ABSTRACT
Public relations communication has traditionally been used in functional ways such as advertising, marketing, publicity, and lobbying to help organizations of all kinds shape their environments. Under a functional orientation, stakeholders, publics, and society at large are often treated as merely the receivers of organizational messages and actions. Organizations use one-way communication to tell publics what they want them to know. Public relations practiced in this functional orientation is rarely ethical and does little to empower the public. This chapter argues that by shifting our frameworks for understanding ethical public relations away from a functional orientation, we can practice more ethical public relations.
