Society

All professions base their identity and measure their contribution from their ability to add value to society. Legendary practitioners recognized that their profession had to add value to society through their services to clients. They shaped what they believed was the ethics of their practice as well as the skills of their service against this metric. They may be faulted for failures, some of which are more clearly understood in retrospection, but they took this responsibility seriously as they defined the role of public relations in society. The eternal question is not “Does each profession serve society?” but perhaps “How does society sustain each profession?”

For instance, John W. Hill, principal founding partner of Hill & Knowlton, recognized that public relations practitioners were needed to help organizations understand and meet their contract with society. They were servants of each society that gave them life. Hill in 1958 advised, “Public relations is an outgrowth of our free society, in which the ideal of an enlightened and rational public opinion is brought ever closer as understanding increases between groups and individuals” (p. vix). For Hill (1963), the primary role of public relations was to serve “the public interest” (p. 256).

The early years of the Public Relations Review witnessed many articles that addressed the standards of corporate responsibility that must guide practitioners and their clients. In those treatises, service to society was a constant and serious theme. Ron Pearson examined how critical standards surrounding the practice reflected different views of the role of business in society. Practitioners were in a position to adjust business to society or society to business. They could be the pawns of business or the servants of society.

Systems perspectives on public relations reasoned that an organization cannot long prosper or even survive if it is out of harmony and does not behaviorally adjust to the interests of its publics and stakeholders. A rhetorical perspective on public relations views dialogue as the essential struggle to codefine and manage interests and perspectives. This view of public relations assumes that public discourse refines ideas, vets facts and sharpens their interpretation, evaluates value [Page 855]priorities, creates and demolishes identifications, and scrutinizes personal and sociopolitical policies and actions. Critical theory adds depth to such considerations by exploring the presence, causes, and remedies to alienation. To this end, and that of the other perspectives central to public relations, the fundamental concepts are balance and harmony.

The iconic social thinker, George Herbert Mead explored such themes in 1934 as he built his sociology on the belief that normative behavior results from individual and collective dialectics of mind, self, and society: