Management_in_Bp

PROFESSIONAL DUTIES IN PUBLIC RELATIONS One of the biggest ethical challenges for practitioners has to constantly reconcile the conflicting loyalties and duties that they have. Craig Miyamoto discusses the duty to the “Five masters” as he calls the five duties of public relations professionals as described by Philip Seib and Kathy Fitzpatrick in Public Relations Ethics (1995), e.g. self, client, employer, profession and society. Practitioners are expected to first consider their own value system and personal ethical codes. These will guide decisions based on what you truly believe is right or wrong. Ask yourself, "Can I sacrifice my own personal values for the client, for my employer, for my profession, or for society'" The client is generally the first loyalty beyond self. Practitioners should ask themselves, "Knowing what I know, can I represent the client'" If practitioners knowingly allow harmful work to continue, they'll be violating their duty to the public, which many would agree takes precedence over duty to employer. It is assumed that practitioners have a duty to support their profession and their professional colleagues. In this way common standards of behaviour can be agreed and the bounds of acceptable practice established. Very important in this respect are the established Codes of professional conduct of PR practitioners. Finally, society is the key component to ethical public relations decisions. PR practitioners are expected to serve the public interest. This essay supports that this particular “master” takes precedence over all the others, including self. STRATEGIC CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY For public relations practitioners the stakes have never been higher, both personally and professionally. Increasingly, CSR advocates have, to their credit, transformed corporate expectations into corporate demands. So too have the expectations and demands on public relations changed. Some scholars (Falconi 2004, pp. 92-94; Schoenberger-Orgad & McKie 2005, pp. 578-583) have argued that public relations have not been up to the task, partly because both the definitions and the practices of CSR have become more rigorous and far-reaching in recent years. For example, Whetten et. al. (2002) recently defined corporate social responsibility as “societal expectations of corporate behaviour; a behaviour that is alleged by a stakeholder to be expected by society or morally required and is therefore justifiably demanded of a business” (p. 374). This move beyond legal compliance is likely to produce a variety of dilemmas for public relations practitioners devoted to CSR, as public companies, at least, must address the balance between shareholder interest and community interest. The broadening of the range and scope of CSR-related practices is evident in the proliferation of CSR reporting (Tinker & Lowe 1980, pp. 1-17) and CSR indexes (Courville 2003, pp. 269-297), both of which may impact public relations practitioners. The ethics of corporate social responsibility disclosure have been the most difficult to reconcile with shareholder expectations and activist demands (Browne and Haas 1974, cited in Blowfield & Murray 2008, p. 207; Gelb & Strawser 2001, cited in Crowther & Rayman-Bacchus 2004, p. 112). Maintaining integrity becomes more challenging when a company must report less attractive details or respond to criticism. The problem that faces many companies engaging in public dialogue is how to ethically, legally, and effectively disclose information while maintaining a positive image (Argenti & Forman 2002). Many corporations have responded to societal demands for responsible behaviour with extensive reporting mechanisms. It is common, in today’s business environment, for the annual report to be accompanied by the CSR report, as well as consulting firms (e.g., Accenture, Deloitte), institutes (New Economics Foundation), and universities to devote resources to social auditing. CONCLUSION A global economy has produced a wide confluence of factors that make the future form of CSR less predictable and, ultimately, ambiguous and rife for contestation. Public relations practitioners and the universities that educate them are challenged to address more directly the range of ethical dilemmas that CSR produces for the profession. As it was outlined in this essay, it is believe that the most recent iteration, strategic CSR, creates further challenges and issues for public relations, most notably a re-articulation of the long-standing tensions between economics and ethics, performance and responsibility. The strategic CSR appeal to bring together economic and social interests, the corporation and the community, makes it all the more important for PR practitioners to manage closely its logics, its discourses, and its practices. REFERENCE LIST Argenti, P. and Forman, J. (2002). The Power of Corporate Communication, New York: Mc Grow Hill Publishers Baker, S. (2002). The theoretical ground for public relations practice and ethics: A Koehnian analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, 35(3): 191-205 Barney, R. & Black, J. (1994). Attorney adversary model of communication. In Moloney, K. (2006) Rethinking Public Relations: PR Propaganda and Democracy, p. 165 Browne & Haas (1974), In Blowfield, M. & Murray, A. (2008) Corporate responsibility: A critical introduction, p. 207 Cheney, G., & Christensen, L. G. (2001). Organizational identity: Linkages between internal and external communication. In L. Putnam & F. Jablin (Eds.), The new handbook of organizational communication: 231-269. 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