‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’. A qualitative study of ethical PR practice in the United Kingdom

Abstract

The dynamics of ethical behaviour has long been a preoccupation of the Public Relations (PR) field, yet in the United Kingdom, there are few empirical studies of ethical practice to date. In this article-through interviews with 22 UK Public Relations practitioners (PRPs) in small and medium-sized enterprises-we address this empirical gap. We examine three dimensions of ethical practice: societal responsibilities, truth-telling and the role of professional bodies. In the literature, the PRP is often positioned as the ethical conscience of the corporation, but in Shakespeare's words, 'uneasy lies the head that wears a crown'. Our findings reveal a range of ethical standards, some of which would make professional bodies blush. Many PRPs aspire towards an ethical counsel role but lack agency in the face of commercial and organisational forces. Rather than challenge such forces and the system they are part of, participants talked of coping strategies. At the same time, practitioners flow between ethical identities, painting a fluid, complex and occasionally contradictory picture of ethical practice that does not fall neatly into ethical metanarratives. While deontological ethical frameworks (typically expressed through codes of conduct) have dominated the professional field, our findings

Social Responsibility and Loyalty in Public Relations Codes

“…He concludes that "the idealistic social role" belongs to the practitioner who believes that "public relations serve the interests of publics as well as organizational interests, contributes to informed debate about issues in society, and facilitates a dialogue between organizations and their publics" (Grunig, 2014, 26). That view is so opposite to the attitude of PR-professionals' "exclusive loyalty to a client", which can harm other members of society (Jackson and Moloney, 2019). Stoker (2005) is directly linking loyalty and social responsibility, which can both be established within professionals in public relations.…”

“…There exist some serious difficulties in PR-professionals everyday work which are dealing with, so to say, the biblical wisdom which says that no one can serve two masters. Those two masters in the case of public relations practitioners can be grouped in society's/stakeholders'/public's interests and organizations'/clients' interests (Jackson and Moloney, 2019;Farmer, 2018), whereby public relations come in the situation of "dual-responsibility" (Taylor and Yang, 2015, p. 553). That is, actually, bringing the ethical issue to the great topic of loyalty in public relations.…”

“…The main question of this research is how do the ethics of public relations professionals look like regarding social responsibility and loyalty as the values presented in their codes of ethics. The answer to that question can be considered as a contribution to the call of Grunig who asked to deal with the ethical principles in public relations since the discussions about ethics and social responsibility in the public relations literature were ignoring ethical theory or principles (2014,15). Ethics has become the crucial issue in building relationships for both, organizations and public relations (Bowen et al, 2016;Stoker, 2005), and furthermore, ethics of PR professionals is especially important in the context of corporate social responsibility (Farmer, 2018).…”

Organised lying and professional legitimacy: Public relations’ accountability in the disinformation debate

“…The embeddedness of disinformation practices reveals that the industry has a professional stake in their survival; it is in its interests to protect the ability to produce disinformation, since it is a means of servicing client needs effectively. Practitioners have a contractual obligation to service clients (Kim and Ki, 2014) and disinformation can be part of the package (Jackson and Moloney, 2019). Client interests are fundamental to the industry’s identity as a profession that manages reputation and risk; understands and engages with audiences in complex communications environments; and contributes to the client’s bottom line (Edwards, 2014).…”

The secrecy−transparency dynamic: A sociological reframing of secrecy and transparency for public relations research

“…Public relations scholarship has extensively explored issues of engagement and deliberation in which institutions reach out to the public with information and possibilities for informed dialogue and influence on decision-making (Edwards, 2018; Ihlen and Levenshus, 2017; Lee, 2015). There is an interest in politics and the lack of transparency in political practices (Cave and Rowell, 2014; Davis, 2002; Lloyd and Toogood, 2015); analysis of PR ethics including truth-telling (Jackson and Moloney, 2019); interest in (a lack of) transparency in corporations (Miller and Dinan, 2008) and in CSR reporting (Coombs and Holladay, 2013). There have been attempts to measure stakeholder perceptions of organisational transparency (Rawlins, 2009), analyses of stakeholder-driven transparency measures (Albu and Wehmeier, 2014), and accounts of the PR industry’s own transparency in terms of employment, for example in relation to diversity (Edwards, 2015) or the ways in which feminism may be co-opted and reformed in PR firms to bolster neoliberal principles of individualised competition and entrepreneurialism in ways that obscure and distract from persistent inequalities (Yeomans, 2019).…”