Commentary: What happened to public responsibility? The lack of society in public relations codes of ethics.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The issue of ethics is complex and contentious. For public relations it is also critical, as the industry will only win the struggle to salvage its own reputation if it can clearly demonstrate not only a commitment to ethics, but also some means to enforce ethical standards. There are many ethical reasoning tools, both intricate and useful, that public relations practitioners use to try to make ethical decisions, and these have been widely discussed in textbooks and specialist articles (e.g. Johnston & Zawawi, 2000; Bivins, 1992; Wright, 1989a; Pratt, 1993; Kruckeberg, 1996). This article does not attempt a comprehensive overview of ethical schemas; rather, it takes one corner of the ethical practitioner’s kitbag of tools, the association code of conduct, and examines one aspect of code content; its stand on social duty. As practical ethics tools, codes clearly have strengths and weaknesses beyond their incorporation or otherwise of a specific ‘duty to society ’ clause (c.f. Roth & Stravpoulos, 1996; Wright, 1993; Zupko, 1994). However, this article suggests that the absence or flimsiness of such clauses in some of the world’s leading PR association codes is too important a weakness to pass without comment. This article is intended not as a definitive word on ethics code requirements, nor an overview of their effectiveness and enforcement, but rather as a means to ensure that the important debate about ethics continues. In an effort to provide members with clear ethical guidelines, non-governmental public relations organisations in several countries have outlined ethics codes. This article reviews the codes of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the Canadian Public Relations
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.067 | 0.061 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".