Risk/Crisis Communication

Ethics

There wasn’t much discussion about ethics in chapter five. While social, organizational, and personal ethics distinct, they are all interrelated. Organizational ethics is meant to set standards of professional behavior. It behooves communications professionals to be familiar with requirements of their professional codes of ethics, in addition to others which may apply to them, e.g. public relations practitioners working in the financial sector must pay attention to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and comply with its standards of financial reporting and gift-giving.

I agree with the exceptions to the use of persuasion during risk communication made on page 90 of L&M. Just like risk communication, public relations frowns on the use of persuasion, one-way asymmetrical communications model, by practitioners. In the excellence study, J. Grunig, (1993) indicates that two-way symmetrical communication should be the ideal communication model used by public relations practitioners to achieve excellence. This model is alluded to on page 89 when the authors indicate that “[a]s with many of the ethical questions faced by communicators, the issue is to balance the needs of the organization with those of the audience.”

As noted in chapter two, difficult review and approval procedures are constraints to effective risk communication. “If the organization has a policy that is too limited for audience and risk assessment purposes (for example, a policy that only the final version of documents are kept), those who are communicating risk may need to work to advocate a change in policy” (p. 88). One solution to this problem is the inclusion of communication practitioners into the dominant coalition. This way they are able to secure adequate funding and effectively communicate the importance and implications of compliance or non-compliance to senior management.

One of the roles of public relations practitioners is to conduct environmental scans. Environmental scanning helps practitioners identify key publics that are of importance to the organization for the purpose of proactively identifying and mitigating possible threat to the organization. In this role, practitioners act as the organizations conscience by awakening management to its responsibility and ethical obligations. They save the organization valuable time and resources arising from issues stemming from legitimacy of representation outlined in page 83.

In the absence of legislation protecting whistle-blowers, I am almost certain that the answer to the question “what would you do if your organization asked you to act unethically?” would be a resounding “step down from the work in question” (L&M, p.91). However, it has been observed that there is inconsistency in attitudes and behavior. As noted at the end of chapter 5, the practitioner owes a certain level of loyalty to the organization which issues his/her paycheck; this may make them unwilling to take any action that will compromise their future in the organization.

The authors’ indication of the sociopolitical effects on ethics is similar to situational ethics theory developed by Joseph Fletcher. Situational theory states that “the morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed. That is, situationism was the claim that it is the actual physical, geographical, ecological and infrastructural state one is in, that determines one's actions or range of actions,” as long as an act is justifiable to the actor then he/she has acted ethically. According to this view, ethics is subjective interpretation based on the perception of the rightness of ones actions. And what have we learnt about perception? It is reality.