The paradoxes of organizational power and public relations ethics: Insights from a feminist discourse analysis

Introduction

This article is not about gender. It does, however, use poststructuralist feminist discourse analysis (which looks broadly at how people constitute positions of power and powerlessness in the language they use to talk to each other and to describe their situations) as an interpretive lens to examine organizational public relations (PR) practitioners’ testimony about ethical practice in their day-to-day working lives and to draw attention to issues of power signaled in that testimony.

There have been important contributions made to our understanding of PR as work and as a discipline by the application of a feminist studies lens to gender issues in PR (see, for example, Daymon and Demetrious, 2010, 2014; Tsetsura, 2010, 2012). However, there has been less work to date in PR studies that utilizes feminist theory as a broader lens to view power relationships generally, including and beyond gender, as per the inclusive nature of third-wave feminism (Snyder, 2008). In the research presented in this article, the broad context of feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, and its focus on power of any kind, is used to conceptualize and appreciate how the pressures on the research respondents are related to and reflect power issues facing the PR profession in current global, social, economic, and political contexts generally. Viewed through the analytical framework of poststructuralist feminism, particularly the work of Nancy Fraser, the ethical and definitional struggles in which the research participants engaged became visible as a microcosm of the contestations over representation and interpretation of human needs and rights that Fraser and other feminist ethicists detect in continual process in all societies. The feminist lens was helpful in revealing a much bigger portrait of barriers and bottlenecks of power that constrain individual intent to be ethical.

Of particular utility was poststructuralist feminism’s shift away from a moralizing frame of reference to an empathetic understanding of the ways that people are caught within and pressured by social, cultural, professional, and political ‘logics’. In the words of Nicola Gavey (2011),

A feminist poststructuralist approach understands and forgives our obedience to dominant cultural norms and values (in a way that is more nuanced and respectful than the older notion of ‘false consciousness’), yet highlights the contingency of these norms. In doing so, it shines light on possibilities for being and acting otherwise – and for imagining more just and ethical conditions. (p. 185)

Hancock (2008) argues that if we understand ‘ethics as an organizational rather than simply a business issue’ and recognize ‘organization as a profoundly intersubjective undertaking’, then feminist scholarship offers a range of insights ‘which have, over the years, sought to firmly locate the ethical subject within the embodied context not only of gender, but of those everyday socio-cultural and political relations within which ethical behavior can, and must, be enacted’ (p. 1358). For the present research, the body of feminist discourse analysis proved particularly compatible with an understanding of PR as ‘an inherently relational profession – that is, a profession defined by its social context’ (Edwards, 2009: 252). Because it theorizes ‘the emotive, embodied and indeterminate nature of ethical existence as a lived social relationship’ (Hancock, 2008: 1359), feminist discourse analysis helps illuminate connections between PR practitioners’ ethical experiences at work and the broader institutional, economic, and political structures containing that work.

Methodology

Between 2004 and 2010, 13 organizations involved in PR practice in Aotearoa/New Zealand agreed to host an ‘ethics workshop’ at which their staff were given material about PR ethics and then participated in a focus group to discuss and share ideas on ethical challenges within PR. The choice of New Zealand was, realistically, a convenience sample given the researcher’s location; however, it has been suggested that, as a small and adaptive society, New Zealand does provide a useful ‘sentinel’ or ‘microcosm’ (Pearce and Dorling, 2006) research locale, in which emerging issues that could subsequently have wider relevance become rapidly visible. There are, of course, important cultural and bicultural characteristics specific to the New Zealand PR industry which have been well documented elsewhere (e.g. Weaver, 2013); however, the New Zealand industry does also have strong professional and infrastructural links with PR as a global phenomenon – in this case, explicit links, given 10 of the 13 participating organizations were either subsidiaries of multinational corporations or working with multinational clients. In the data, participants’ focus was often on the challenges those global connections entailed, meaning the research provides useful insights into issues for practitioners at the geographic periphery as ownership of PR firms, and their clients are increasingly multinational.

The focus groups involved staff at all levels of the participant organizations, from the newest and most junior practitioners to senior managers and proprietors. At eight groups, managers absented themselves for the second half of the discussion, enabling non-managerial staff to share ideas, without the ‘boss’ in the room.

Subsequently, seven of the participating workshop organizations (spanning public and private sectors, small and large operations, profit and non-profit orientations) in two Aotearoa/New Zealand cities (Auckland and Wellington) accepted an invitation to continue to work with the researcher more intensively on the topic of PR ethics. From both the initial workshops and the seven sets of more detailed interactions, which ranged from just a few weeks to, in one case, email conversations with numerous staff spanning more than a year, came a large volume of data documenting diverse ways in which people voiced their understandings of ethics, its application in PR, and the barriers and conduits they perceived to achieving their ethical ideals at both personal and organizational levels. The data span focus group and interview transcripts, qualitative survey responses, email and telephone conversations, and posts to a private discussion forum. In all, more than 45,000 words were collected.

During analysis, these data were read multiple times to identify patterns, categories, and constructs that surfaced from the participants’ words. This close reading was conducted on a single file comprising the merged, anonymized transcripts, emails, discussion posts, and phone call notes, in order to allow overall patterns to emerge without reference to any individual respondent’s demographics or workplace. The researcher’s fieldnotes were not coded but were referred to regularly during coding to check interpretations and contexts. Identified patterns in the participants’ data were then collated into related themes, and the themes were tested in ‘reverse’ to ensure each could be supported by multiple comments (Charmaz, 2005).

The thematic coding was managed using the HyperResearch qualitative data analysis package (ResearchWare, n.d.), which helps a researcher to tag similar language or ideas, assemble theme-by-theme reports across the entire data corpus, and collapse, expand, or change categories when further feedback is obtained. Findings can be quickly adjusted to reflect member checks. The software thus facilitates collaboration, helping the researcher manage multiple data reduction, display, conclusion drawing, and verification cycles (Miles and Huberman, 1994).

The 13 organizations were recruited using, initially, convenience sampling (respondents to an advertisement) and then purposive sampling to obtain greater geographic and sector diversity. Prior written consent to use the anonymized data was obtained both from the participating organizations and from every individual who gave input into the research. Each site initially received a workshop visit that overviewed different ethics approaches and collaboratively worked through a challenge facing the participants, using a practical tool (Tilley, 2008). The workshops aimed to apply different approaches to a real-life ethical challenge to assess their usefulness. After each workshop, a survey was completed, and a focus group discussion session on ethics recorded. Subsequently, 7 of the 13 organizations agreed to participate in action research, that is, to continue applying, evaluating, and giving feedback on the workshop material and research themes during their subsequent daily working activities and to continue the ethics reflection and conversation in more depth via email, telephone, and return visits.

At the seven action research sites, multiple dialogic cycles were conducted: in the first, workshop participants’ feedback was sought on an ethics model that was used primarily to stimulate discussion. This feedback was transcribed and analyzed for themes and used to guide prototype redesign. In the second cycle, participants were asked for their thoughts on both the redesigned model and the aggregated themes from earlier workshops. This feedback was again transcribed, collated, and coded for themes. In third and subsequent phases, participants were invited to discuss and reflect on the effects in their workplace of having the research discussion about ethics and attempting to apply new ideas about ethics to their PR practice, as well as to give further feedback on the relevance to their context of the themes identified in the first two cycles. Overall, the project involved a ‘prolonged period’ of interactive engagement with ‘the practices and discourses of public relations, thus enhancing understanding about public relations practitioners as an occupational group’ (Daymon and Hodges, 2009: 430). Fieldnotes were taken at every workplace visit, to try to capture a sense of the emotional and non-verbal context behind the transcriptions and to record the researcher’s own changing perceptions throughout the course of the research.

The number of organizations (13) participating in total (with 7 organizations participating intensively) means that rather than addressing traditional notions of generalizability, the research aims at transferability. In terms of validity, the research design contained multiple levels of the descriptive, interpretive, theoretical, and evaluative validation deemed appropriate for qualitative research (Maxwell, 1992). Transcripts were checked with participants to ensure descriptive validity of the data, coding was discussed with participants in multiple reflexive member checks to ensure interpretive validity of the data, analyses were checked against existing research and the literature to assess theoretical validity, and the conclusions were checked again with participants to obtain their evaluations. Greenwood and Levin (2005) consider that ‘cogenerated contextual knowledge is deemed valid if it generates warrants for action’ (p. 54). Thus, given the multi-phase consultation process resulted in the participants calling for greater ethical reflection both by themselves and their profession as a whole, the research cycle received evaluative validation. Given Maxwell (1992) considers three validity tests sufficient, attainment of four suggests a robust design.

Another key limitation of the study is that the participants were self-selected. Recruitment was through advertisements in the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand newsletter – available online but read primarily by members of that professional organization, who may by definition, therefore, already have a heightened interest in issues of professionalism, such as ethics – and through a personal invitation email to organizations selected by sector and region. Those who chose to respond may not reflect industry norms. In particular, all those who responded belonged to formally constituted organizations, meaning the voices of those who perform PR in informal or constantly changing contexts, such as for social justice collectives, were excluded. Their specific inclusion in future research will offer important comparisons. However, the present research was designed to be in-depth and intensive, probing the lived experience of day-to-day ethical challenges and processes to obtain explanatory depth, rather than offering a comprehensive and representative picture of the PR profession.

Findings

As noted in the abstract above, five main themes emerged from the multiple cycles of coding and member checks. These were as follows: that ethical problems were recurrent and seldom optimally resolved; that criticisms of PR as an inherently immoral practice were actually contributing to the problem; that compartmentalization and lack of power in relationships within organizations, between organizations, and with clients were fundamental barriers to solving ethics problems; that there were multiple obstacles to discussing power issues; and that practitioners used numerous coping strategies to buffer themselves from their sense of powerlessness. Each of these themes is illustrated, below, with sample quotations that epitomize the kinds of comments coded in each theme category.

Theme 1: Ethical dilemmas are common

Respondents frequently acknowledged that ethically questionable practices occurred in their industry (although there was a managerial/non-managerial difference in disclosure, see below). Typical comments included the following: ‘something is going to give you a little bit of an irk, somewhere along the line in your career’; ‘we can all think of some examples, some PR companies who have overstepped the mark and they have got a client who also doesn’t have a problem with it’: ‘they report how sustainable they are and it is just bullshit, you know, it doesn’t actually mean anything and I think it is unethical’; and ‘You are taught how vital it [ethics] is then you go out there and not many people do it’. Some respondents were explicitly self-critical: ‘I haven’t even read our Code of Ethics, so that tells you a lot I think. I have been in the industry for about a year and have never read it’. ‘In some ways strictly we were quite unethical and I deliberately made the choice that we weren’t going to advertise the fact that we were from a PR company, you know we didn’t say who we were’.

Often during discussion of respondents’ own workplace’s ethical experiences, humor was used to defuse tension: ‘Seriously, let’s be hand on heart here [laughter]. I am thinking of one of our clients! [laughter]’

Numerous specific examples were given of activities by other practitioners that respondents considered unethical, including criticism of a ‘green’ campaign for a client who ‘didn’t even have a recycling program in place. So their PR people should have been shot for letting them go ahead with that, that is not ethical’ and debate over two controversial alcohol brand promotions (one a competition to ‘win a Russian bride’ and the other a campaign that invented a new word with a prize on offer to journalists if they used it).

Some practitioners said their own workplace had effective systems to manage responses to ethical dilemmas:

I identify an unethical thing on a semi-regular basis and some of them you think, God, that would be so tempting. But there is accountability, you know, you step out of line [there will be consequences].

It is something that we do talk about … [we have] quite hot debates … when we have got an issue that we are not comfortable with we will definitely bash it around ourselves, how do we deal with this.

Other practitioners were more cynical: at one workplace, a staff member suggested the profession’s advanced storytelling ability meant its own ethical problems were typically explained away rather than solved: ‘We can rationalize anything’. In general, practitioners described ethical dilemmas as a frequent occurrence that, in both their own and others’ practice, was not in their opinion always dealt with adequately.

Theme 2: Stereotypes exacerbate the problem

Negative labels that others, especially journalists, applied to the PR profession were seen as a substantial problem by some practitioners, perhaps even creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. One respondent working in PR who had received only journalism training said,

We were told PR are dark and dirty. It would be nice to know something else, I think it should be a bit more broadminded, [then] you wouldn’t necessarily go into it with a negative attitude right from the start.

Others found the constant criticism demoralizing:

it is really, really galling where … with 20 years or more experience under your belt where your whole business career has actually been founded on your personal values system that we can … be tarred with the brush of everything else … You just constantly have to hold yourselves up and just keep doing the right thing. Just keep doing the right thing, there is no point in engaging [with the criticism]. I can’t see the advantage in engaging or trying to win that … I have never been able to figure out a way of winning.

Other practitioners also found disengagement offered a way to deal with criticism: ‘The fact is we get called spin doctors, we couldn’t give a monkey’s. My clients don’t seem to care, not at all’; ‘They [the media] just like to slag us off because it makes them feel better’.

Theme 3: Silos

A common theme describing barriers to achieving ideal ethical outcomes referred to various manifestations of power compartmentalization or what one respondent termed ‘silos’. Sometimes this was between consultancies and clients, sometimes across departments or hierarchies within client organizations, and sometimes within respondents’ own organizations, for example, a separation in the way managers and non-managers spoke about ethics, and a feeling among non-managers that they could not be candid in front of senior staff.

Theme 4: Coping strategies

Participants’ self-protective mechanisms included blame, fatalism, reductive framing, and deliberate ignorance.

Discussion

A psychological approach to the data could identify multiple mechanisms that participants are using to reduce and evade personal accountability for unethical aspects of PR. For example, they only rarely push clients to engage with ethical considerations because gaining the account is a priority. They are often aware that clients and colleagues do not disclose all ethically pertinent information but choose to ignore that awareness, and they tend to exclude contemplation of overarching or global ethical considerations from the parameters they assign to their daily working role. A psychological approach might also fault the individual participants for these instances of moral disengagement (Bandura, 2011). For example, blaming others has often been identified as an unhelpful or deficient defensive response in ethics contexts. Lekan (2003) points to Dewey’s argument that

The tendency to praise and blame frequently inhibits good moral reasoning. The emotional heat generated by praise and blame gets in the way of careful and critical thinking. It also leads to a kind of defensiveness that saps energy better spent examining the conditions and consequences of the moral problem. (pp. 136–137)

Alternatively, if we apply the feminist discourse perspective that ‘agency is in the relations between actors, rather than in people and things, thereby enabling some possibilities and constraining others’ (Keevers and Treleaven, 2008: 16), we can start to contextualize the participants’ dilemmas and coping strategies, including blame and displacement of responsibility, as indicative not of fault, deficiency, or gridlock in their ethical thinking, but as in fact symptomatic of their attunement to the ‘bigger picture’ of their profession’s paradoxical position within competing and contested flows of power. These are people who are well aware that, ‘through its often powerful and persuasive contribution to public discourse, public relations is influential in shaping the meanings and imperatives of society’ (Daymon and Hodges, 2009: 430). Yet, simultaneously, they experience as practical limitations the ways that their organizations’, their industry’s, and society’s understandings of the nature, boundaries, and practice of PR constrain what representations are possible. They recognize themselves as embedded in manifold power relationships, some of which enable ethical possibilities but many of which constrain them. Using Fraser’s insights into framing and justice to interpret the respondents’ positions, it becomes unsurprising to see them using framing as a way to exclude others (consumers, the media) from their own thinking about responsibility, in order to cope with their situation. The data show that the practitioners are themselves subject to framing. Few if any of the practitioners appeared to be experiencing in their working life what Fraser (2008) considers the two preconditions for enabling just discussion: ‘the inclusiveness condition: discussion must be open to all with a stake in the outcome’ (p. 93) and ‘the parity condition: all interlocutors must, in principle, enjoy roughly equal chances to state their views, place issues on the agenda, question the tacit and explicit assumptions of others, switch levels as needed, and generally receive a fair hearing’ (pp. 93–94). On the contrary, practitioners were themselves typically among those excluded from ‘having a say’ on the intra-organizational and inter-organizational relational structures of global capitalism and, hence, on their particular role within those structural relationships.

Some practitioners were expending considerable effort to resist and confront their construction by others in positions of ‘spin doctor’ and ‘dark side’. Others coped by disengaging from those particular relationships and critiques. Some were expending effort to oppose the construction of their role as a post hoc adjunct to sales and marketing. Others did not feel powerful enough to attempt to challenge that definition of their role. Many simply felt overwhelmed by the constant effort such definitional struggles require. All were postmodern practitioners, in Holtzhausen’s (2000) sense of experiencing the ‘irony and contradiction that living in modernity produces’ (p. 98).

Overall, fieldnotes taken at the time painted a picture of these emotional quandaries that can only be described as bleak. Both collection and analysis of data felt grueling, not because of the quantity of work involved but because the data seemed disheartening, such appeared to be the deeply pessimistic nature of many of the comments the research participants made about ethics.

The fieldnotes record the non-managerial practitioners in particular as seeming, as a generalization, negative, cynical, dismissive, angry, or frustrated about the ethical dimensions of their profession and, in broad terms, feeling powerless both to understand the exact sources of their frustration and to change things. There were numerous moments of exception to this rule, of course, with more upbeat visions of the profession’s positive ethical possibilities. But particularly for those at the lower and middle tiers of the profession who performed the daily technical work of PR, the outlook seemed generally skeptical and despondent, a mood that was particularly evident when managers were not in the room.

One useful interpretation to come out of the research may be the identification that participants are both subjected to power-frames that exclude them and using exclusionary framing as a way to cope with their own feelings of powerlessness (e.g. ‘that is not our problem, it is so ignorant that they believe everything’). For Fraser (2008), an important first step toward creating just systems is simply recognizing the presence and implications of framing:

far from being of marginal significance, frame-setting is among the most consequential of political decisions. Constituting both members and non-members in a single stroke, this decision effectively excludes the latter from the universe of those entitled to consideration within the community in matters of distribution, recognition, and ordinary-political representation. The result can be a serious injustice. (p. 19)

The participants’ experiences of multiple levels of siloization point to frame-setting’s ubiquity within the system of global capitalism, including its uses of PR services, but also show that there is no meaningful opportunity for discussing these decisions: no all-inclusive forum exists for debating issues of power and ethical responsibility between organizations and clients, across organizational divisions or hierarchies, across the transnational activities of multinational corporations, or even between industries such as media and PR. The existing structures are in the main ‘taken as read’ – indeed, as Fraser points out, it is not clear to whom or what questions as to the validity of structural relationships constituting the ‘big picture’ of the global capitalist system can be addressed. She argues that there is no effective mechanism for transnational democratic decision making on the issues of justice that arise from a globalizing economy (Fraser, 2008). Looking at the data through this lens, the participants’ within-organization dilemmas and reactions can be seen as symptomatic of a much bigger predicament (a global system that has no democratic governance) rather than as themselves the root of the problem. Seen from this perspective, the first question in any ethical dilemma becomes one of scope: who has the right to set the frame that limits or extends responsibility – a question that, indeed, some of the participants were already asking.

Fraser (1997a, 1997b, 2008) argues that if we want to suggest the possibility of transforming a field, we must first understand the dominant social logics operating to structure power within that field: Chouliaraki (2002) suggests that, for Fraser, those are the ‘pressure points’ ‘from which any possibility of re-articulation arises’ (p. 100). In this research, the data depicted a clear yet competing set of pressure points that participants were attempting to navigate every day. From Fraser’s (1997a) work, we can recognize these as exemplars of ‘the multiple contradictory interpellations of social subjects, and the multiple complex moral imperatives that motivate struggles for social justice’ (p. 287, original emphasis) that people experience in contemporary capitalist society.

These insights provide an important counterpoint to the sometimes sanguine normative exhortations about possibilities for PR as an ‘ethical conscience’ or ‘moral tugboat’ that are present in the PR literature (including in my own previous writing, e.g. Tilley, 2005a, 2005b, 2009). They suggest that, before we can propose ‘ways to be ethical’ through personal or group training, knowledge, and reflection, we need to develop a far better and deeper understanding of the barriers and challenges that practitioners face, including deeply embedded institutional norms, roles, and structures that are felt only as invisible-yet-material obstacles and limitations, including to what they are allowed to discuss. We need to more accurately diagnose the nature and sources of the feelings of anger and frustration before we can presume to offer a ‘cure’.

Conclusion (or anti-conclusion)

In a sense, this article has no traditional conclusions. The research was, in the end, a process of troubling the status quo and prompting the asking of questions which neither researcher nor participants could, in the immediate context, easily answer. A simplistic suggestion that managers listen more to staff and staff speak more openly in front of managers or that more consultancies draw the line at accepting ethically opaque jobs does not even begin to address the overarching economic structures that caused these symptoms to erupt lower down the power hierarchy. It is also possible, as feminist scholars have argued in relation to patriarchy, that focusing on symptoms may serve to mask the underlying causes of dis/ease – in this case, the lack, as Fraser has repeatedly pointed out, of any kind of democratic governance forum for global capitalism, in which fundamental issues of inequality and powerlessness, at every level, might start to be addressed. Therefore, I deliberately resist the temptation to make glib recommendations. However, a participatory action research framework is nonetheless reassuring in suggesting that perhaps this is in fact the research purpose: to ask questions and support ‘the evolution of a critical consciousness amongst participants’ (Cassell and Johnson, 2006: 802). Certainly, the participants articulated, by the end of multiple loops of sharing and reevaluating findings, clear issues that occupied them urgently in connection with PR ethics. They largely acknowledged the existence of unethical practice rather than denying it, and they identified a range of relationships in which power differentials impacted their ability to achieve the standard of ethics they aspired to. Most if not all the respondents already clearly possessed a critical consciousness in the sense of experiencing disquiet over situations of inequality and limitations on their ability to achieve just outcomes, but the research’s particular critical lens was helpful in putting names to that awareness and identifying points of consensus so that participants might no longer feel alone in their unease.

While the project’s design and analysis drew on ‘the four collective emphases of feminist praxis: reflexivity, orientation to action, attention to the affective aspects of research and the use of the situation-to-hand as a focus for research’ (Keevers and Treleaven, 2008: 3–4), the feminist theoretical paradigm also offered a way forward, in acknowledging that simply recognizing the frames that limit the operations of justice in a given field is the first step to imagining a new frame. The resultant conclusions offer a new way to respond to the mounting calls, such as by Edwards (2009) for research that ‘can illuminate the connections between the social, organizational, and individual levels of public relations activity and enhance existing understandings of the workings of power in public relations’ (p. 252).

Perhaps most usefully, the feminist discourse perspective demonstrably illustrated, as Holtzhausen (2000) argues, that ‘public relations, in representing capitalist institutions, cannot escape the postmodern scrutiny of its role and function in maintaining the often conflicting aims of capitalism’ (p. 97). It also indicated that practitioners do not escape internal awareness of these contradictions. This is a difficult condition to live with, but embracing and naming that difficulty is also a first essential step toward envisioning reform of the wider structural conditions that create the paradoxes of PR ethics.

A feminist poststructuralist approach has not previously been used specifically to examine issues in PR ethics that go beyond a specific focus on gender. Other theoretical paradigms (such as Bourdieu’s conceptualization of power fields) may offer additional ways to see the same data, but as the feminist discourse analysis approach illuminated themes that resonated with the participants, and offered explanatory power for their concerns, I suggest that it has proven itself valuable as a tool in the PR researcher’s analytical array. For practitioners, the research shows that the ethics of daily work within a system such as global capitalism are not insulated from overarching questions about the ethics of the system itself. These broader issues, such as the lack of an effective mechanism for transnational democratic decision making, do influence the context within which PR professionals work and do deserve PR practitioners’ and scholars’ conscious consideration. They also have implications for PR educators, in that they suggest that focusing narrowly on normative individual- or organization-centric approaches to ethics training is unlikely to achieve results.

As Fraser (2008) has argued, justice cannot be understood or enacted within the restricted scope of particular sets of delimited relationships (such as might be implied by concepts of stakeholders) but must first consider issues of scale and scope as themselves questions of ethics in a globalizing world.