CORPORATE COMMUNICATION IN CONTEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS

The evolution of communication disciplines and techniques that are used by organizations to promote, publicize or generally inform relevant individuals and groups within society about their affairs began at least 150 years ago. From the Industrial Revolution until the 1930s, an era predominantly characterized by mass production and consumption, the type of communications that were employed by organizations largely consisted of publicity, promotions and selling activities to buoyant markets. The move towards less stable, more competitive markets, which coincided with greater government interference in many markets and harsher economic circumstances, resulted from the 1930s onwards in a constant redefining of the scope and practices of communication in many organizations in the Western world. Communication practitioners had to rethink their discipline and developed new practices and areas of expertise in response to changing circumstances in the markets and societies in which they were operating.

The historical development of communication within organizations and the emergence of corporate communication. It starts with a brief discussion of the historical development of separate communication disciplines, such as marketing communication and public relations, and moves on to explain why organizations have increasingly drawn these disciplines together under the umbrella of corporate communication. The chapter concludes with discussing the ways in which contemporary organizations organize communication activities in order to strategically plan and coordinate the release of messages to different stakeholder groups.

This brief notes is about the changing definition, scope and organization of communication in organizations, and about the societal and market dynamics that triggered its evolution. A brief sketch will be provided of the historical evolution of the two main individual communication disciplines in each organization: marketing and public relations. The chapter will describe the development of both disciplines and will then move on to discuss why organizations have increasingly started to see these disciplines not in isolation but as part of an integrated effort to communicate with stakeholders. This integrated effort is directed and coordinated by the management function of corporate communication. As a result of this development, managers in most corporate organizations have realized that the most effective way of organizing communication consists of ‘integrating’ most, if not all, of an organization’s communication disciplines and related activities, such as media relations, issues management, advertising and direct marketing. The basic idea is that whereas communication had previously been organized and managed in a rather fragmented manner, a more effective organizational form is one that integrates or coordinates the work of various communication practitioners. At the same time, when communication practitioners are pulled together, the communication function as a whole is more likely to have an input into strategic decision-making at the highest corporate level of an organization.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Communication management – any type of communication activity undertaken by an organization to inform, persuade or otherwise relate to individuals and groups in its outside environment – is, from a historical perspective, not new. But the modernization of society, first through farming and trade, and later through industrialization, created ever more complex organizations with more complicated communication needs. The large industrial corporations that emerged during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century in the UK, in the USA and later on in the rest of the Western world required, in contrast to what had gone before, professional communication officers and a more organized form of handling publicity and promotions. 

BY KYEJU DIANA

BAPRM 42589