Remembering the future: Professional logics and the social shaping of technology in Czech, Slovak, and Polish public relations

This article explores how public relations professionals in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland adopted successive waves of communication technologies from 1989 to 2025. Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews and a reflexive, qualitative design, the study examines the relationship between technology, professional identity, and legitimacy in transitional post-socialist contexts. Findings reveal three patterns. First, adoption was driven by pragmatism: technologies such as email, smartphones, and AI were embraced to enhance efficiency and responsiveness, not to disrupt core practices. Second, adoption was structured by social and organisational dynamics. Tools became embedded through peer uptake, client expectations, and internal champions, creating an ecosystem of collective sense-making. Third, technologies functioned as symbolic capital: mastering new tools signalled competence, modernity, and professional maturity, particularly in a semi-professionalised field navigating global standards. Combining the Social Shaping of Technology framework with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the analysis shows how communication technologies are used not only to perform tasks, but to perform credibility. In doing so, the study contributes to critical public relations scholarship by highlighting how adoption becomes a site of professional calibration—where tools are interpreted through service ethos, symbolic value, and cultural context rather than functional utility alone.