Why Does Ethics Matter in Public Relations?
Both public relations employers and educators rank ethics among the most essential competencies for aspiring professionals to master (DiStaso, Stacks, and Botan 2009; Todd 2009). Many senior public relations executives even describe ethics as the foundation of effective public relations. For Anthony D’Angelo, 2017 Chair-Elect for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), ethics are essential to the practice:
As the late Patrick Jackson wisely noted, the currency of public relations is relationships. I think, essential to that currency, in order to make it work, the bedrock has to be trust…built on an ethical foundation and once trust is broken, you can’t have effective public relations, nor can you have an effective organization. So it’s really a central, important, grave responsibility.
Part of the foundation of ethics in public relations is truthful communication. As a PRSA Fellow working in an agency setting noted:
It means that the communications we give…will be believable, it will be truthful, it will not be deceitful, it will be in the public interest, but it also will be in the clients’ interest too. But we will not sacrifice the standards of truth and good communications just to satisfy a client.
Most college students will learn about ethics while studying philosophy or professional codes of ethics. One or two ethics courses, however, does not begin to prepare public relations professionals for the responsibility many in the profession have called an “ethical conscience.” While many of us might recall a conscience illustrated by the fictional childhood character Jiminy Cricket as he tried to prevent Pinocchio from making mistakes, this example, would have been far too simple for moral development philosophers.
Developing a Conscience
Moral development begins in early childhood, primarily from interaction with our parents. As we mature, we advance to higher levels of moral development. Although Piaget (1997) identified four stages (e.g., ritualized schema, egocentric, cooperation, and codification of rules), Kohlberg (1969) focused on six potential stages of moral development (see Table 1.1). Kohlberg’s stages offer additional insight into moral development and are discussed below.
Table 1.1 Kohlberg’s stages of moral development
Several terms have been used to describe the first stage including compliance, obedience, and punishment orientations (Kelman 1961; Piaget 1997; Rest, Turiel, and Kohlberg 1969). This stage focuses on our willingness to obey others’ rules to avoid punishment or receive rewards. Obviously, this implies behavior is dependent on the presence of others (Kochanska and Aksan 2006), and because the rules are not part of the individual’s personal conscience, they do not fully influence behavior (Piaget 1997). This stage also has been referred to as primary socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1967).
The next stage is identification, when an individual adopts behavior to build and maintain relationships with another person or group (Kelman 1961); a process called secondary socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Kohlberg (1969) wrote that identification applies across a variety of situations and behaviors. He also found it to be persistent, occurring when others are not around, and even without reinforcement. This stage represents Kohlberg’s (1969) egoistic orientation (stage 2) and good-boy orientation (stage 3). Egoistic orientation focuses on compliance in order to receive rewards or benefits, while the good-boy orientation seeks approval through pleasing and helping others (Kohlberg 1969). Similarly, Piaget (1997) referred to these stages as egocentric and cooperation. From a child’s perspective, rules are regarded as sacred and untouchable and as a form of loyalty.
Kohlberg’s (1969) fourth stage, the authority and maintaining social-order orientation stage, focuses on duty and respect for authority. Similarly, Piaget (1997) calls this stage codification of rules. It is at this stage that concepts such as social norms and descriptive norms become important for predicting behavior. Social norms are “rules and standards that are understood by members of a group and that guide and/or constrain social behavior without the force of laws” (Cialdini and Trost 1998, p. 152). Industry codes of ethics would be a good example of social norms. Descriptive norms (i.e., what is actually done) motivate us to imitate the behavior of those who have visible signs of success such as wealth, power, or status (Cialdini and Trost 1998).
Eventually some rules are internalized as personal norms (Cialdini and Trost 1998), becoming part of our values system (Kelman 1961). This would be consistent with Kohlberg’s (1969) fifth and sixth stages of development, when a person considers issues such as duty, rights of others, and universal principles. This is the level of moral development that we refer to as a conscience, that which is “embedded in the self so as to become an internal guideline for the necessary personal decisions of social life…what gives us the courage of our convictions” (Miltch and Orange 2004, p. 207). These convictions can be referred to as the values or guiding principles in our lives (Schwartz 1996). Values represent “enduring notions of goodness and badness that guide behavior in a variety of contexts,” and are usually resistant to change (Burgoon 1989, p. 132). While some people may think the conscience plays a role in most decision making, Rest et al. (1969) suggest that the majority of U.S. adults make moral judgments at the Kohlberg’s conventional (stages 3 and 4) levels, based on the good-boy orientation and maintaining social order.
In contrast to the more self-centered motivations for ethical behavior, we found some professionals who are accredited in public relations (i.e., hold the “APR” designation) and have internalized the PRSA Code of Ethics (https://prsa.org/ethics/code-of-ethics/) to the point that the principles and values of the code are consistent with their own values. As a PRSA Fellow, who was a principal in an agency explained, the code was part of the agency’s normal business practices:
There was only three partners—one left I became the third partner. And from day one, because I was APR, I insisted on putting in our proposals and in our letters of agreement with the clients, that we published the PRSA Code of Ethics and each of the partners would sign to have this—this is how we’re running business with you and for you. So that minimized the number of (ethics) discussions we ever had to have.
Further evidence of internalization and identification with the PRSA Code of Ethics was obvious in an interview with a female senior executive, an APR, who recalled the time her boss asked her to share false information in a news release to counter damaging information about the company:
I gave her four different choices…let’s reword the press release, let’s leave out the information that she perceived was damaging, although, I didn’t perceive it that way, but anyway, a number of choices…She wanted to issue it that way…So in that instance… my final option to her was let’s take my name off of this one and put your name on it and that was met with a red face and I think what she said was, “Are you refusing to do the job for which we hired you?” And I said, “I wouldn’t say that I’m refusing to do the job for which you hired me because…you hired me knowing I was an APR, that’s the job.” (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
Cruising on Autopilot
History has unfortunately given us too many examples of instances when ethics played a minor, if any, role in an executive’s decisions or actions. Scholars suggest Schema theory might have been at work in those instances. Schema are those subconscious routines that allow us to function every day, and Schema theory proposes that sometimes scripts or action rules, or “cruising on automatic pilot,” guide our behavior (Ableson 1982). By using scripts, “a decision maker need not actively think about each new presentation of information, situations, or problems; the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance” (Gioia 1992, p. 386). In fact, Schwartz (1996) wrote that “values may play little role in behavior except when there is a value conflict,” otherwise “habitual, scripted responses may suffice” (p. 2).
Those habitual, autopilot responses were a fear for one senior public relations executive working in an agency setting:
I think the greatest concern I have is just…in the midst of all the things that you do in your professional life, are your ethical antennas up sufficiently high to see a potential concern and then place it on the table for review, debate, discussion. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
The Process of Ethical Decision Making
Just as it is helpful to understand how a conscience is formed, it is also beneficial to examine the steps involved in making an ethical decision. Ethics have been described as “a systematic attempt to make sense of our individual and social moral experience, to determine the rules that ought to govern human conduct, the values worth pursuing, and the character traits deserving development in life” (DeGeorge 2009, p. 13). In practice, ethical decision making “involves making rational choices between what is good and bad, between what is morally justifiable action and what is not” (Patterson and Wilkins 2005, p. 4). Public relations professionals can draw upon ethical principles based on fundamental values to help them “judge the rightness of decisions” and to resolve conflicting duties to the public and key stakeholders (Fitzpatrick and Gauthier 2001, p. 201). They may consider principles and values drawn from their family and religious upbringing, as well as industry and employer’s codes of ethics (Fitzpatrick 2002; Halff 2010; Lee and Cheng 2011; Wright 1993) to lead them to a decision. Examples of core values that are foundational to the PRSA Code of Ethics are honesty, loyalty, and fairness. One PRSA Fellow said, “Joe Truncale [CEO of PRSA] had mentioned them at the Leadership Assembly in 2015, and I wrote them down, because they were like just wonderful guidelines to live by.” Another PRSA Fellow described the progression of training he has received that guides his ethical decision making:
I went to a Jesuit university, I was raised a Catholic…I think my mom made sure that I had the understanding of what a moral and ethical lifestyle was all about. And then essentially with teachings of the Catholic church that combined with you know the Jesuit tradition: five philosophy courses, three theology courses and what I would consider a super liberal arts education…set me up for it and then after I got into the profession and joined PRSA back in ‘78 or whatever…and going for APR…put me in a sequence that had at least some memorization of the [PRSA] Code of Ethics… So I think that was an overall sort of lifestyle understanding and training from home to university…basically innate stuff that’s in your head that says what’s right and what’s wrong.
To understand the process we might go through when putting those ethical principles from industry codes of ethics or our upbringing into practice, Rest (1986) developed a four-step model. During the first stage, moral recognition, a person identifies a moral or ethical issue based on his or her awareness of industry codes of ethics or ethics training. Jones (1991) pointed out, however, that “a person who fails to recognize a moral issue will fail to employ moral decision-making schemata” and will instead make the decision based on other factors (p. 380). This is what Denny Gioia (1992), Ford Motors’ recall coordinator during the Pinto fire crisis of the early 1970s, described when explaining why he chose not to issue a recall after buyers reported a million-and-a-half Pintos with faulty gas tanks. Gioia explained that he was forced to let challenges such as time pressures, production limits, and the market (e.g., oil crisis, layoffs), rather than ethical considerations, guide his decision.
Once someone recognizes an issue as an ethical one, he or she would then use moral reasoning to make a decision. It is at this stage that some people are able to use moral imagination, which Jacobs (1991) described as “articulating and examining alternatives, weighing them and their probable implications, considering their effects on one’s other plans and interests, and considering their effects on the interests and feelings of others” (p. 25). Some public relations professionals’ have demonstrated moral imagination by using creative approaches to raise ethical concerns. One male senior executive staged a mock news conference to demonstrate why it was a bad idea to use an uninformed spokesperson. The ethical issues in this scenario were related to transparency rather than dodging tough questions. As the male senior executive described:
I played a rather aggressive environmental reporter, but no more aggressive than any good reporter would be. And at the end of 15 minutes of the HR guy being grilled, and pretty much eviscerated, made to look foolish, so the company would look foolish, and like they were hiding stuff and being deliberately obfuscating the issue, the lawyer looked at me and said, “Ok, you convinced me. That’s the wrong decision; we need to have someone there who knows what they’re talking about.” (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
The next step in ethical decision making is referred to as moral intent, which Rest (1986) described as giving “priority to moral values above other personal values such that a decision is made to intend to do what is morally right” (pp. 3–4). This stage is consistent with Rawls’ (1971) concept of reflective equilibrium, which is “reached after a person has weighed various proposed conceptions and he has either revised his judgments in accord with one of them or held fast to his initial convictions” (p. 48). Moberg and Seabright (2000) provided three alternatives for decision makers as they progress from moral reasoning to moral intent. The first is “tell-and-sell,” which involves convincing others of their moral position and the second is “tell and listen,” which requires one to consider others’ views and possibly refine the original position. As the second option suggests, Goodstein (2000) advised it may be appropriate to reach a compromise with colleagues, because “as individuals are exposed to an array of varying perspectives and multiple values, one’s own certainty about the interpretation or application of a principle may lessen, opening up the possibility of accepting alternative perspectives” (p. 811). In short, at times we may not have all the essential details—or may not have weighed other perspectives—that would lead to a better decision. Based on this perspective, moral compromise is not about compromising our integrity, but considering other reasonable options. As one Arthur W. Page Society member explained:1
Sometimes they [legal] come back with a perspective I hadn’t considered that if you say it this way it might be misconstrued as X. Ok, I’ll go back to the drawing board and come back again with yet again an alternative. But you can’t push back and be assertive and constantly pushing if you’re not also listening and reshaping…You can’t just aggressively advance your viewpoint without also listening and figuring out how you can find that common ground.
Consistent with this Page member’s advice, Moberg and Seabright’s (2000) third alternative for decision makers is mutual problem solving or negotiation. Successful negotiation involves not only listening to others’ perspectives, but incorporating those considerations into the final decision (Conger 1998). As an illustration of this principle, a PRSA Fellow with experience in government and legal settings described, “By no means did the communications aspect always have more pull. Frequently other interests overruled what I would have done in a vacuum myself unadvised.”
One key element in negotiation is personal credibility, earned through expertise and forming strategic relationships (Conger 1998). This does not mean that those who lack the necessary expertise and strong relationships in their organizations, new employees or those working in lower-level positions, for instance, are left without options. They can hire an outside consultant, reach out to coworkers with credibility within the organization to support a position, or conduct research to find data to back the position (Conger 1998). A PRSA Fellow working in an agency setting described the importance of using research to back-up recommendations:
I’ve got a presentation in two weeks to the leadership team at this client. I’ve got the research people who did this national consumer survey that are based in Virginia, they are going to drive down. And that section of the presentation, they will carry the water on because it has more credibility with the client to have this third party make that presentation—not that they wouldn’t trust me to deliver the right information or do so well. But there’s value in having that third party person who’s not dealing with the day to day make that presentation.
The final step in Rest’s (1986) ethical decision-making model is moral behavior, which he argued some may never achieve: “the person must have sufficient perseverance, ego strength, and implementation skills to be able to follow through on his/her intention to behave morally, to withstand fatigue and flagging will, and to overcome obstacles” (p. 4). He summed up the difficulty of acting on your values as “weakness of the flesh” (p. 15). A Page Society member described the courage it took to speak out against the unethical behavior of a more senior colleague:
I felt it was a duty to say something about it, even it if involved— even if it was at my own personal risk, and it was. So I was willing to take that risk and to fall on my sword if I had to, because of the investment that I personally had made in the reputation of the company and my desire for the company to continue to be able to enjoy its stellar reputation.
Fortunately, she did not face any retaliation or other consequences for speaking up. She added, “That to me was one of the ultimate tests of whether the organization really adhered to its beliefs and its public and private statements.”
In addition to fear, real life financial pressures also can serve as barriers, what some have called “golden handcuffs” (Berger 2005). For senior executives, these barriers are usually substantial salaries, benefits, and power. A PRSA Fellow encountered these “handcuffs” early in her career when she confronted a colleague about the earnings report for a publicly traded company:
I can remember going into the CFO after hours and saying, “You know this doesn’t seem right.” And I remember him saying to me, “It’s not my decision. The chairman has told me what I’m to say. I’ve got kids in college. I have a big mortgage. It’s not really against the law. But everybody does it. And this is what we’re gonna do and if you’re uncomfortable, then you need to make the choice about what’s best for you and your future.”
Chapter 6 includes insights from senior executives who have confronted similar resistance to ethics counsel.
How Public Relations Professionals Define an Ethical Conscience
While the concept of an ethical conscience has been advanced by scholars and industry leaders for decades (e.g., Bivins 1992; Bowen 2008, 2009; Fitzpatrick and Gauthier 2001; Fitzpatrick 1996; Paluszek 1989; Ryan and Martinson 1983), there has been no clear consensus about what this role should involve in actual practice. One of the clearest and often cited descriptions depicts an ethical or corporate conscience as “a lack of impulsiveness, care in mapping out alternatives and consequences…and awareness of and concern for the effects of one’s decision and policies on others” (Goodpaster and Matthews 1982, p. 134).
To better understand the concept of an ethical conscience, in-depth interviews were conducted with 55 members of the PRSA College of Fellows and Arthur W. Page Society. Members of the College of Fellows are accredited by the Universal Accreditation Board (APRs), have a minimum of 20 years of experience in public relations, and have been recognized for distinguished careers in public relations. The Page Society is also an elite group, open by invitation only to chief communications officers (CCOs) of Fortune 500 corporations and notable nonprofit organizations, the CEOs of public relations agencies, and educators representing thought leadership from business and communications schools.
Some of the more common terms the Fellows used to describe this role included encouraging companies and organizations to practice truthful and authentic communication, “pointing out what is right and what is wrong,” being “unafraid to raise these questions,” representing the concerns of key stakeholders, and informing “senior management…as to the potential ethical impact of their decisions.” The role also has been referred to as “a reality check” or the “last common sense checker or gut checker.” Page Society members described the role as raising red flags, “ensuring that the organization you work for or support always does the right thing even when it’s the toughest thing,” and making sure that decisions are grounded in the company’s core values.
The role of ethical conscience also was examined through survey research with members of the College of Fellows and Southern Public Relations Federation (SPRF). In response to a survey question, a SPRF member wrote:
Acting as an ethical conscience should involve keeping in mind the big picture and how the organization’s decisions or actions impact all parties involved. Additionally, to keep a company in good standing with the public and the media, a PR professional should keep in mind every way every person of society could view a situation.
In response to the same question, a PRSA Fellow wrote, “Having the knowledge and the experience to speak knowledgeably about an issue and present coherent, logical and rational alternatives for consideration.” In other related questions, 89 percent of the Fellows and SPRF members agree to strongly agree that public relations professionals should provide ethics counsel, and 63 percent answered that they were likely to actually provide ethics counsel in their jobs.
Two major responsibilities associated with the role of ethical conscience include environmental scanning and boundary spanning. Environmental scanning involves monitoring traditional and online media “to identify stakeholders who are affected by potential organizational decisions” (Grunig 2006, p. 159). In a 2012 study on public relations’ role as an ethical conscience, a male public relations executive working in an agency described public relations as the “eyes and ears of an organization” (Neill and Drumwright 2012). Another male executive with a nonprofit organization described it as “the duty to bring in the other’s voice,” which is a reference to stakeholders that may be impacted by a company or organization’s decisions such as employees, customers, or the local community. In that same study, a female professional used the “canary in a coal mine analogy” to argue that an ethical conscience can be the early warning sign of potential crises.
Boundary spanning follows environmental scanning, allowing public relations professionals to filter information by choosing to act on some, store others, or summarize and interpret the intelligence for senior management (Aldrich and Herker 1977). A male professional working in education described this role as not only having one “foot inside the organization” but also stepping outside the organization to represent the interests and perspectives of external stakeholders (Neill and Drumwright 2012, p. 227). Neill (2014) found that public relations professionals also act as internal boundary spanners by “gathering intelligence across the company’s various business units and then ‘connecting the dots’ to identify strategic decisions that may be inconsistent or not in the company’s best interest” (p. 600).
A PRSA Fellow said he often established the role of ethical conscience with the CEO on the first day of employment:
I had a conversation with the CEO to whom I reported and I said, I am going to take this role on, and you should want me to take this role [ethics counselor] on because there will be instances where…we’re going to do something that…we didn’t think clearly about, or we had pressure put on us to do that might not have been the best thing if we had thought about it a little more clearly.
He emphasized that these conversations should be behind closed doors:
And so I walked into his office and I shut the door and I said, We are going to have one of those conversations that we have when we close the door and when we come out of the conversation, we are going to forget we got into an argument or did whatever we did. We’re going to have an opinion.
A primary motivation for public relations professionals to embrace the role of ethical conscience is that they are often the spokespersons for their companies or organizations, putting their own credibility on the line as the voice and face of the brand (Neill and Drumwright 2012). A female executive working in higher education warned there was little chance to go back once the line is crossed:
I’ve said many times, that I can’t afford to lose my credibility that it’s all that I have. As a PR professional, it’s all we have. And if I lose my credibility here, it’s not like you can go just start over with someone else, somewhere else. Credibility is something you can’t afford to lose. And so I think that I just made that very clear to them that I cannot lose my integrity, and my credibility. And I just won’t. I won’t do anything that’s going to jeopardize my own reputation as a professional. And that parlays into the organization’s best wishes, what’s best for the organization as well, because it wouldn’t be good for me as the PR person to be lying and be seen as a liar for my organization. (Neill and Drumwright 2012, p. 225)
This role takes courage as it often involves providing less-than-welcome advice to people who may outrank you. A male public relations professional working in an agency said it is simply our responsibility to “speak truth to power in the sense that our job is not to be yes-men or yes-women.” Chapters 4 and 5 provide specific examples from senior executives who have effectively counseled other senior executives while managing to keep their jobs. At the same time, they recognized that they have no control over whether the senior executive accepts their advice, but as a PRSA Fellow working in a corporate setting said, “Ultimately, they can decide not to take your counsel, but you have to make your view known and potentially what might unfold if they decide to take a different course.”
Not all public relations professionals or scholars accept that public relations professionals have a role in ethics counseling. Some professionals insist ethics are better left to the legal department. They also argue that they lack the necessary access to provide ethics counsel (Bowen 2008). One Page Society member was reluctant to assume this role out of concern that what might be ethical might not be in the company’s best interest. He gave the example of choosing to remain silent for legal reasons. He explained his support for a more limited role of providing ethics counsel:
My advice would be if you’re in public relations, your reputation, risk is absolutely your domain. And reputation, risk and credibility and ethics go hand in hand, so it’s all good. But don’t fashion yourself into the chief ethics officer. I just don’t think that’s a good place to be…You’re there to preserve the credibility of the organization and the senior executive team. Those are precious assets, but you’re not the moral conscience of the organization. I just think those are different things.
Lack of access and training prompted Parsons (2008) to question public relations’ role in ethics counseling. A PRSA Fellow acknowledged the limitations of access and influence:
The PR person can be the conscience, but are they listened to? Are they respected? Are they at the table? Those things are important as well because you can be doing everything right, but if nobody is listening to you, it really doesn’t matter a whole lot. Except that you can sleep at night.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide guidance regarding how public relations professionals can become more influential, so that their colleagues seek their input and are more willing to listen to their counsel.
Regarding influence, Neill and Drumwright (2012) found public relations professionals who did not consider ethics counseling to be part of their job descriptions tended to be working in more entry-level positions and more focused on public relations tactics such as media relations and event planning. These same professionals, as one female government employee pointed out, did not have regular access to senior leadership and information:
To be a good public relations professional, you need to have a lot of information from your organization…You really do need to have a seat at the table to listen and to hear what people are saying, how they’re saying it, what information they’re discussing. I couldn’t be a good spokesperson if I didn’t understand some of the internal discussions that are taking place, so I think that’s very important…I think there have been some times where I haven’t been in the room where I would have liked to have been in the room, because I think I would have had a deeper understanding of some of the issues or problems that I would then later be asked to speak about. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
Despite the skepticism and resistance among some professionals, surveys with PRSA general membership and educators in the Public Relations Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) found the majority (83 percent PRSA members and 96 percent educators) agree to strongly agree that practitioners should provide ethics counsel (Neill 2016a).
Public Relations’ Role in Values Communication
Much of the discussion about public relations’ ethics counseling role is focused on crisis prevention, but some scholars suggest professionals should be even more proactive as ethics advocates in their organizations (Men and Bowen 2017; Neill 2016b; Sison 2010). Marketing and human resources scholars have found that promoting an organization’s core values can produce a distinct competitive advantage through employer-branding initiatives (Ambler and Barrow 1996; Foster, Punjaisri, and Cheng 2010; Lloyd 2002; Moroko and Uncles 2008; Vallaster and de Chernatony 2005). In a previous study, a female senior professional in the transportation industry included this role in her concept of an ethical conscience:
For me, what that means is ensuring that the company, corporately, adheres to stated values, as well as ensuring that employees understand what those values are. And that involves working as a team also with HR to ensure that the follow through on hiring makes that clear to employees. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)
Through in-depth interviews with internal communication professionals, Neill (2016b) found that public relations professionals had a leadership role in creating strategic communication plans and distributing key messages about a company or organization’s core values. They tended, however, to be less involved in employee recruitment and orientation, when employees are first introduced to the core values and/or ethics policies of an organization. Those communication efforts are led instead by human resources executives. Realizing the importance of delivering those messages earlier and more effectively, some public relations and marketing professionals reported that they were becoming more involved in creating promotional materials and videos for new employee orientation. More on this topic is covered in Chapter 8.
Summary
Many public relations professionals believe it is their responsibility to provide ethics counsel to senior leaders to help prevent crises. This role has been referred to as an ethical conscience, and it involves environmental scanning, or conducting research about the concerns of key stakeholders; and boundary spanning, which involves sharing those concerns with senior leadership.
Public relations professionals also proactively support ethics by promoting their company or organization’s core values through routine communication efforts. This role of values communication is typically fulfilled in collaboration with human resource executives, who are responsible for communicating core values as part of employee recruitment and new employee orientation.
Questions to Ponder
1. How does your view of ethics in public relations compare to that of the senior executives quoted in this chapter?
2. Are there any employers that you believe do a good job of communicating and living their core values? If so, what are their best practices that you could follow?
3. What challenges might be associated with serving as a boundary spanner—someone with one foot in the organization while also representing the concerns of external stakeholders?
1 “The Arthur W. Page Society is a professional association for senior public relations and corporate communications executives [and leading academics] who seek to enrich and strengthen their profession” (www.awpagesociety.com).