Ethics in Strategic Communication Campaigns: The Case for a New Approach to Public Relations

Abstract

Public relations, issues management, and most marketing communication cam paigns are instances of the broad category of strategic communication, although by no means the only instances. Such campaigns can be conducted from several models, but these can be broadly grouped into monological and dialogical approaches. In an information society such campaigns increasingly provide the point of contact between an organization and its publics. As a result, these cam paigns constitute the primary input with which publics make assessments about both the ethicality of the organization's communication and the ethicality of the organization itself. Using the example of public relations, this article describes the increasingly important distinction between monologic and dialogic cam paigns, explains why the currently dominant monological approach to public relations has long been recognized by practitioners and scholars to be ethically perilous, suggests an ethically more viable dialogic approach, and concludes by discussing some of the reasons the business community has been slow to adopt such an approach and why its ethical and practical benefits outweigh these objections.