Meanderings on the subject of corporate ethics II

OK, so I asked Adam Garfunkel whether my fictional boardroom exists anywhere, and he was diplomatic in his response. His answer went something like, sure people are well motivated, even in boardrooms, but ultimately CSR initiatives have to make business sense. This, I suppose should be self evident, unless obviously you're a tambourine weilding idealist like myself.

Luckily he was pretty good at convincing me that at least a lot of the time CSR initiatives do make business sense. CSR, he explained, is about risk management. Increasingly, companies are conducting their business in public, improved means of communication making it easier to notice poor practice. Companies should avoid future scandal by looking long and hard at what they are doing, and putting it right if it offers any cause for concern.


Although this seemed to make fine sense (it always does at the time), I've been considering the extent to which the logic tied to market conditions. What if people don't care where their slacks are being manufactured? What if people who patronise your business are indifferent to ethics? What if people are distracted from ethical considerations by other imperatives? The current financial environment seems less conducive to ethical scrutiny than the boom which preceeded it. Businesses have also dropped the amount they're donating to charity.

I suppose the failsafe should be the law, which we imagine is creeping (very slowly) in the direction of making business acknowledge and seek to limit its impacts. In principle, a business would do well to make a gradual transition to more sustainable operations, rather than getting into some ruckus with a regulator. Unfortunately, law makers (at least in this country) seem to be doing very little to make things uncomfortable for unsustainable businesses, and this has also been compounded by the economy. It would be a great shame to see emergent business values like transparency and social responsibility going under before they've had a chance to make an impact.

Meanderings on the subject of corporate ethics

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a class debate. Our team opposed the motion that you could only practise ethical PR in the not for profit sector, not with little difficulty. Especially ferocious was the attack from my classmate Saema, who argued that business simply can't be ethical, on the basis that they must, first and formost, cater to their shareholders. This view holds that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a sham, and that ethics simply cannot exist in the boardroom.


Sadly I've never sat in a boardroom, at least not with board of directors, so I can only imagine (see above for my rather tragic graphical rendering of ethics in the boardroom). However, I 'm lothe to belive that every single one of them would be operating without a moral compass of any description. Presumedly these leaders of business would all be pariahs by now had they not, in general, abided by the ethical codes which define individual ethical conduct. Why should they as broadly moral people, who have probably wrestled with a dilemma or two, not be allowed to take a step back to examine and adjust the ethical direction of their organisation - the way that its vision and strategy work towards the (admittedly fairly vague) ideal of a good society?

Maybe people are right that as long as shareholders are there to be sated, and a profit seeking imperative remains enshrined in law, this ideal will never be acheived.

Or maybe it is in fact the case that for certain kinds of company, not only are conditions like sustainability and ethical agreeability becoming bound to profit, but also shareholders can be persuaded of this with greater ease. I reckon you can have a company that is both financially strong and actively ethical. What do you think?

The Thick of It

Some of my classmates will have heard me talking about "The Thick of It", a satirical comedy about British government. One of the main characters is a press officer who is obviously based on a well known public figure.

As our last seminar was about political PR, I thought it timely to link to a clip of the show for your enjoyment and eduction. While it is very funny (alongside making a serious observation about the impact of spin on the running of government) I should warn that in the name of realism it contains a bit of creative swearing.

New Media: Is PR getting left behind?

When I was working for my last employer (a local authority for a major UK city), my colleague made an educational film for local schools, tackling an issue she was working on. While she wanted to put the film on Youtube, Corporate Communications insisted that she could only do so with viewer comments disabled. She proceeded as instructed, and for a while we heard nothing.

Some days later however, the video was picked up by a local MP. Dismayed at the restrictions imposed on it, he had reuploaded the videos, this time with comments enabled. My collegue found that people were viewing (and commenting on) his version of the video, and took this finding to Corporate Communications. Only then did they relent, and authorise comments on the council's version of the film.

The intention of this vignette is to illustrate that the internet is no place for control freakery. Even where an organisation tries to restrict debate for fear of criticism, it is likely that the debate will surface elsewhere. When organisation establishes a presence on the internet, it should understand that in doing so, it is expected to "join the conversation".

This should be a wonderful thing, especially for organisations like local councils which have a deeply rooted reputation as inert, non-responsive institutions. However, it is understandable that an organisation may be unwilling to open the floodgates - in doing so, it is likely to discover public relations challenges it never knew existed.

(Thats good news for us by the way!)

Propaganda in War

In the first lesson of this module, we discussed ways of creating public consent for acts of war, and then we watched a film - called War and Spin - about how to control representations of international conflict in the media.


Set during the second Gulf War, War and Spin follows British and American journalists as they cavort around the Iraqi landscape in pursuit of objective news reportage. While intended as comment on the coalition's strict handling of media access during the war, overall I found myself cheering on the American infantry, who spent the whole thing landing helicopters and speeding around the sparkling dunes of the Iraqi desert in IMVs. Private Jessica Lynch is hot as the love interest rescued from evil Iraqi doctors, and Brigadier General Vincent Brooks (pictured above) is convincing as the army spokesman in the media centre, lording over the holographic display screen while telling the nosey brit to lie the f**k down. In fact the last person you wanted to be (apart obviously from an Iraqi extra or Saddam) was the lead journalist (played by Clive Myrie) who was either a) miserably embedded with troops and being made to cry because he couldn't hold a gun, or b) miserably cooped up in the CENTCOM centre with hundreds of other journalists and being made to cry because Brig. Gen. Brooks told him his question was literally meaningless in front of everyone.

Of course I'm being glib, but only because this blog is about PR, not the horrors of war or the moral and political ramifications of unilateral regime change. And from the point of view of PR, it seems that the second war in the Gulf created what practitioners crave: infinite journalistic interest combined with utter journalistic dependency. Naturally, journalists were quick to criticise the restrictions put on their work, but they couldn't complain too loudly. The amount of media access made possible during the conflict was unprecedented.

But it remains debateable how far coverage of the Iraq war actually helped to sway public opinion in the UK, a significant proportion of which continued to oppose the war, even after the invasion began. Initial coverage was generally positive - perhaps due to the PR strategies employed - and for a short time, the war went from political liability to boon. However, as the conflict has dragged out and its premises have continued to be tested, the media excitement around the 2003 offensive has given way to more sober assessment, with the only respite being what some have called Iraq Fatigue, which has to some extent dulled reader and editor interest in the issue. Damaging criticism of Tony Blair, George Bush and Gordon Brown as a result of the war shows that even with favourable PR conditions in place, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to polish a political turd.