Browsing by Subject "eettinen viestintä"

The aim of this study is to examine the communication ethics of lobbying from the perspective of lobbyists. Lobbying is a constantly growing phenomenon but has not been paid much attention to in speech communication. Most of the previous studies on lobbying have emphasized the perspective of politicians or other "recipients" of lobbying. Lobbying can be defined as professional and interpersonal persuasive communication that aims to influence the opinions or attitudes of others. Usually the main objective of lobbying is to affect the political decision making process. Lobbying involves communication in different types of contexts and relations. Interpersonal communication that aims to influence or persuade others should always be examined with ethical sensitivity. As there are no formal rules or code of ethics in Finland for lobbying, the ethics of the profession rely essentially on lobbyists themselves. Lobbying is an important part of democracy and therefore it is important to address the issue of communication ethics in lobbying. The focus of this study is on understanding the different ethical dimensions of the communication in lobbying. The data of this research was collected by interviewing nine lobbyists. In the interviews the informants described their experiences of professional lobbying. Two main themes were found in these descriptions: the relationships and ethical values guiding the communication. These main themes were divided into six other ethical dimensions of lobbying: 1) disclosure and transparency, 2) honesty, 3) credibility, 4) agreeing with the core message, 5) personal relationships and 6) mutual responsibility. The results indicate that the diversity of lobbying communication makes it possible to view the ethics of lobbying from multiple perspectives. The results had very much in common with the previous literature on ethical communication but also pointed out the demand for further research. It was concluded that the values guiding ethical lobbying, such as disclosure and transparency, were considered as commonly shared values. The data also suggests that ethical lobbying is based on the idea of communication as a dialogue.