Toward a More Robust Conceptualization of Crisis Communication Ethics in Public Relations: Life Span Critiques

• In Event: Crisis Communication Effects and Strategies

Abstract

Public relations literature demonstrates a decades-long movement toward emphasis on relationships. Privileging relationships, contexts, and care for vulnerable others, ethic of care is a normative framework that uniquely fits modern public relations – especially crisis communication/management, which inherently entails organization-public relationship violations and vulnerable publics. This essay demonstrates that dominant approaches to public relations and crisis communication ethics have exhibited a masculine-thought bias based on classical philosophies such as deontology and utilitarianism that privilege logic and rationality. Indeed, traditionally masculine thought and classical ethics are valuable, even integral to conceptualizing and applying public ethics; however, this focus creates ethical weaknesses in existing scholarship that traditionally feminine thought is positioned to strengthen. Namely, ethic of care, at one time confined to the private domain, should also be brought to light through public actions and practices, and attention to other feminist frameworks in public relations and crisis communication ethics scholarship is warranted as well.

Author

• Julia Daisy Fraustino, West Virginia University