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Facing Public Interest pp 149–166Cite as

Dialogue Between Corporations

Ethically Conscious Public Relations Management as Promoter of Industry-wide Agreement on Ethical Policies

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Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics ((IBET,volume 8))

Abstract

In our paper we reflect upon the possibilities corporations have to solve (ethical) problems of industry-wide significance, for example the problem of environmental pollution. Often a single corporation is overcharged by solving the problem on its own because the only suitable solution would be a collective effort. This is a solution of ethical displacement: A shift from the level of a single corporation to the level of industry or, concerning to the business ethics concept of Peter Ulrich, a shift from normative management to layer of shared system political responsibility for the order of economic structure. An industry-wide agreement on ethical policies represent the shift to layer of shared system- political responsibility for the order of economic structure of all industry corporations. The agreement is the result of cooperative negotiations between the affected corporations (and stakeholders) according to the idea of Habermas’ communicative ethics. After discussing the strategic implications of an industrywide agreement on ethical policies we show that in contrast to the conventional success-oriented PR management only the ethically conscious PR management can support the process of cooperatively negotiating. We examine the role of ethically conscious PR management before, during, and after the cooperatively negotiations. The ethically conscious PR management is an important promoter during the whole problem-definition and problem-solving process.

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Authors
  1. Regine Tiemann
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  2. Susanne Zajitschek
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Business Ethics, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Peter Ulrich (Chair of Business Ethics, Director) & Charles Sarasin (Chair of Business Ethics, Director) & 

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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Tiemann, R., Zajitschek, S. (1995). Dialogue Between Corporations. In: Ulrich, P., Sarasin, C. (eds) Facing Public Interest. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0399-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0399-2_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-3634-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-0399-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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