During the latter half of the twentieth century, a genre of public relations media called “economic education” flourished during times of industrial conflict. Despite remarkable profits, many businesspeople in the United States saw a need for defensive public relations interventions (Fones-Wolf, 1994; Phillips-Fein, 2010; Waterhouse, 2014). Economic education media were such interventions: media productions that offered citizens a distinctly managerial perspective on economic principles and systems. This paper explores two cases of economic education media production from the late 1970s and early 1980s, tracing how management reports informed sensemaking around economic education among the creators, distributors, and advocates of economic education media.
I explore cases in which techniques and methods from the social sciences, including interviewing and survey research, were the basis of management reports that justified economic education campaigns by asserting a public misunderstanding of economics. First, I review how a 1975 Compton Advertising survey of “public understanding” for the Advertising Council framed the Ad Council’s 1975-1979 The American Economic System PSA campaign as civically necessary; and second, I consider a 1980 report prepared by the Robert Johnston Company for business education nonprofit Junior Achievement with funding from aluminum manufacturer ALCOA, which figured economics as a new frontier that could capture the attention of youth.
Drawing on Ahmed (2004) and Thrift (2005), I focus on suggested conditions of self-description and subjectivity that come into being through the circulation of narratives among managerial knowledge creators. From this perspective, I argue that such reports not only organized and interpreted information in support of managerial decision-making, they also helped the managers of economic education projects, and their sponsors, frame economic education media as public service.