Handbook of Corporate Communication and Public ... - Blogs Unpad

organization as a whole beyond that of the
chief executive officer. He or she is required
to advise, counsel, monitor and measure
operations in a reliable and consistent manner
beyond the reductionist, functional
approaches of corporate accounting or integrated
marketing. Indeed he or she also
accepts the role of boundary spanner in
monitoring not just relations between organizations
and their stakeholders but beyond to
the value-added implications of policies and
practices within a wider democratic society.
In 1999, Purcell 2 suggested that the concept
of best practice and best fit is limited by ‘the
impossibility of modelling all the contingent
variables, the difficulty of showing their interconnection
and the way in which changes in
one variable have impact on others’. Many
management consultants have taken up this
view and been less concerned with best practice
and best fit to address more sensitive
processes of organization change so that they
can ‘avoid being trapped in the logic of rational
choice’. So what we have tried to do with this
book is to adopt the concept of bundling
whereby the chapters are interrelated, complement
and support one another through the
medium of quality research rather than mere
opinion. Sometimes referred to as a configurational
mode 3 or complementarity, MacDuffie 4
states that ‘implicit in the notion of a bundle is
the idea that practices within bundles are interrelated
and internally consistent and that more
is better with respect to the impact on performance,
because of the overlapping and mutually
reinforcing effect of multiple practices’.
It is generally accepted that to overcome
these barriers to the implementation of corporate
communication strategy a number of
activities are essential. Michael Armstrong 5
argues that essential activities include: the
conducting of a rigorous initial analysis, formulation
strategy, the gaining of influential
support, assessment of barriers, preparation
of action plans, project manage implementation
and follow up evaluation. All these activities
are basic and familiar to middle and
project managers, management research
students and PR campaign practitioners. The
corporate communication industry which
includes public relations agencies and blue
chip management consultancies have relied
heavily on developing the skills and techniques
to carry out such activities in an essentially
practical but research-based manner.
Now, with the recognition of the growth of
the global knowledge economy ‘the traditional
factors of production – land, labour
and capital – pale into insignificance alongside
knowledge’, as Philip Sadler says. 6 The
corporate communicator is at the helm of
this development. It is the corporate communicator
who has to be fully aware of changing
environments, major trends, opportunities
or threats to the development or survival of an
organization. The management of intellectual
capital has to be understood but is also has
to be applied through corporate communication
operational strategies for it to be of
added value to an organization. The pure and
applied aspects of corporate communication
as educational and training areas of knowledge
and skill are inextricably linked. The
future of corporate communication will continue
to depend on its tactical skills base but it
is beginning to redesign itself as a strong professional
vocation based on sound research
methods. In spite of the different names by
which practitioners are labelled or defined
whether in-house or as external consultants,
ignorance is not bliss. Corporate communication
has moved away from the secular public
relations approaches of the 1970s and 1980s
and moved into new areas of political roles
and relationships between peoples and their
economic environments.
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors