Introduction
Public relations is an unavoidable function in any organization. As Haywood (1984) notes: An organization has no choice whether to 'have' public relations. All organizations are communicating with all audiences that are of importance to them. The decision is not whether to have public relations, but whether these relations will be handled in a planned, organized manner or allowed to be accidental, haphazard and possibly inconsistent.
No industry probably agonizes more over how to make its clients comprehend what they are buying than the public relations business like public relations consultancy. Presidents and counselors of public relations agency worry about the difficult partnership with clients just as much as clients also worry about their relationship with their agency (Carrington, 1992).
Public relations development and management is making a powerful and dramatic comeback lately. More and more organizations are placing emphasis on developing relationships with their customers (Bruning & Ledingham, 2000). This is most especially pronounced in public relations consultancy. Although client relationship management or customer relationship management has only been used more recently, the principles on which it has been based have existed much longer.
Client relationships development and management builds especially on the principles of relationship marketing between the public relations company and their client. However, relationships development and management alone is not the only essence in public relations. Another aspect that has to be given more focus by public relations organizations is one that concerns ethics and professionalism. The rest of this paper will discuss ethics and professionalism in public relations organizations, drawing upon the codes of conduct and ethical principles of public relations organizations.
Context
Public relations practitioners in any area of service are bound to professional ethics. Throughout recorded history the concept of ethics has meant different standards of conduct to different people at different times. Both industries and individual companies have taken positive steps to indicate their belief in and support of the concept of business ethics and ethical practices.
Public relations is often used for strategic business communication, and the ethicality of strategic communication can be analyzed not so much in terms of its content as its process - the relationship it assumes or enforces between the involved parties - and the attitudes and values this reflects. It is the question of process, then, where an assessment of any communication campaigns should start (Botan, 1997).
Public relations practitioners serving as technicians are as bound to professional ethics as those practitioners who have moved on to jobs with greater impact upon major organizational decisions. Entry-level technicians are usually responsible for data collection and compilation, writing and reporting. Those at the 'Technician' level are increasingly asked to assume responsibility for minor functions instead of doing specific tasks.
As technicians, these public relations practitioners are obligated to demonstrate a high level of competence, act ethically as knowledge workers, keep up with technical developments, observe at all times the ethical standards governing technicians, respect the primacy of their employers' interests, and preserve the confidentiality of employer information. As individuals, technicians are also expected to make moral judgments about the activities they engage in (Schick, 1996).
In a technician approach, the practitioner cedes unquestioned authority to decide major ethical issues such as message purpose, content, and targeting to someone outside themselves, in this case to corporate leaders (Botan, 1997). In doing so the public relations department usually accepts what is essentially a one-way communication role and assures that it will have little voice in deciding what is ethical for the organization to do with respect to its publics or in deciding exactly how public relations itself will be practiced. In fact, those making the calls under this model are often organizational leaders with little or no training in communication, in communication campaigns, in persuasion, or in the media and its role in society. They often do not even have basic training in the legal or ethical aspects of public communication campaigns.
In the literature of public relations ethics, many authors consider the role of public relations technician. But these authors move on quickly to consider the "higher" role of advisor or counselor, where the PR practitioner has greater impact upon responsible organizational decisions, and where there is clearer instance of the ethics of the profession. There are, however, many thousands of PR practitioners for whom technician roles are a large part of their job, if not the whole job. These people could benefit from another look specifically at the ethical norms of the technician role - as could new entrants into the field, such as recent graduates, who almost all enter technician roles. Finally, those who employ PR technicians may also benefit from considering the scope of the ethical obligations of these employees (Schick, 1996).
However, status may limit the technician's influence on the employer organization. The technician likely does not have access to the dominant coalition, and may not get a hearing that would allow him or her to influence the course of action by the employer.
In exercising ethical responsibility, the technician-practitioner properly continues an orientation of trust toward the employer, and he or she should not develop a practice of second guessing employer requirements. However, if work for an employer seems ethically questionable, contrary to the ethical norms of the technician's role, or contrary to the technician's ethics as a person, then the technician needs to query and investigate, to resolve the ethical ambiguity (Schick, 1996).
Another professional body worth mentioning in the paper is that of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). In October of 2000 the Public Relations Society of America Assembly approved a new PRSA Member Code of Ethics. This code replaced the older PRSA Code of Professional Conduct. According to the PRSA Board of Directors, the new Code of Ethics is intended to "...inspire ethical behavior and performance (PRSA Member Code, 2000) but both the new code and the Code of Professional Conduct it replaced may neither reflect actual public relations practices nor establish standards appropriate for a profession. It seems the codes were created primarily to give the observers of the practice a positive image of public relations.
PRSA has adopted "codes of ethics" which describe how public relations practitioners want to be perceived by the general public. Further the codes seem based on the two-way symmetrical model which focuses on scientific research, two-way communication and "non-persuasion." These codes suggest that practitioners of the profession of public relations do not recognize their professional obligations. Adherence to the codes requires a practitioner to engage in conduct that violates obligations to clients. In short the codes are neither professional nor ethical and until fundamental changes are made those who seek the status of a profession for public relations are doomed to failure (Parkinson, 2001).
The single most significant requirement for professional status is some system of public recognition or licensing. A profession's members cannot define themselves as a profession, the public, government or other regulatory body must do so as they do by admitting attorneys to the bar, licensing physicians or ordaining ministers (Parkinson, 2001).
As the information age unfolds, and we become more of an information society, public relations and other strategic communication campaigns will play an ever larger role in the lives of organizations (Botan, 1997). The information society is characterized by a preponderance of the labor force being engaged in information work, as opposed to a minority being so engaged, which has been true since Aristotle. Information work has been defined as "the production, distribution, transformation, storage, retrieval, or use of information."
Public relations and other strategic communication campaigns are instances of such information work and are, therefore, part of the emerging information society, both intuitively and functionally. The former because information is the primary tool of strategic communication campaigns, including public relations. The latter because this work is composed primarily of the production, distribution, transformation, storage, retrieval, and use of information. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of any endeavor that is more quintessentially information work than is strategic communication.
The result is that new and greater ethical challenges, not all of which are related to technology, will confront practitioners and those who hire them. This view sees public relations not from an ethical perspective but as a set of technical journalism-based skills to be hired out. Most important among these is the ability to write press releases well, but organizing and hosting press conferences, laying out or editing publications, taking pictures, and handling media relations are also important skills (Botan, 1997).
In effect, the practitioner becomes the client's hired journalist-in-residence, or a mechanic for media relations. The most important attribute of this approach is that practitioners and their employers assume that the practitioner should be primarily a conduit for strategies, and sometimes even tactics, that have been decided elsewhere in the organization.
Public relations practitioners in general have many loyalties. Newsom, Scott and Turk (1993) identify ten loyalties of public relations. Parsons (1993) proposes that one has four major loyalties: one's self, the organization that provides employment, the profession and, finally, society. Bivins lists a fifth key loyalty, namely, the client, as distinct from the organization or employer (Bivins, 1992).
For any person at all, an employer becomes a loyalty because of a conscious act of agreeing to work for that certain employer, in exchange for certain compensation. This agreement may be a written contract, or it may have the nature of an implied contract, which may be guided by a specific job description, by employer procedures and handbooks, by specific employer custom, or by more general social custom and understanding.
While clearly recognizing ethical obligations tied to one's professional role, Bayles (1989) argues that one's ethics cannot be guided by professional norms alone. A person cannot put aside norms of personal ethics when moving into a vocational or professional status; one cannot divorce professional from personal ethics.
A central issue in considering ethical decision making is the notion of freedom, or autonomy. This is explicit in the discussion of public relations ethics according to roles, as in Bivins (1992), who says freedom as a responsible moral agent means "independence in decision making." Overall, though, Bivins seems to consider freedom as the authority to execute whatever it is that one wants to do. Thus he finds freedom only in the PR counselor, and only the counselor is an ethical agent. This notion of freedom is the "autonomy of execution", or the "freedom of self-realization."
Certainly, in exercising ethical responsibility within the workplace, a person in the role of technician has certain well-recognized limitations. The technician may have limited knowledge of the employer organization and of employer decisions. The technician may not have access to the information needed to determine whether there is a conflict of loyalties, and what might be the appropriate ethical courses of action (Schick, 1996).
Professionalism suggests a commonality of agreed-upon professional behavior by members of a given profession that tends to unite those professionals into a solidarity of ethical beliefs. These beliefs reflect ethical values that allow practitioners to define themselves as a professional community by defining their relationship with society. Professional ethics must be consonant with the expectations of the society in which that profession is practiced (Kruckeberg, 1998).
However, "professionalized" practitioners will tend to search for the universals from among themselves within a global society on which to base their "professional" ethical behavior. Professionalism encourages an increasingly cosmopolitan worldview as it influences professional ethics and, conversely, a decreasingly provincial worldview in the consideration of ethical assumptions and ideology. Increasingly, professionals will seek out other professionals to help them determine their professional behavior and decreasingly will seek out culture-based norms (Kruckeberg, 1998).
Conclusion
Ethics for public relations organizations is exactly the same as normal ethics, and that is knowing what is right or wrong, and learning what is right and what is wrong in the field of public relations. Public relations and its communications cannot function no succeed without ethics. Society dictates a set of rules and conformities and seeing as all organizations strive in doing that which is right, publuic relations organizations also must adhere to ethics in order to be successful.
The challenge for the public relations practitioner and the entire field as well is concerned about communicating ethically must center on a commitment to delivering truthful and substantially complete information. This means the practitioner will not be concerned primarily about whether or not to withhold particular information, but rather on what needs to be communicated in order to achieve genuine understanding. Organizations may develop good communication strategies, and effective formal communication methods, but nevertheless this does not reduce the need for professionalism and ethics within the organization. One suggested method for ensuring professionalism in the public relations organizations is the need for some system of public recognition or licensing for professional status.
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