Society

All professions take and measure their contribution from their ability to add value to society. The history of the profession of public relations is inseparable from the changing nature of individual societies as well as the larger sense of what constitutes society. Legendary practitioners such as Ivy Lee, Edward Bernays, Earl Newsom, and John W. Hill 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 by studying and dedicating to society. They may be faulted for failures, some of which are more clearly understood in retrospection, but no one can deny their concern. They took this responsibility seriously and thought in [Page 788]terms of it as they defined and added to the role of public relations in society.

They were not alone in this exploration and dedication. The Public Relations Society of America's “Official Statement on Public Relations” states,

If we trace the antecedents of public relations broadly, we will find it at the very fabric of the evolution of ideas, policies, values, and organizations in every country, culture, and society. For instance, John W. Hill, principal founding partner of Hill & Knowlton, recognized the reality that public relations practitioners were needed to help organizations understand and meet their contract with society. They were the servants of society that gave them life. Hill 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” (1958, p. vix). For Hill, the primary role of public relations was to “serve ‘the public interest’ {which} evolves from the properly combined energies and principles of all positive elements of our society” (1963, p. 256). Leaders in the profession have long recognized that their obligations, rights, responsibilities, and ethics derived from the societies where they operated.

Sensitivity to public relations' role in society has been a constant theme in published studies on the discipline. The early years of the Public Relations Review witnessed many articles that addressed that theme and the standards of corporate responsibility that must guide practitioners and their clients. In those treatises, service to society was a constant and serious theme. More recently, Ron Pearson (1992) examined in detail 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. These were ethical and professional choices. Similar analysis underpinned Larissa A. Grunig's (1992) reasoning that public relations needs to add definable value to society if it is to have the status of a true and worthy profession. Central to its charge is the challenge facing it to raise the ethical standards of the organizations the practice represents. Studies of this kind by academics such as Roy Leeper in 2001, were accompanied by substantial investigation of the implications and challenges over the meaning of community and communitarianism.

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