A Description of Lobbying as Advocacy Public Relations

This study defines lobbying as advocacy public relations. Data were collected from self-administered surveys of 222 registered lobbyists in Oregon. This study provides insight into a specialized group of public relations practitioners

The Ethics of Lobbying: Testing an Ethical Framework for Advocacy in Public Relations

This study evaluates the ethical criteria lobbyists consider in their professional activities using Ruth Edgett’s model for ethically-desirable public relations advocacy. Data were collected from self-administered surveys of 222 registered lobbyists in Oregon. A factor analysis reduced 18 ethical criteria to seven underlying factors describing lobbyists’ ethical approaches to their work. Results indicate that lobbyists consider the following factors in their day-to-day professional activities: situation, strategy, argument, procedure, nature of lobbying, priority, and accuracy. This framework, derived from Edgett’s 10 criteria, illustrates the importance of context while incorporating ideas from recognized ethical theories

Finding Connections Between Lobbying, Public Relations and Advocacy

This study begins to connect our understanding of lobbying and public relations as communication activities. A survey of 222 registered lobbyists in Oregon reveals the range of communication activities in which they are engaged, as well as the range of organizations on whose behalf they lobby, and their description of their occupational role. Findings suggest that many lobbyists, like many public relations professionals, do think about their role as a form of advocacy. I then conclude by noting some of the contradictions and limitations of using the term advocacy as a way of describing the communication activities

Hired Guns and Moral Torpedoes: Balancing the Competing Moral Duties of the Public Relations Professional

Public relations helps an organisation and its publics adapt mutually to each other. However, this does not mean that the profession is value neutral or anything goes. There will be cases where professionals have to make discretionary ethical decisions and negotiate their roles and responsibilities, especially when faced with novel or difficult issues. In this conceptual paper, we describe how the notion of professional role morality not only shapes the individual struggles that practitioners endure but also highlights the organisational structures that foster or shun ethics in the decision-making process. Thus we provide a means of assessing professional action that balances the urge to become a hired gun who simply abdicates personal responsibility and completely adopts the employer’s moral viewpoint on the one hand, and moral torpedoes who rely exclusively on their personal views without any concern for wider implications on the other. Investigating role morality as played out in public relations is important because it may explain why practitioners often find themselves at odds with their best moral judgments. Here we present five fictionalised narratives to illustrate the conceptual issues and highlight the most significant moral distinctions that have practical consequences for both the theory and practice of public relations

Analyzing the Intersection of Transparency, Issues Management and Ethics: The Case of Big Soda

This article critically analyzes the ethics of Coca-Cola’s public relations strategies through the lens of corporate social responsibility, issue management, and moral legitimacy. Corporate legitimacy is essential for corporate survival and, in today’s complex environment, expectations for legitimacy have shifted. Corporations are called on to consider their roles in the context of the greater good. These changes call for an examination of what constitutes ethical communication for public relations practitioners. While theoretical advancements in the area of ethics sketch the landscape for providing for greater transparency in what the aims of organizations should be in providing for ethical communication, more needs to be done to examine the specific content of this communication. Toward this end, the authors seek to extend conversations and draw from Habermas’s theories of communicative action and Principle U to propose a new direction for evaluating public relations ethics