This study examines how sociocultural factors influence the ethical practices of public relations (PR) practitioners in Ghana, addressing the dominance of a Western-centered perspective in PR ethics by offering a uniquely African perspective. Using a qualitative case study with purposefully selected practitioners, this research investigates how professionals navigate ethical issues within Ghana's cultural context and organizational requirements. The results revealed three main insights. First, ethical loyalties differ: while some practitioners prioritize personal values, others show stronger allegiance to their organizations, a trait influenced by high power distance and collectivist cultural norms. Second, practitioners uphold universal principles such as honesty, integrity, and transparency while adapting them to local cultural expectations. Third, traditional and religious institutions significantly influence ethical decision-making, highlighting the importance of communal values and relationships. These dynamics reflect the impact of the ubuntu philosophy and the personal influence model, illustrating how PR ethics are reshaped through culturally rooted practices. By emphasizing Ghana's cultural realities, this study contributes to the decolonization of PR ethics and offers insights into more culturally responsive and contextually relevant approaches to theory and practice.
Jacques Ellul warned that a culture ruled by technical efficiency sidelines moral judgment. This worry is realized in AI writing assistants, which promise frictionless generation while eroding the formative struggle of writing. Building on Shannon Vallor's analysis of "frictionless virtues," this article develops strategic inconvenience-the cultivated capacity to choose friction over optimization when human flourishing demands it-as a technomoral dimension of practical wisdom. Using AI writing assistants as a case study, we draw on Aristotelian virtue ethics to argue that strategic inconvenience is the practical wisdom to identify the mean between uncritical technological optimization and blanket rejection. Drawing on Heidegger's enframing and Illich's distinction between convivial and manipulative tools, we discuss how the struggle of manual composition sustains the deliberative space required for this practical wisdom. Finally, we address objections concerning efficiency, privilege, and progress; ask what refusal means when AI is infrastructural; and propose practices for cultivating this judgment.
Through the lens of professional responsibility theory, the study examines direct and indirect effects of these three ethics constructs on public relations practitioners' trust building toward their organizations. By using a national online survey of 620 PR practitioners in the United States and Canada, the study confirms positive and direct effects of all three ethics constructs on trust building. More importantly, the results suggest that ethics training does not function as a standalone intervention, while both ethics awareness and ethics resources partially mediate a direct effect of ethics training on trust building. The interrelationships among these three ethics constructs are used to build a model for organizational ethical infrastructure, highlighting that PR practitioners' trust building toward their organizations emerges most strongly when ethics training, awareness, and resources are aligned to reinforce the professional role of PR practitioners. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Legal sports gambling in the U.S. has spread rapidly since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling. Media entities are becoming increasingly reliant on sponsorships and partnerships with sportsbooks, raising considerable ethical concerns. This study analyzes responses from 15 self-identified editors to assess widespread legalized sports betting's epistemological impact on professional practice. Via thematic analysis, we identified three primary themes: Epistemic Ecological Transformation of Sports Betting, Epistemic Labor and Compromised Objectivity, and Risk Perception. These themes illustrate a complex and swiftly changing sports media ecosystem that leaves individual reporters to ascertain what constitutes ethical behavior in the absence of institutional policy. Findings suggest that a meaningful shift in sports journalism practice is underway and that explicit guidelines are needed to set consistent terms of ethical approaches to sports journalism in an age of normalized gambling.
