Multicultural Ethics Perspective

Today's range of multicultural perspectives concerning appropriate public relations ethics will be
greatly reconciled as public relations continues to professionalize globally. The personal ethics of
any "professionalized" occupation's culture-bound practitioners historically have tended to
become subsumed into universal professional ethics that have encouraged corresponding
universal ethical values.
As has been the case with other occupations that have "professionalized," the range of public
relations' multicultural perspectives will tend to coalesce into a singular universal "professional"
perspective as "professionalization" of public relations occurs through globalization.
This coalescence will occur because of the increasing need for - and societal expectations of - a
commonality in "professional" behavior that will tend to encourage a solidarity in practitioners'
ethical assumptions. These assumptions will be based upon a professional "ideology" that will
evolve from increasing agreement about the public relations profession's role and function within
a globalized society.
This ethical universalization can be expressed as a series of inter-related propositions:
Proposition 1: As the level of public relations professionalism increases, personal and
culturebased ethics will tend to become subsumed by "professional" ethics and these ethics'
corresponding "professional" ethical values.
Practitioners of any "professionalized" occupation tend to derive such strong identity from their
membership in that occupation that the individual practitioners tend to reconcile and subsume
their personal and culture-based ethical values into those of the profession to which they belong.
For example, when a professional journalist enters the "professionalized" culture of journalism,
she can be expected to develop strong personal feelings concerning freedom of speech and the
role of the press in society, even in personal contexts outside her role and function as a
professional journalist. A physician will tend to "professionalize" her view of the sanctity of
human life, in keeping with expected professional behavior based on universal ethical
assumptions and a professional "ideology" related to the medical profession's agreed-upon role
and function within society.
Disparities between the actual practice of journalists and of physicians, to name two examples,
and the "professionalized" ideals that they might hold will create a psychological dissonance on
the part of these practitioners that they will continually attempt to reduce in their own
professional practice. As professional norms evolve, practitioners will increasingly attempt to
reconcile their professional behavior with the norms of their professions.
Similarly, as public relations continues to professionalize, psychological dissonance will occur
among practitioners as they note the disparity between what might be evolving as universal
professional norms and their own practice related to payoffs for story placement, for example.
In some countries journalists pay to get stories, while in others journalists are paid to print them.
Concurrently, a global ethical norm might be evolving that regards any type of payment to be
unethical behavior according to normative ethical assumptions.