Public Relations Ethics and Professionalism

The Shadow of Excellence

Johanna Fawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136223747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Do professions really place duty to society above clients' or their own interests? If not, how can they be trusted? While some public relations (PR) scholars claim that PR serves society and enhances the democratic process, others suggest that it is little more than propaganda, serving the interests of global corporations. This is not an argument about definitions, but about ethics - yet this topic is barely explored in texts and theories that seek to explain PR and its function in society.

This book places PR ethics in the wider context of professional ethics and the sociology of professions. By bringing together literature from fields beyond public relations - sociology, professional and philosophical ethics, and Jungian psychology - it integrates a new body of ideas into the debate. The unprecedented introduction of Jungian psychology to public relations scholarship shifts the debate beyond a traditional Western 'Good/Bad' ethical dichotomy towards a new holistic approach, with dynamic implications for theory and practice.

This thought-provoking book will be essential reading for students, academics and professionals with an interest in public relations, ethics and professionalism.

1 Messy ethics An introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203097670-2

A different voice

This book builds on a lifetime of reading, writing, thinking, dreaming, failing, starting again, denying, confronting, shifting and teaching. This is an adventure in thinking – and feeling – about ethics generally and in the field of public relations (PR) particularly. It does not end in a model that will remove or resolve all ethical dilemmas henceforth. On the contrary, it aims to induce greater confusion and uncertainty at least at the beginning, before concluding that uncertainty is a healthy state to be in when reflecting on ethical situations (and, the book argues, there can be no artificial distinction between ethical and non-ethical situations). This is a book about being as much as doing.

I will do proper academic things, like provide sources and references for arguments and literature. I will also ‘map’ territories for which we only have partial, fragmented or contradictory information, such as the field of PR ethics. Not only that, but the book offers deeper readings and academic underpinnings for many of the ideas that are current but underexplored in the subject area.

I will also do non-academic things, like link ideas about ethics to life experiences, primarily my own. The purpose is not narcissistic self-display but to use the raw material of one PR practitioner and academic, one human life, to illustrate more general theories from philosophy and psychology. A central theme of this book is the relevance of inner experience to ethical actions and the importance of developing reflexivity to build stronger bridges between the inner and outer. Jung is the great advocate of the subjective. So it would be hypocritical not to apply such tenets in my own writing. This also means I have to own up to actions that still disturb me decades later – what was I thinking? Exploring these ‘critical incidents’ illuminates mechanisms of denial, self-righteousness and often conflicted loyalties that seem characteristic of ethical confusion. This approach aims for a more conversational than didactic tone, but risks sacrificing authority for engagement.

Given that I am drawing on my own experience as well as literature, I should briefly introduce myself: I first started work in PR in 1975 but really learned the job at the National Gas Consumer Council a year later, where my brilliant boss, Kel Hunter, and I spent most of our time in the pub, but managed to come up with headline-grabbing ideas just when our positions were looking precarious. Then a stint in publishing, some freelance journalism and, from 1983–8, campaign worker for the London Borough of Camden, including a long stint as trade union leader; the years that gave me many of the key experiences which inform this book. My last full time PR job was at the Trade Union Congress and in 1990 I joined the London College of Printing as a senior lecturer to transform a course from ‘publicity and packaging’ to PR. Since then I have devised, developed and delivered PR courses to undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals at universities in the UK and, since 2011, Australia. I have also advised the peak professional body, the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations on educational policy, and from 2005–7 was Chief Examiner for the CIPR Diploma. According to Macnamara (2012), with a similar range of experience, this allows observations to be grounded auto-ethnographically.

So many texts on ethics imply that they embody some kind of procedure for making reliable ethical decisions, whether that is the utilitarian cost/benefit analysis, a Kantian set of duties or a matrix of values and choices such as the Potter Box. Every code is normative, prescriptive: follow these precepts and you can’t go wrong. The human being processing these edicts always looks, to me anyway, like a rational, educated man (probably white) who can weigh the consequences of all his actions, make lists of values and priorities, calibrate the balance between competing duties, systematically form a hierarchy of ‘principal stakeholders’ and so on. My experience is just so much messier.

One of the qualities that most attracted me to the work of Carl Jung was his engagement with that mess, his own and his patients’. He worked out that these experiences were not only meaningful in themselves but also had something to say to others about being human, an observation made by artists throughout time, of course. While I didn’t read any of his writings until a few years ago, so claim limited expertise, I was aware from my mid-twenties that he saw growing up as a struggle between powerful inner forces. I was recovering from early addiction then, so my psyche looked like something by Hieronymus Bosch – his validation was helpful. Nevertheless, without really asking any questions, a few years later I entered into long-term psychotherapy with a neo-Freudian. This is where I finally began a relationship with the unconscious, moving from denial of the existence of some parallel personality (scary) to an acknowledgment that it sometimes had something to offer my waking self. I learned, very, very slowly, to first ask, then answer the question – how did I feel? Like many other bright young people, then and now, and of course, like many students and academics – I always knew what I thought, held powerful opinions on everything, particularly politics, but could barely string an emotional sentence together. My throat closed around the words I didn’t know. This experience of emotional inarticulacy and the long decades of acquiring that vocabulary convince me that while the separation may have been extreme in my case, it is not uncommon. Which is why that rational ethicist described above doesn’t convince. I know it is possible to coolly calculate why a certain course of action would be best for all concerned, while utterly denying the degree of self-interest at the heart of the decision.

So this book argues that self-awareness is a precondition for ethical action. It moves away from ethics as ‘being good’ or even good enough. Using Jung’s ideas about the unconscious, about duality and about integrating disparate elements within the psyche, it suggests that ethics flows from self-awareness, not as a separate activity but as a way of being in the world. The central argument is that ethics stems from wholeness not goodness, and that wholeness requires the ability to recognize, acknowledge and build relationships with rejected aspects of individuals and groups. Engaging with what Jung calls the shadow is an essential stage in psychological, spiritual and ethical maturity. It is as relevant to groups as individuals and offers a new way forward for professional ethics generally, and PR in particular. As the book demonstrates, Jung’s ideas are drawn from a wide range of both European and Asian literature and philosophy, and have much to contribute to current debates in ethics, though the linkage is rarely explored. They have not been discussed in the context of PR before, but a new space is opening in thinking about the field which makes such a conversation timely.

The expanding PR multi-verse

In bringing reflections from ethical philosophy and Jungian psychology to the field of PR, I hope to contribute to the sudden expansion in PR theory, which is currently becoming fluid, multi-perspectival – and hence very interesting. The creation of this Routledge series, and the 2012 launch of the SAGE journal Public Relations Inquiry are evidence of the wider debate available to PR scholars than was the case for most of my early teaching years (from 1990), when the only UK texts were triumphalist and simplistic how-to books. In that context the arrival of quantitative, longitudinal research into PR best practice, the beginning of the excellence project (Grunig and Hunt, 1984; Grunig et al., 1992) was both a welcome aid to teaching and illustrative of the complex inter-disciplinarity of the field, drawing on management and social sciences. The four models of communication (Grunig and Hunt, 1984) provided a useful teaching tool and helped introduce concepts of history and changing roles to the classroom. In time, however, these tools seemed tired and limited, the historical assumptions increasingly implausible. It was good to have the subject taken seriously but it was essential to have it treated critically, so the publication of L’Etang and Pieczka’s (1996)Critical Perspectives in Public Relations was pivotal in reframing the subject, allowing the articulation of power imbalances and societal perspectives that were invisible in the functionalist canon. This was followed by Moloney’s two editions of Rethinking Public Relations (2000, 2006) and in recent years by a cascade of new ideas (Bardhan and Weaver, 2011; Curtin and Gaither, 2007; Edwards and Hodges, 2011; Holtzhausen, 2012) as well as the updated L’Etang and Pieczka (2006). Metaphorically we have stepped out of the PR office or boardroom and re-located the subject in its wider context: there are now multiple paradigms available to PR scholars with interesting points of convergence and divergence; some of these are explored later in the book when I consider how a Jungian approach ‘fits’ into current thinking. Much of the new writing locates public relations ethics, as I do, not in specific situations but as an expression of cultural, social and economic power. Power has raced up the agenda in the past few years of PR scholarship and I seek to enter this discussion – to a certain extent – but with a focus on ethics. While there has been some excellent critical writing on PR ethics – fully discussed in later chapters – it is still underdeveloped in many ways, dismissed by the managerialist school as something to be achieved only in symmetrical communication, and seen by others as a somewhat embarrassing, awkward subject, synonymous with being Good. (One of the joyous aspects of a Jungian approach is that it is absolutely not about being good.)

As I suggest later, there are voids between the ethical aspirations of codes, which are often based in idealised self-images promoted by the excellent model and happily embraced by professional associations around the world (who wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘serving humanity’?), and the grubbier realities of practitioners. Faced with an impossible ideal, they have largely turned away. In their stead is a vocal body of critics, often from outside the field, which remorselessly exposes the routine abuses of power that constitute ‘normal’ PR practice. Discussion about ethics is reduced to a slanging match, with the defenders claiming to contribute to society and the critics accusing PR of distorting the entire democratic process. While the mud-slingers often have a limited idea of how PR works, much of the mud has rightfully stuck, leading to widespread distrust of the field, its operatives and its employers. These issues are discussed fully in the opening chapters, but to summarize: in my opinion the current state of ethical thinking in the field is fragmented, contradictory – which is fine – but also philosophically thin, based on unchallenged assumptions and ultimately divorced from practice, which is not fine.

As well as engagement with multiple paradigms and a rising interest in power, there has been a recent turn away from the organizational focus of PR thinking, whether from managerial or critical perspectives (the old ‘corporations are Good/Bad’ dyad). Like other writers (considered in more depth in Chapter 5), I want to broaden the scope of the debate to embrace at one end of the spectrum, the PR practitioner and his/her individual experience (micro-level), and at the other, the social fabric in which we all swim (macro-level). However, for fear of losing all coherence, the focus for this book is the profession, which operates at the meso-level, the level of organization. This does not mean I consider PR from an organizational perspective, either supportively or critically. Many of the arguments and ideas here are not directly related to corporate or even organizational communications, though I do borrow from organizational psychology at various points. The unit of study is PR as a ‘profession’, which is of course an organization, albeit a peculiar one. Professions have ‘representative’ bodies that offer some organizational entity but which are neither trade unions working for members’ interests nor, in the main, regulators working for society’s benefit. In this sense, looking at the field as a profession or occupation (the distinction is investigated in Chapter 3) offers a lateral, cross-sectional view. The location of practitioners in agencies, corporations, voluntary bodies and so on is outside the scope of this study. It may be that there will be different applications of the central ideas in different types of workplace – and it is certainly the case that individuals in different workplaces will experience different ethical pressures and may subscribe to multiple, even conflicting codes or values systems – but the main arguments are intended to be germane across the board.

And while the scope of investigation is PR as a profession, the topic under scrutiny is not its status or value for money or relationship with the CEO or with marketing for that matter, but how it collectively considers and, to a lesser extent, practices ethics.

Research approach

Perhaps this is the place to stress that this book is based on conceptual research, not empirical study. The final chapter raises research possibilities and I certainly hope to develop some deeper understanding of how these ideas operate at local levels, but this book aims to introduce the ideas generally, to start a debate. If it lights a spark, research will follow.

Overall the book takes a hermeneutic approach, meaning that this work is one of interpretation. Briefly, hermeneutics is sometimes called the philosophy of interpretation and has been developed in the past few decades primarily by Riceour (e.g. 1981) and Gadamer (e.g. 1989) building on earlier works by Heide...