Peter at AlfadogPR is thinking about the GOP's branding problems - and grappling with issues of communications, values, morality and how they intersect. No small task. If it was up to me (which it isn't), I'd go with a cleaner definition of values:
10. values, Sociology. the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard. These values may be positive, as cleanliness, freedom, or education, or negative, as cruelty, crime, or blasphemy.
In other words, values, as a class, are inherently neutral. You can value ethical corporate behavior or you can value rule-bending as long as it pays off for you and your shareholders. "Greed is good" is a value - not one you might like, but a value nevertheless.
Same thing with morality:
1. conformity to the rules of right conduct; moral or virtuous conduct.
Once again, it's consensual - "affective regard," same as above.
So I'd argue that Peter isn't upset about the absence of values and morality, or that they're de-valued - he's upset because the values he sees aren't the ones he wants.
Which is fine because it points at a bigger problem, namely this: people in businesses and organizations like to talk about values and morals (and ethics, let's not forget ethics) as something separate, self-contained and split-off from the day-to-day running of the operation. A committee writes a set of values and they get stuck on a paperweight and handed out to everyone. There's an ethics training module that's dropped into some other curriculum (I went through one during my Masters program - they took two sessions out of a policy analysis course and had us read Lying and that was about it).
Related to this: communications, as a discipline, is also treated as something separate and distinct. It might be the department or function that puts out the press releases. It might be the one that's called on to "spin" whatever bad thing just happened as a result of the values or morals or ethics or what have you.
I'm playing with a different idea - that communications as a discipline, and values as an organizing principle, need to re-integrated with the rest of the organization and treated as something pervasive, something that's involved with every aspect of operations. It's not a matter of these ideals over here, and that set of practical problems over there. It's all one thing.
What would that approach look like and how would it work? More on this soon.
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