It is all in the name: Toward a typology of public relations professionals’ ethical dilemmas

Although scholarship discussing public relations professionals’ ethical dilemmas has been abundant, a theoretically-derived typology explaining the origin of these dilemmas and categorizing them into distinct profiles has been so far lacking. We address this lacuna by utilizing role theory to elucidate the origin of public relations professionals’ ethical dilemmas and employ a deductive approach to extricate them from each part of the name “public relations professional.” Specifically, we portray public as the midpoint on a continuum, with the organization at one end and society at the other; relations as the midpoint between transactions and bonds; and professional as the midpoint between employee and citizen. This leads to the development of a multidimensional typology that includes three categories of ethical dilemmas: organization-versus-society, transactions-versus-bonds, and employee-versus-citizen. We advance extant scholarship by explaining the origin of public relations professionals’ ethical dilemmas and unifying such dilemmas in an exclusive-inclusive typology.