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The Organization of Communications 127

disciplines were located and structured within companies in the past, is rather limited.
The marketing historian Hollander, with his historical study of the market orienta-
tion of US firms, is one of the few exceptions and observed that in the 1950s and
1960s the different marketing communications disciplines of advertising, promo-
tions, selling and publicity were functionally separated within the organization, but
he suggested nonetheless that ‘the indications are that advertising, sales, promotion
and merchandising people in industry worked together more closely than is commonly
2
thought’. In the 1970s, there was equally little systematic empirical research into
communications organization, although there were some commentary pieces writ-
ten by practitioners that again stressed the functional separation of communications
disciplines, a feat that was generally seen as detrimental to the effective functioning of
communications as a whole. Writing in 1973, Cook, one of these communications
professionals, argued in this respect that companies should consolidate their entire
communications function, bringing together various external communications dis-
ciplines,such as advertising,public relations,promotions and issues management,into
a central organizational function, with the purpose of increasing the organizational
3
autonomy of communications within the organization. Following in Cook’s foot-
steps,many academics in the 1980s and 1990s equally started discussing the traditional
division of communications responsibilities into separate disciplines. Don Schultz and his
colleagues from Northwestern University, for instance, took issue with what they
called the functional silos of communications that had emerged within many organi-
zations because of this division of communications into separate disciplines. They
argued that in the 1970s and 1980s, because of an emphasis on functional specialism,
there had been a trend towards dividing and splitting communications disciplines and
organizing them apart, which had led to each discipline protecting its financial
and specialist ‘turf’ and to an ineffective use of communications as fragmented and
conflicting messages were being sent out. 4
The views expressed on the subject of communications organization in the 1980s
and 1990s all voice this concern that dividing communications and organizing it in a
functional manner by discipline or speciality leads to ‘fragmentation’,‘functional silos’,
5
‘stovepipes’and ‘Chinese walls’between communications disciplines, and that compa-
nies should move to other more integrated forms of organizing communications that
would enable communications professionals from marketing communications, public
relations and internal communications to collaborate and coordinate their work.The
philosophy of corporate communications, when it got a foothold within communi-
cations practice in the early 1990s, equally prescribed an alternative form of organiz-
ing communications to ensure the autonomy of the function and its strategic input
into decision making, as well as to enable practitioners from different disciplines to
work together and align their communications products (messages, campaigns, etc.).
The recommendations that came out of it were the following: 6
1. Consolidating and centralizing communications disciplines into a
single department: the general idea in this regard is to bring a range of com-
munications disciplines together into a single department so that knowledge and
skills of practitioners can be shared, specialist expertise is enhanced, and the
autonomy and visibility of the communications function within the organiza-
tion is secured. Some communications disciplines might still be organized as