A somewhat dramatic and exaggerated question, but hopefully one that makes you read on.

This is essentially the question I set out to answer when I began the process of writing a dissertation for my MA Public Relations degree at Bournemouth University.

I tell you this now because I got a letter from BU last week saying the external examiner for my project has recommended my entry for the Euprera Jos Willems Award - a European-wide competition to find the best Bachelor and Master dissertations on public relations. This seemed to impress people, so I thought I'd blog about it for my kind colleagues that wanted to hear more about my study.

I spent three months of my life (I enjoyed every second, promise) looking into the differences in perspectives that public relations academics and public relations practitioners have towards the ethics of public relations practice.

There were a few reasons I picked this particular topic. At the time of writing, I'd been 'doing PR' for about five months, and had not once heard any single person mention the word ethics. Conversely, I'd been reading PR academia for about nine months, which was littered with talk of ethics and the public interest.

Did that mean that PR people are just incessant liars? Even in my limited experience, I'd never encountered anyone manipulating the truth, and had actually found PRs to be very genuine and honest people. So, I investigated. Hence the question 'do books tell the truth?', which roughly translated to 'are PR academics just idealists writing about ethical things they want to happen in the industry, when actual PR people don't care much about ethics at all?'.

The academic literature will tell you that PR's longstanding association with unethical practice has traditionally been viewed as the greatest hindrance to the field's professional credibility. PR academics have also suggested that, as the society-facing members of the profession, PR practitioners hold the key to determining the field's ethical reputation.

Essentially, this means that as PR practitioners' work has the greatest impact on people, people will judge the whole PR field based on what practitioners do. Now, this puts the PR academics in a very difficult situation - they're associated with the field, but can't determine its reputation. This, in turn, leads the academics to apply philosophical frameworks (based on the very foundations of 'good' human behaviour), in order to say, in their books and journals, how PR should be ethically conducted.

So their part is done, right? No. The problem I found in my reading was that none of these models and frameworks had actually been empirically tested - nobody knew if they were realistic for actual PR practice, nor whether the practitioners agreed with/cared about them.

This is where I stepped in. I did interviews with 10 PR people (with backgrounds ranging from Higher Education to entertainment) to see what their views on ethics were, with the eventual aim of proving that what the academics said is rubbish*.

10,464 words later and I had some success in doing that, but the results were mixed at best. What I found were similarities and differences with what the academics had written and what PR people thought.

For the most part, PR people believed themselves to be ethical, and felt that it filtered into their work too.

The biggest differentiator between the two groups, though, was the academic idea that PR practice is only ethical when it catered to the public interest, i.e. it is mutually beneficial for both the client and society in general. It's quite a contentious issue, but my results indicated that PR people were prepared to account for wider public interests in their work, but didn't want to hold society's interests above their client's interests (rightly so, who pays the bills...?).

This is all a very longwinded way of helping us...in no great way. The academics will continue to be idealists, while the PRs will be realists, serving their clients in an open and honest way.

I've worked at Octopus for about seven weeks now. Again, I've still not heard anyone talk about ethics - but what needs to be said? The people I work with are honest, truth-telling and hardworking people, and it would be counterproductive for people to fret about the ethics of every decision they make.

The verdict: ethics should remain an academic issue. We need to focus on 'doing all the PR'.

*It's best not to refer to anything as 'rubbish' when writing a dissertation.

Sammy