Politics, power, and professional practice: Cultural control in an Indian political public relations department

This article develops a theoretical framework of professional cultural logics to explain how power is enacted, moralized, and reproduced in political public relations practice in India. Drawing on fifty-six hours of video ethnography and multimodal analysis of workplace interactions during the 2019 Indian General Election, the study examines how everyday communicative routines fuse organizational expectations with historically embedded cultural norms. The analysis shows that professional PR goals such as visibility, narrative control, and message localization intersect with cultural logics of duty, hierarchy, obedience, and moralized authority. Through close examination of spatial arrangements, dress codes, gesture, tone, linguistic registers, and routine managerial interactions, the article demonstrates how seemingly mundane communicative acts materialize symbolic and disciplinary power in ways far more nuanced than envisaged by Western critical theorists. These acts transform PR work into a cultural practice in which obedience, loyalty, and moral obligation become central to professional conduct. Design practices further reproduce these logics by visually affirming organizational hierarchies and cultural ideologies. The framework positions culture not as a background condition but as an infrastructure of power. In doing so, the study advances critical public relations scholarship by reframing professionalism as a culturally situated mode of power.