Ethical failures are not just philosophical problems, but also economic problems that hold significant social and political consequences for the social and communal contexts in which these are enacted. Recent ethical scandals such as Bell Pottinger and Cambridge Analytica have reawakened public debate on ethical standards in professional practice. While some research on PR roles has been conducted in the South African context since 2002, there are no formally documented studies regarding the moral philosophy and ethics of PR practice in South Africa. This article seeks to determine how South African PR practitioners respond to their ethical obligations. Research findings confirm that partisan values still dominate and that contexts of practice do not facilitate ethical practice by meeting ethical obligations through ethics of care and communality. The findings seem to indicate that the roots of ethical failures in the industry run deep. South African PR practice will continue to be regarded as a "dark art" unless it can free itself of moral constraints inherent to the reflexive modernist PR practices and assumptions that prevail. To facilitate a transition away from compliance to codes of conduct towards greater moral accountability, moral character in role enactment must be engaged with on a more profound level.

Business thinking, engagement with stakeholders, and the practice of public relations haveall been confronted with major paradigmatic shifts – especially as these are contextualized byenvironments that are increasingly pluralistic. This has contributed to an important question intowhat the education of future public relations practitioners (PRPs) should be so that they canpurposefully and successfully navigate and negotiate the challenges of decision-making – thatare ethical and moral in nature – in the context of complex, and diverse practice. In light ofthis, public relations curriculum developers and educators are challenged to address issues ofpurpose, values-based practice and education in order to prepare future PRPs for the ethical andmoral challenges that they will encounter. In the South African context this is further complicatedby the recent calls for decolonisation of South African public relations curricula. This conceptualand exploratory paper addresses the issue of practice in an age of purpose, the changing roles ofpublic relations practitioners, and the contribution values-based education can make in addressingdemands for revised, and decolonised PR curricula.

The spurious and unethical actions of the renowned global public relations (PR) firm Bell Pottinger in early 2017 cast a dark cloud over the PR industry in general. Aside from the economic and sociopolitical ramifications that emerged in the wake of this scandal, it has tainted the moral standing of all public relations professionals, including those in South Africa. There is little doubt that tactics such as offering to manipulate a client’s online reputation through the use of fake online accounts, newly created blog pages or fake online reviews are unethical, and take the industry back to a less glorious time in its history at a point when much emphasis is being placed on both ethics and values-based practice globally. Moral philosophy provides a basis for rationalising human motivation in decision making and action. However, it can be argued that there is potentially a mismatch between theories and moral frameworks created for individualistic cultures, and their application within communal cultures. Building social capital in any society begins with a commitment to support the collective interests of the community. Thus, any discussion of thevalue of ethical communication practice for society must begin with a concern for the nature and integrity of community. Against this background this article utilises the Bell Pottinger case study to examine the tensions that arise between individual values and communal PR practice, and to explore the moral implications of ethical PR practice in a communal context such as South Africa.

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The effects of wireless communication on society emphasise one of the discrepanciesthat exists between developed and developing countries like South Africa. Mobile commerceis experiencing a growth rate in the developed world unlike in South Africa. Wirelesscommunication in the form of mobile communication is being adopted at a significantpace, especially among urban emerging youth markets in South Africa. This market’sconnectivity is mainly via SMS. The most pertinent finding of the research is that the roleof cellular phones as an m-commerce application in the emerging youth market is oneof connectivity, lifestyle and usage convention.