, a role, and it comes with certain expectations. The term “role”

refers to the socially prescribed behavior of a position holder, the atti-

tudes, and behaviors structured around tasks linked to a specific social

position. At its core, role theory posits that position holders will

behave in accordance with both their own role expectations, and per-

ception of what the position entails, and those, which exist in the

environment, or of counter position holders (e.g., Parsons, 1951). Role

theory explains roles by presuming that persons are members of social

positions and hold expectations for their own behaviors and those of

other persons (Biddle, 1986). We view roles and role conceptions as

multidimensional and dynamic, meaning that they may be subject to

Received: 25 June 2020 Revised: 12 March 2021 Accepted: 30 August 2021

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2759

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2021 The Authors. Journal of Public Affairs published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

J Public Affairs. 2022;22(Suppl. 1):e2759. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of9

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2759