Negotiation as a Model for Teaching Public Relations Professionalism

When public relations practitioners (and many leading textbooks) mention professionalism, the discussion often centers around professional status. This is unfortunate because professional status and professionalism are not the same. According to Cutlip, Center, & Broom (1994), professional status is a distinction enjoyed by certain occupations after they have met specific criteria basic to all professions. On the other hand, the authors noted that professionalism refers to the combination of professional skills and ethics to which professionals should aspire: "One without the other falls short of the ideal: Ethics without competence is meaningless; competence without ethics is directionless" (p.158). The authors argued for the distinction in terminology. Professional status, they concluded, is of lesser value than professionalism. The former, they argued, will come as a logical consequence of the latter, We agree. As university professors, we are challenged to find better ways of teaching our students to simultaneously balance the two components of professionalism: (a) ethical considerations and (b) more pragmatic, problem-solving measures. Leading textbooks offer little help toward this end, mainly because traditional teaching methods address ethics and competence separately. More often, discussions of ethics are limited to a single chapter in an introductory text. As students learn additional skills, they are somehow expected to combine them effectively with ethical principles. They are rarely able to do so. In exploring better approaches to professional decision making, we found a negotiation model to be extremely useful. From Murphy's (1989) discussion of game theory as a paradigm for the public relations process, we learned that most public relations situations are best described as "bargaining games" (p.183 in which there are no clear-cut "winners" and "losers." According to Murphy, "the negotiation model holds true for day-to-day decisions where the public relations practitioners must trade off the company's needs and desires against those of other stakeholders" (p. 183). We operationalized Murphy's model into a series of gaming sessions designed to show participants a new way to think about public relations situations. The purpose of this study was to determine qualitatively the extent to which negotiation provides an effective model for teaching public relations professionalism. Related literature Professional status versus professionalism in the public relations field. To date, the preponderance of journal articles on professionalism focus on some aspect of professional status. According to Cutlip, Center, and Broom (1994), five criteria are basic to the achievement of professional status in a given field. Specifically, the criteria are: 1. Specialized education involving a body of knowledge and skills based on theory and research in the field; 2. Provision of a unique and essential service recognized as such by the community; 3. Emphasis on public service and social responsibility over private interests; 4. Autonomy and responsibility to make decisions that affect any number of publics; and, 5. Enforcement of a code of ethics and standards of performance through a selfgoverning association of colleagues (p. 49). Specialized education. Pratt (1991) suggested there is a shortage of empirical evidence on the ethics of public relations practitioners (p. 230). The study concluded that college-level courses explore common ethical issues facing public relations practitioners (p. 234). Ryan and Martinson (1990) surveyed ill PRSA members about the importance of social science research as a major component of public relations professionalism. Practitioners agreed that public relations persons must understand and know how to use social science techniques to contribute to the esoteric, theoretical knowledge (p. 389). Bivins (1989) also noted there is no conceptual framework in public relations texts to study ethics as a component of professionalism. …