“A code of ethics for those evil figures known as Public Relations professionals? I’d like to see that!”
Well, that would have been my ignorant, cynical view five weeks ago. In actual fact the Public Relations industry has been struggling to compile a universal code of ethics since its birth. In 1906 Ivy Lee made one of the earliest attempts and due to the nature of the industry Public Relations is not all that much closer to consensus. However, with that said, there is a theory which places a broad outline to ethical behaviour and how to identify unethical behaviour.
To define ethics, the reading states that ethics are “personal values or deeply held belief systems that underpin the behaviour and moral choices made by an individual in response to a specific situation” (p. 111). Due to this idea of individual circumstances impacting upon what ethics can be defined as it is important that Public Relations practitioners utilise Immanuel Kant’s three-step process of solving ethical dilemmas which is summarised in the readings as follows:
When in doubt as to whether an act is moral or not, apply the categorical imperative, which is to ask the question: ‘What if everyone did this deed?’
Always treat all people as ends in themselves and never exploit other humans.
Always respect the dignity of human beings.
It is incredibly important that practitioners can identify what is ethical and what is not as the codes available to them are far too broad and generalised to apply to all fields of the industry. The professional associations that do provide codes simply ensure that there is a bottom line of standards to meet. An example of a code of ethics can be found on the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) website. One of the biggest setbacks to a larger structure of ethics is that professional associations, such as PRIA, are voluntary leading to the fact that behaviours cannot be enforced outside of the membership group.
Senebti,
Kobe.
A CYNICAL VIEW
ReplyDeleteYour absolutely right in saying that PRIA can only enforce a code of conduct or ethics within its own members. I am always dubious of these types of arrangements.
The company my business partner and I started belonged to the RCSA (Recruiting & Consulting Services Association) - we had to belong to this organisation in order to tie up preffered supplier agreements with some of our clients (little did we know that the clients would use us anyway down the track based on our performance rather than associations we belonged to). It was governed by what they call the 'Code for Professional Conduct'(another way of saying code of ethics and such).
Unfortunately our company was challenged in the supreme court over a name dispute by another member of the RCSA. It just so happens that the Director of the other company was the Vice President of the RCSA and didn't follow proper dispute resolution procedures as set out in the code. When we pointed this out to the RCSA, the MD refused to take any action based on the fact that the matter had been "taken to court" (even though at this point we had not been served). I am dubious of these types of governing organisations or associations because to a large degree they are toothless tigers, and in our case, they didn't even look after their own.
I say work outside of their code, be smart, work hard and make the clients want to use your firm, rather than dilly dallying around with time consuming bureaucracies that sometimes don't support their very own policies and procedures. Once bitten twice shy!