A Greater Means to the Greater Good: Ethical Guidelines to Meet Social Movement Organization Advocacy Challenges (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ethics in Public Relations and Responsible Advocacy Theory
Ethics in public relations plays a vital role in human communication. It brings the credibility to organizations. It helps to establish faithful relationship between organizations and the public. Excellence in public relations can be achieved by ethical practices. Public relations organizations should follow code of ethics to provide reliable services to the target audience. Organizations need to ensure that the codes of ethics are practically implemented for the betterment of all the stakeholders. The responsible advocacy theory is one of the latest theories of ethics in public relations. It focuses on the responsibilities of public relations practitioners. It is based on three major principles of public relations ethics: the comparison of harms and benefits, respect of persons, and distributive justice. It encourages to avoid all harmful contents, guarantee the public interest, safeguard the human dignity and maintain justice in communication. This article highlights on the basic concepts of ethics in public relations, codes of ethics in different public relations organizations and key points of responsible advocacy theory.
The Journal of Public Interest Communications
Through a nationally representative U.S. survey of 1,214 participants, this study examined attitudes toward the role of corporations in public interest communications and response to a series of recent high-profile corporate social advocacy cases. Findings provide preliminary evidence for what types of public interests are most appropriate for organizations to address, based on perceived motivations, commitment to advocacy, and dimension of corporations as actors for social change. Results from this study suggest demographic differences by political viewpoints, age, income, education, and gender. However, an overall level of agreement across all respondents indicates that corporations should engage in addressing important social issues, which is particularly noteworthy given that the U.S. population skews conservative.
Social Movement Activism Analysis of Strategic: Communication in Context
Strategic Communication in Context: Theoretical Debates and Applied Research, 2021
Social movement activism presumes strategic communication processes by which groups achieve extra-governmental changes to public and private policy through public pressure. Such pressure presumes conditions of five kinds: strain, mobilization, confrontation, negotiation, and resolution. To explain this process, several cases will be offered but especially the U.S. civil rights movement and the activist career of John Lewis. Social movement activism is a test of wills, a test of character, strength, fact, value, identity, identification, and place
Fundamentals of Public Interest Communications [Dissertation].pdf
University of Florida, 2018
This dissertation focused on developing the theoretical foundations of the interdisciplinary field of public interest communications (PIC). It expands on earlier work of a) presenting the case for considering PIC as an emerging academic field of strategic communications to advance social causes (Fessmann, 2016), b) defining the field (Fessmann, 2016), c) establishing differences and relations to public relations (PR) (Fessmann, 2016, 2017), and d) PIC’s grounding in strategy in the original historical context (Fessmann, 2018). The dissertation used qualitative grounded theory methodology to identify key concepts and features of PIC. This research analyzed 22 in-depth interviews conducted with central figures in PIC including the presidents/chairman and two vice presidents of the three largest PIC agencies. Participants were specifically selected because of their ability to analyze critical areas and the development of the field based on usually 20-40 years of work experience in PIC. This dissertation proposes a new PIC definition and a typology of the degree to which certain communications areas serve the public interest or do harm. Furthermore, a spiral process model of PR activism and PIC is proposed. Drawing on expert opinion and theories of PR, activism, and social movement literature, the model identified eight distinct phases that a PIC social movement must go through to achieve sustained social change. Each step of the process requires different communications efforts and thus understanding the various phases will make social movement communications more effective. The model and the dissertation findings overall will be useful in developing theory about and teaching PIC and strategic activism communications.
Corporate Activism: research, case studies and solutions for communicators to address a rising trend
2019
DOWNLOAD FULL DOCUMENT: https://www.quadriga-university.com/sites/default/files/document/2019-09/Quadriga-Reader\_Corporate%20Activism\_Ana%20Adi.pdf In recent years, corporate activism has intrigued, puzzled and challenged communicators. While in the past, activism and corporate communications were often presented as incompatible if not totally opposed (for that, all you need to do is leaf through any book of PR history published before 2000), a shift into what corporations can and should acknowledge seems to have haven taken place around 2010. Whether this is related to changes in technology (and more specifically, the rise of social media) or the increased visibility and success of social movements, or a combination of both, is still up for debate. It is also questionable whether critical PR scholarship calling for an integration of activism and communication (see my recent edited collection on Protest Public Relations, for example) has finally reached practitioners and corporations. This reader aims to tease out answers from practitioners, members and alumni of Quadriga University of Applied Sciences’ network. Conceived as a collection of research updates, opinion pieces, case studies and practical insight geared at communication practitioners and communication students, this reader has been designed as a conversation starter as well as classroom material. It is therefore structured in three parts: research updates, case studies, and tools and solutions from practitioners. To cover the background and evolution of corporate activism, there are two introductory articles: Anthony Gooch’s exploration of radical uncertainty and its influence on corporate activism, and Hemant Gaule’s article about corporate activism in India, focusing in particular on the drivers, risks and repercussions with some fantastic examples. The Research section is dedicated to some of the studies often referred to by contributors to this series: Weber Shandwick and KRC’s research into employee and CEO activism covered by Stephen Duncan and Johanna Hille; BRC’s research into creating a culture of purpose covered by Phil Riggins; and Kerstin Lohse-Friedrich’s study of China’s public diplomacy and its reactions to activism by western corporations. They all provide rich insight into perceptions and expectations of corporate activism as well as new perspectives. The Case Studies section is designed as classroom material. Joyce Costello reviews the evolution of Nike’s corporate activism over the past 30 years and some of Nike’s actions that conflicting with its declared values. Sebastian Biedermann and Sergiy Smetana’s case takes us into the future, discussing alternative sources of protein. They provides a detailed background on the issue and raise questions from a German’s association perspective. Finally, the Tools and Solutions section puts forward a variety of solutions from practitioners, for practitioners. Here, Jo Detavernier reviews his five questions around embracing corporate activism; Mike Klein focuses on internal audiences and their reactions to corporate involvement with corporate activism; and Virginie Coulloudon proposes a new, all-inclusive approach. Finally, the closing of the section and the reader is made by Thomas Stoeckle, who focuses on ethics and the seven traits of ethical leaders
Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines, 2014
New social media tools emerge regularly linking people to people, people to organizations, and organizations to organizations. Today, there are hundreds of social media tools and apps. The fields of advertising, marketing, and public relations all make claims about social media as tools to further their field’s strategic objectives. While corporate uses of social media for advertising, marketing, and public relations, are quite common, we know very little about how social cause groups use social media to interact with publics, media, donors, government officials, and corporations. Can the traditional models of social media in strategic communication, initially employed by profit seeking firms, be applicable or even desirable for activist groups? This essay explores a new model of social media that sells ideas rather than products or services.
International Journal of Strategic Communication, 2021
This study experimentally interrogates the critical preconditions of how an organization legitimizes its corporate social advocacy (CSA) initiatives as an integral part of strategic communication. A 2 × 2 factorial design survey (N = 398) indicates that companies must find a way to bridge two perceptual gaps À a factual gap and a conformity gap. The factual gap refers to perceived inconsistency of values-that is, that the company may not walk its talk on moral values. In contrast, the conformity gap refers to values incongruity between public expectations and corporate performance. Using these two conceptual constructs, we classify CSA initiatives into authentic, faulty, and fake. Authentic CSA initiatives project clear corporate moral values and meet public value expectations; unsurprisingly, they are found to generate more substantial perceptions of legitimacy and more positive behavioral willingness than other types of CSA initiative. Previously, few attempts to measure experimentally the legitimacy gaps that frequently arise between public expectations and companies' actual CSA performance. The authentic CSA could not only fulfill corporate strategic communication missions but also generate the legitimate end of mutual understanding between the organization and the publics.
Editor’s Essay: Public Relations, the Public Good, and Prominent Pathways and Principles
Journal of public relations research, 2024
Communicating for the public good is nothing new for public relations scholars and practitioners. Corporate social responsibility (CSR), perhaps the best-known iteration of that concept, has been a recognized piece of business and communication literature since at least the 1950s (Carroll, 1999), with proto-CSR activities dating back a century earlier, if not further (Browning, 2018; Lamme, 2014; Myers, 2020). More recently, public relations scholarship has extended that focus to include corporate social advocacy (CSA), as well as related constructs such as corporate political advocacy (CPA), CEO activism, corporate responsibility to race (CRR), and several others (
Ethics in public relations: Responsible advocacy
2006
In 2002, about three-fifths of women were in the labor force. Although the unemployment rate for women rose from 4.7 percent in 2001 to 5.6 percent in 2002, it remained low by historical standards. White women's unemployment rates continued to be lower than those of their black, Asian, or Hispanic counterparts. (See tables 1, 2, and 3.) • Since the early 1980s, women and men's unemployment rates have been roughly similar. In 2000, the unemployment rates for both sexes hit 30-year lows at 4.1 and 3.9 percent, respectively. (See table 2.
Conceptual foundations of public interest communications.pdf
This article argues that public interest communications (PIC) fundamentally emerges from public relations (PR) scholarship. PIC addresses paradigm anomalies of the excellence and relationship management theories of public relations in the specific case of activism and communication for the common good. It posits that PIC is structurally different from non-profit public relations and examines several key conceptual differences between PR and PIC.