The Ideal Type of Social Responsibility in Public Relations at Copper Mining-Industrial Organizations, Application Test in an Iranian Organization

The purpose of this study is to discover and represent the recognized meaning of social responsibility in the public relations of copper mining-industrial organizations using the ideal type. For this purpose, after thematic analysis of social actions of seven prominent copper mining-industrial companies in the world in connection with the phenomenon of interest and discovering the hidden meanings, the Swedbergh  approach was used to review and validate the extracted meanings according to the opinion of 6 public relations experts of mining-industrial organizations. Findings led to the identification of three dimensions for the ideal type of social responsibility in public relations of the mentioned organizations: “demonstration of responsibility and social accountability” with 3 components, “practical commitment to the environment” with 8 components, and “giving prioritization to the model of sustainable development" with 4 components. The truth table obtained from these three dimensions provides 8 types of public relations, the ideal type of which is “sustainable public relations”. The result of a fuzzy comparison of public relations of one of the Iranian organizations in the copper industry with the ideal type recognized its species as “moving corpse” (weak in demonstrating social responsibility and accountability, weak in practical commitment to the action context and prioritizing the model of sustainable development).