Publicity and Socialist Advertising in Romania. The Ideology and the Legitimising Discourse

The present study aims to analyse the ideological, economic and cultural grounds that configured the discourse that legitimised the role and the economic and social functions of socialist advertising in Romania. The research examined a text corpus compiled of articles and studies from scholarly publications, as well as treaties and textbooks from this field, which had been representative in their time. Moreover, the aim was to make a correlation between the aforementioned texts and the theoretical and institutional dynamics of socialist advertising from the “stages” characteristic to the development of the socialist commerce and economy in Romania (the stage of the ideological establishment – 1955-1963; modern socialist advertising – 1963-1973; advertising as a part of marketing – 1974-1989). Throughout these stages, from the viewpoint of the legitimising discourse of the socialist advertising, two types of discourse can be identified, namely the reactive discourse and the argumentative discourse.

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