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Women working in public relations (PR) in the 1990s developed the power of metamodern pragmatism to avoid being constrained in this decade of contradictions.

This was a time of promise for female empowerment and careers. The PR industry in Britain had quadrupled in size, yet increased feminisation and professionalisation did not resolve gender inequity. Indeed, alongside the existence of ‘old boys clubs’ and hedonistic macho agencies in the industry, the 1990s offered a lad's mag culture and an AbFab image of PR.

An original collaborative historical ‘Café Delphi’ method was developed using three themes (sex, sexuality and sexism) to explore women's careers and contributions in the expanding and increasingly powerful field of PR in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. It built on feminist critique of the industry and paradoxical portrayals of women resulting from significant changes in media, popular culture and a pluralistic marketplace.

Individual and collective experiences of women working in PR at the time reveal the power of attitudes to affect their ability to achieve equality and empowerment. Women navigated tensions between the benefits of accelerated pluralism and the patriarchal resistance in the workplace through performative choices and a deep sense of pragmatism.

Justice perceptions describe an individual's evaluation of whether decisions or actions are fair or unfair. These perceptions are important because they affect individual attitudes and behaviors in different situations. Family firms develop and implement governance policies and structures (i.e., governance systems) to diminish the problems that can arise from the overlap between the business, the family, and the ownership systems of a firm. Governance systems help family firms have a clear structure of accountability and a clear understanding of the rights and responsibilities that family and non-family members have toward the family enterprise. Research on governance to date has focused on the practices and policies that exist and their effects on the family firm. However, in the governance context, individual perceptions are important because they are likely to affect the attitudes that family and other members have toward the family enterprise and the likelihood that they will follow the different policies when they are implemented. This chapter takes a receiver perspective to explain how individuals create justice perceptions based on governance mechanisms and the effects of these perceptions. The goal is to understand how we can use this information when developing governance practices in family firms.