PR Ethics and CSR

This article discusses the importance of ethical PR and CSR practices in modern organizations. It explores the challenges and benefits of CSR practices and how they can be effectively communicated through PR. The article also highlights the need for ethical behaviour in PR professionals and the impact of unethical PR on CSR activities.

PR ETHICS AND CSR

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
Essay on “Can only ethical PR be done for an ethical organisation”..........................................3
Essay on “Various organization that are good at taking the responsibility of practising CSR”..4
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
PR refers to public relations which involves management and dissemination of
information from an organization to the public in an attempt to influence their perception in
public. Ethics provide a framework or concepts to guide the behaviour of an individual and
organization by making them known about what behaviour is wrong and what behaviour is right.
Furthermore, CSR can be defined as those good doings of an organization through which the
latter contributed towards the achievement of the social goals and protection of their interests.
MAIN BODY
Essay on “Can only ethical PR be done for an ethical organisation”
Ethical PR means requirements to disseminate accurate and truthful communication or
representation among the target audience by informing about every process undertaken by an
organization, that is, right from marketing and billing of services by an organization to
management of competition faced from peers. Similarly, ethical organization have such a culture
where its employees and leaders adhere to the code of ethics applicable on them.
It is necessary for an organization and individual therein to perform ethical PR only and
especially those organizations that aims to act in an ethical manner or are ethical organizations.
This is because PR aims to gain credibility and this can be achieved only by being on truthful
path (Fitch, 2018). Accordingly, if PR is taken as a clever strategy to make public such things to
be right that are in real sense wrong and PR professional is believed to manipulate information,
then it leads to poor reputation of an organization even if they are exercising ethical behaviour in
their internal processes.
There are certain ethical issues associated with carrying out public relations through PR
professionals such as it is generally seen that public and society at large believes that PR
professionals tend to manipulate public by making them believe what they are saying or selling
is beneficial for them. Furthermore, PR professionals are supposed to be withholding some of the
key information from public and accordingly adopts a biased approach in carrying out their
duties, so that organization's reputation can be improved in the eyes of public where in reality it
was not true. For instance, if an organization is practising ethical behaviour, then those results
should not be promised with stakeholders and public by PR professionals that are not achievable
by an organization. Accordingly, it suggested that such tendencies must be avoided by PR
professionals at any cost (Pompper, 2021). This is because such unethical way of disseminating

information reflects that an organization is not sincere or exercising ethical behaviour which they
are intend to do.
These issues create problems in influencing people's perception by making them believe
that whatever information provided by PR professionals is true (Kampf and Fashakin, 2021).
Accordingly, it is believed that everything depends upon the PR professionals in terms of
convincing public and their clients that whatever they are communicating with them is true or
beneficial for them and nothing else.
In this way, it is expected from PR professionals to maintain impartial behaviour at all the
times because a biased approach adopted by them never allow in achieving their goals behind
performing public relations. It is the responsibility of PR professionals to avoid distortion of
reality and exercising discrimination as it would lead to ethical issues only and even being
ethical, an organization may earn a bad name on getting biased to gain higher market share even
at the cost of leaving public at the edge of harms.
Essay on “Various organization that are good at taking the responsibility of practising CSR”
CSR practices can be best defined as a practice or policy of an organization undertaken
with the intention of having positive influence over the public and society at large. The key
purpose behind taking CSR is to pursue social objectives in addition to their goal of maximizing
profits. Several organizations in contemporary world are good at fulfilling their responsibility
towards the society which involves reducing externalities over the environment, encouragement
of volunteerism among their employees and making donations to charities out of their profit for
the betterment of society (Lee, Cruz and Shanka, 2018).
Organizations generally take the responsibility of CSR practices due to several reasons
such as having good image of their brand in the eyes of society, achieving a perception among
customers and clients that they highly ethical in doing business in order to achieve more business
with them. Accordingly, CSR is considered to be an important component of public relation
related activities.
Consumers generally demands more and more contribution from organization towards
the society. It is seen that CSR practices leads to improvement in long term performance of
business because customers wants to have business with those organizations that are having
strong base of practising CSR and ethical values. Therefore, it is necessary to have such PR

practices that ensures authenticity. PR can be used as a voice to inspire & inform society about
the CSR activities that an organization is carrying out.
There are certain issues that must be addressed through performing CSR activities such
as provision of better working conditions, environmental management, employee & community
relations, gender balance, protecting human rights and good governance (Tworzydło, Gawroński
and Szuba, 2021). With the help of these addressing these issues through performing CSR,
modern organizations are able to establish a differentiating factor between them and their
competitors. This is because of the reason that customers prefer to buy only from those concern
who are seems to be both environmentally and socially responsible.
The biggest challenge for modern organization is of communicating their CSR initiatives
among public and society which depicts an existence of complex relationship between PR and
CSR practices. The CSR practices revolves around making improvements in product sourcing,
boosting job opportunities available to local communities and reducing pollution. Whatever the
practice may be, it must be communicated to society in order to build good brand image through
PR. However, the issues of PR such as provision of manipulative information and unethical
behaviour of PR professionals as perceived by society hinder the success of CSR practices as
well.
Therefore, many organizations are good at CR practices over the others due to their better
communication strategy of presenting their socially responsible activities to society.
CONCLUSION
It has been identified ethical organization must ensure that their PR professionals are
exercising ethical behaviour in performing activities related to maintaining public relations. If
PR is not carried out in ethical manner, then CSR activities also gets affected accordingly.
Furthermore, many organizations in modern times are effectively carrying out their CSR
practices which is helping them in improving the performance of their PR as well.

REFERENCES
Tworzydło, D., Gawroński, S. and Szuba, P., 2021. Importance and role of CSR and stakeholder
engagement strategy in polish companies in the context of activities of experts handling
public relations. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental
Management, 28(1), pp.64-70.
Kampf, C. E. and Fashakin, O. K., 2021. The social responsibility of AI: a framework for
considering ethics and DEI. In Public Relations for Social Responsibility. Emerald
Publishing Limited.
Fitch, K., 2018. Public relations and responsible citizenship: Communicating CSR and
sustainability. In Disciplining the Undisciplined? (pp. 109-119). Springer, Cham.
Pompper, D. ed., 2021. Public relations for social responsibility: Affirming DEI commitment
with action. Emerald Group Publishing.
Lee, H. C. B., Cruz, J. M. and Shankar, R., 2018. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in
supply chain competition: should greenwashing be regulated?. Decision Sciences, 49(6),
pp.1088-1115.
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