Environmental Scanning & the Ethical Conscience

One of our core roles as professional public relations professionals is to serve as our organization’s environmental scanner. We must look beyond our organization’s boundaries to seek information about our organization, news that could possibly affect our organization, and issues that warrant our attention. As the parable goes, indeed we must “see the whole elephant” in order to identify and manage potential issues, issue which, if left unaddressed could affect the operation or reputation of an organization. Environmental scanning can happen in a variety of ways, through both formal and informal inquiry—by analyzing social media, looking at comments discussion boards, on-site observation, and of course evaluating news coverage. As Dyer (1996) explained,

“Monitoring the organizational environment, environmental scanning, is an important part of the public relations practitioner's job. Everyone knows that the contents of the media agenda have very significant implications for organizations…. But some of the greatest utility that the public relations practitioner can offer an organization is the ability to identify incremental changes in the content of the media agenda for issues with which the organization is concerned” (p. 148).

By scanning our environment to understand those issues and topics that could affect our organization, we are able to provide better ethical guidance in terms of next steps. Simply put, our environmental scanning role informs our role as an organization’s ethical conscience. Much like the legal team provides legal counsel, we must provide ethical counsel. And we cannot provide sound counsel unless we have a handle on public discourse and expectations. The roots of public relations’ “ethical conscience” can be traced to Ivy Lee’s 1906 Declaration of Principles, which argued that public relations professionals should serve as their organization’s journalist in residence; we must provide transparent, open, accurate information for our publics. The specific concept of an ethical conscience developed by the 1950s—evidenced by John Hill’s 1958 discussion of the “corporate conscience” (Bowen, 2008). As Bowen summarized, “the role of ethical conscience allows public relations practitioners to act in the best of interests of both their organizations and their publics. The well-being of both organizations and publics could be enhanced through public relations professionals performing the role of ethics counsel” (p. 290).

In practice, this mandate means thinking holistically for your organization—scanning our environment while thinking about all publics and stakeholders at all times. Acting ethically also means thinking long term—sometimes even sacrificing short-term gains in order to help build long-term quality relationship outcomes. As this lesson will explain, often it is our role to convince management that the latter is more important than the former. It requires thinking beyond the immediate business needs and legal parameters, and considering what your organization “should” do to help manage important relationships. And having a grasp on current conversations in the media inform this responsibility.

For example, in 2008 two major California-based corporations—Apple and Google—publicly announced donations ($100,000 and $140,000 respectively) to help in the campaign against Proposition 8, a bill before California voters proposing a ban on marriage for same-sex couples. In so doing, Apple released the statement, “Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation” (Kim, 2008). Similarly, one of Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin released a statement that read, “While we respect the strongly held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love” (Kopytoff, 2008). Certainly, neither company had any legal or significant business reason compelling them to make a donation. In fact, making a donation and strong public statement about such a political and divisive topic could have been seen as risky. The companies felt, however, that it was their ethical responsibility to do so. Thinking long term, they wanted to make a values statement to key internal and external stakeholders, in order to nurture those relationships. And they conveyed those values via mainstream media.