Putting ethics of care into public relations: Toward a multi-level agency model

This paper examines how ethics of care (also known as care ethics) can be applied to public relations, drawing insights from a two-stage empirical study. The first stage explores industry best practices from award-winning campaigns, followed by elite interviews with leading practitioners to understand how care ethics can be infused into various organisational, personal, and professional contexts. The paper examines contested connections between care ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics, building on early work by Virginia Held and others, to develop a multi-level agency model of enacting care ethics. This fuses an array of concepts: caring-about, caring-for, self-care, habitus, and the lateral integration of care as a form of ‘caring citizenship’. In turn, this fusion advances ethics of care as a shared practice between caregivers and care-receivers, shifting its focus from essentially within the private to the public sphere, locating public relations in this process. • This study delves into the under-explored ‘Ethics of Care’ (care ethics) in public relations. • It examines the contested connection between care ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics. • A multi-factor, multi-level ‘agency’ model is developed to implement care ethics within the public relations context. • This study offers both theoretical and practical implications for integrating care ethics into public relations.