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Ex.9. Give the written summary of the topic “Understanding Public Relations” (350 words)

Ex. 10. Go over pages 3-40 of the book «PR Today» and the texts of exercises 7 and 8 of the present textbook. Get ready to speak on the following issues of the topic “Understanding Public Relations”:

• 
  Definitions of Public Relations;
  
• 
  Origins and development of PR;
  
• 
  Attempts to develop theoretical approaches to understanding PR;
  
• 
  PR’s role in the information marketplace
  

Chapter 2. PR Ethics

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions:

1. 
   What is ethics? Can you give your own definition?
   
2. 
   Why is the issue of ethics so sensitive for a PR professional?
   
3. 
   Do you agree with the author’s statement that PR is amoral? Why or why not?
   
4. 
   In your opinion, should a PR practitioner only work for purposes they are passionate about?
   
5. 
   What is Corporate Social Responsibility?
   
6. 
   Which PR conduct codes can you mention?
   
7. 
   What is the ethical principle concerning representing conflicting or competing interests?
   
8. 
   Can the rule of not attacking other organizations be applied rigidly? Why?
   
9. 
   What is your personal attitude towards payment by results in PR profession? Give arguments.
   
10. 
    What are the problems of keeping with public interest?
    
11. 
    Can you give the definition of the integrity of public communication?
    
12. 
    Should PR specialists always tell all the truth about the organization they serve? Why or why not?
    

Ex.2. Match the words with definitions.

to be bemused	to deliberately disobey a law, rule etc, without trying to hide what you are doing
to aspire	to consider something to be important
to covet	to avoid a problem or rule that restricts you, especially in a clever or dishonest way
paragon	someone who is perfect or is extremely brave, good etc - often used humorously
glib	something that must be done, and which is stated as part of an agreement, law, or rule
to flout	to be looking as if you are confused
to be at stake	you will lose something if a plan or action is not successful:
slanging match	said easily and without thinking about all the problems involved
stipulation	an angry argument in which people insult each other
flagrant	to break a law, rule, or agreement
to set great store	to desire and work towards achieving something important
to circumvent	to have a very strong desire to have something that someone else has
to breach	shocking because it is done in a way that is easily noticed and shows no respect for laws, truth etc

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Ex.3 Complete the words and translate the following sentences into Russian.

1. 
   The Michelin Awards are c________ by restaurants all over the world.
   
2. 
   He could never be called a p_______ of virtue.
   
3. 
   His opponents say he is g______ and deceitful.
   
4. 
   Some companies f_______ the rules and employ children as young as seven.
   
5. 
   They have to win the contract - thousands of jobs are a_____ s______.
   
6. 
   Little misunderstanding led to a real s_______ m_______.
   
7. 
   The agreement included a s_________ that half of the money had to be spent on housing for lower-income families.
   
8. 
   He was often accused of f________ violations of human rights.
   
9. 
   Patrick has never s______ much s______ by material things.
   
10. 
    The company opened an account abroad, in order to c________ the tax laws.
    
11. 
    The company accused him of b________ his contract.
    
12. 
    He looked slightly b_______ by all the questions.
    
13. 
    At that time, all serious artists a_______ to go to Rome.
    

Ex.4. Translate the following words and word-combinations from Russian into English using active vocabulary.

Скользкий (о человеке); попирать; быть на кону; перебранка; условие, оговорка; ужасающий; относиться серьезно; обойти; нарушать; быть пораженным; стремиться к чему-либо; жаждать; образец.

Ex.5 Translate the following sentences from English into Russian.

1. 
   My father looked slightly bemused.
   
2. 
   She aspires to nothing less than the chairmanship of the company.
   
3. 
   The team coveted the championship throughout the season.
   
4. 
   Such a paragon never wears jeans, or drinks alcohol, or smokes.
   
5. 
   Many senior administrators are smooth and glib, in the manner of politicians.
   
6. 
   He often flouts the rules of propriety.
   
7. 
    That's a very risky investment. How much money is at stake?
   
8. 
   The slanging match continued to show no sign of calming down.
   
9. 
   The only stipulation was that the flag should keep flying.
   
10. 
    While you may believe your comment to laudable, it is nothing more than a flagrant display of your ignorance.
    
11. 
    Bill sets great store by his expensive tools.
    
12. 
    He circumvented capture by anticipating their movements.
    
13. 
     The company was found to be in breach of environmental regulations.
    

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Ex.6. Translate the following sentences from Russian into English using active vocabulary.

1. 
   Председатель Джонс производил впечатление скользкого и ненадежного человека.
   
2. 
   США часто обвиняют в попирании суверенитета различных стран.
   
3. 
   Игра продолжалась, все больше и больше денег было на кону.
   
4. 
   Пиар специалисты не должны устраивать перебранки, которые могут негативно отразиться на репутации данной области.
   
5. 
   Данная оговорка присутствует не во всех кодексах деятельности специалистов по связям с общественностью.
   
6. 
   Как и многие другие политики он жаждал власти.
   
7. 
   Некоторые неправительственные организации демонстрируют поведение, которое можно назвать ужасающим.
   
8. 
   Он всегда очень серьезно относился к своим обязанностям.
   
9. 
   Компанию часто обвиняют в попытках обойти законодательство с целью извлечения дополнительной прибыли.
   
10. 
    Очень трудно доказать, нарушил ли специалист по связям с общественностью этический кодекс.
    
11. 
    Такой подход зачастую поражает сотрудников компании и не дает им возможность маневра.
    
12. 
    Многие пиар профессионалы стремятся к тому, чтобы их воспринимали серьезно.
    
13. 
    Данную компанию нельзя назвать образцом честности.
    

Ex. 7. Translate the following text from English into Russian

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Ethics courses fall short in business schools

A few years ago, Israeli game theorist Ariel Rubinstein got the idea of examining how the tools of economic science affected the judgment and empathy of his undergraduate students at Tel Aviv University. He made each student the CEO of a struggling hypothetical company, and tasked them with deciding how many employees to lay off.

Some students were given an algebraic equation that expressed profits as a function of the number of employees on the payroll. Others were given a table listing the number of employees in one column and corresponding profits in the other. Simply presenting the layoff/profits data in a different format had a surprisingly strong effect on students' choices -- fewer than half of the "table" students chose to fire as many workers as was necessary to maximize profits, whereas three quarters of the "equation" students chose the profit-maximizing level of pink slips.

Why? The "equation" group simply "solved" the company's problem of profit maximization, without thinking about the consequences for the employees they were firing.

Rubinstein's classroom experiment serves as one lesson in the pitfalls of the scientific method: It often seems to distract us from considering the full implications of our calculations. The point isn't that it's necessarily immoral to fire an employee -- Milton Friedman famously claimed that the sole purpose of a company is indeed to maximize profits -- but rather that the students who were encouraged to think of the decision to fire someone as an algebra problem didn't seem to think about the employees at all.

The experiment is indicative of the challenge faced by business schools, which devote themselves to teaching management as a science, without always acknowledging that every business decision has societal repercussions.

A new generation of psychologists is now thinking about how to create ethical leaders in business and in other professions, based on the notion that good people often do bad things unconsciously. It may transform not just education in the professions, but the way we think about encouraging people to do the right thing in general.

At present, the ethics curriculum at business schools can best be described as an unsuccessful work-in-progress. It's not that business schools are turning Mother Teresas into Jeffrey Skillings (Harvard Business School, class of '79), despite some claims to that effect. It's easy to come up with examples of rogue MBA graduates who have lied, cheated and stolen their ways to fortunes (recently convicted Raj Rajaratnam is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business; his partner in crime, Rajat Gupta, is a Harvard Business School alum). But a huge number of companies are run by business school grads, and for every Gupta and Rajaratnam there are scores of others who run their companies in perfectly legal anonymity. And of course, there are the many ethical missteps by non-MBA business leaders -- Bernie Madoff was educated as a lawyer; Enron's Ken Lay had a Ph.D. in economics.

In actuality, the picture suggested by the data is that business schools have no impact whatsoever on the likelihood that someone will cook the books or otherwise commit fraud. MBA programs are thus damned by faint praise: "We do not turn our students into criminals" would hardly make for an effective recruiting slogan.

If it's too much to expect MBA programs to turn out Mother Teresas, is there anything that business schools can do to make tomorrow's business leaders more likely to do the right thing? If so, it's probably not by trying to teach them right from wrong -- moral epiphanies are a scarce commodity by age 25, when most students start enrolling in MBA programs.

Yet this is how business schools have taught ethics for most of their histories. They've often quarantined ethics into the beginning or end of the MBA education. When Ray Fisman began his MBA classes at Harvard Business School in 1994, the ethics course took place before the instruction in the "science of management" in disciplines like statistics, accounting and marketing. The idea was to provide an ethical foundation that would allow students to integrate the information and lessons from the practical courses with a broader societal perspective. Students in these classes read philosophical treatises, tackle moral dilemmas and study moral exemplars such as Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke, who took responsibility for and provided a quick response to the series of deaths from tampered Tylenol pills in the 1980s.

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It's a mistake to assume that MBA students only seek to maximize profits -- there may be eye-rolling at some of the content of ethics curricula, but not at the idea that ethics has a place in business. Yet once the preterm ethics instruction is out of the way, it is forgotten, replaced by more tangible and easier to grasp matters like balance sheets and factory design. Students get too distracted by the numbers to think very much about the social reverberations -- and in some cases legal consequences -- of employing accounting conventions to minimize tax burden or firing workers in the process of reorganizing the factory floor.

Business schools are starting to recognize that ethics can't be cordoned off from the rest of a business student's education. The most promising approach, in our view, doesn't even try to give students a deeper personal sense of mission or social purpose -- it's likely that no amount of indoctrination could have kept Jeff Skilling from blowing up Enron. Instead, it helps students to appreciate the unconscious ethical lapses that we commit every day without even realizing it and to think about how to minimize them. If finance and marketing can be taught as a science, then perhaps so too can ethics.

Encouraging people to act ethically can take some ingenuity. But often a minor change can make a lot of difference. Take something as simple and seemingly irrelevant as where you sign a legal document. These days, signatures verifying that you've provided truthful and accurate information usually come at the end of documents like tax returns and insurance claims. Yet according to a recent study, signing a pledge of honesty before filling out a form resulted in half as many misreported expenses as signing at the end. Like a courtroom oath, signing first invites a commitment to ethical principles.

Some solutions may involve thinking more proactively about removing temptation altogether. Consider an example from the classroom. In MBA programs, professors sometimes like to give take-home, closed-book exams, trusting their students not to peek at their texts as they take the test. But the temptation to cheat and rationalize may simply be too great for too many when given such an easy opportunity. By confining closed-book exams to in-classroom tests, we remove the temptation. Regulation can serve a similar function: the Glass-Steagall Act prevented commercial banks from getting into the investment banking business. With its repeal in 1999, banking CEOs were drawn into using the safe and secure resources of their commercial side for risky speculation, a decision that they no doubt rationalized as profitable in the short-run but ultimately contributed to the financial crisis.

The fundamental problem with the partitioning off ethics and values from the rest of the business school curriculum is that students will think about self-serving bias and discrimination and moral disengagement only so long as it's the focus of classroom conversation, then forget it amid discussions of marketing, finance and accounting.

In addition to greater self-awareness, we need a discussion of the kinds of structural solutions that force people to confront ethics rather than leaving them in the background. This will help our students with their own ethical lapses and help them in their roles as future business leaders.

What we need to do is equip our students to become "Moral Architects," to create environments that naturally lead people -- themselves included -- in the right direction. Being a moral architect can involve modest organizational changes (like shifting where people sign a document) to more complex ones (like introducing an ethical checklist for all important decisions, in the way that doctors and pilots use checklists to reduce errors and save lives). It also involves training students to know when it's most valuable to remove a temptation in the first place (for example, designing organizations to minimize conflicts of interest).

The only way we'll get our students to integrate their moral compasses with the practical tools of business we teach them is to incorporate the topic of ethics throughout the curriculum. This will require the accounting and finance and marketing professors to grasp the ethical blind spots inherent in their respective areas, and to appreciate and recognize approaches to lessening them. Professors, in other words, need to be moral architects themselves.

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