ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the transactional justice of exchange relationships. It shows that David Hume’s concept of justice is inextricably embedded within resource dependency theory and the desire for a positive reputation. Resource dependency theory and the concept of reputation management, of course, span a wide variety of explanations and enactments of public relations. Hume creeps eerily close to Charles Darwin’s revolutionary concept of natural selection in flirting with the idea that justice and transferable property themselves might be offshoots of “some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species”. Evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and rhetoricians have made much the same claims regarding a fusion of justice and reputation— further consilience among the different disciplines. Hume’s belief that respect for justice and property leads to enhanced reputation and social approbation is relevant to social-theory approaches to public relations. Social theory tends to take a macro-level/societal view of public relations, as opposed to meso-level/organizational approaches or micro-level/individual approaches.
