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The Organization of Communications 133

Research with US companies. Studies with large manufacturing and service corporations
in the US all found that communications disciplines were indeed consolidated in
a separate communications department, rather than arranged into various stand-alone
units. A Conference Board study in 1996 showed that close to 80 per cent of the
largest ‘corporate affairs’ or ‘corporate communications’ departments incorporated a
whole range of communications disciplines including media relations, speechwriting,
employee communication, corporate advertising and community relations. Similar
results were obtained by a 1996 study sponsored by the US-based Public Affairs
Council and a 2001 study sponsored by the Council of Public Relations Firms,
which both indicated that a whole range of communications disciplines, including
community relations,issues management,employee communications and media rela-
tions,are centralized in communications departments.The results of these studies also
indicated that disciplines such as consumer affairs and brand advertising were hardly –
if ever – integrated into such a communications department, suggesting that marketing
activities and marketing communications are brought under a different department
(and are thus not subservient or in a direct reporting relationship to corporate com-
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munications). Surveying 75 of the 300 largest US corporations,Hunter equally found
that in 81 per cent of these corporations external communications disciplines have
been arranged into separate corporate communications and marketing departments.
Hunter’s study also showed that both the communications and marketing depart-
ments operated at a similar level in these US corporations (as separate but equal
management partners), and that there were no apparent moves towards a conversion
of communications disciplines (e.g. marketing communications taken out of the
marketing department and subsumed as the responsibility of the communications
department) or towards increased structural alignment or even a consolidation of all
communications disciplines into one overall communications or external relations
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department. And Grunig and Grunig, reporting on the IABC Excellence study,
corroborated these findings in their observation that communications is more effec-
tive when marketing communications does not dominate the communications func-
tion, as communications ‘has its greatest value when that function and the marketing
function are treated as equal partners in management’. 13
This consolidation of communications disciplines in either communications or
marketing departments has over the years effectively become more pronounced and
significant as the 1996 Public Affairs Council study led by Post and Griffin indicated.
Their accumulated survey data showed that whereas in previous surveys (in 1980)
approximately 24 per cent of respondents identified consumer affairs as part of the
communications (‘corporate affairs’) portfolio, that number had declined in 1992
to 13 per cent and in 1996 to 17 per cent.The full figures for the 1992 and 1996
surveys are presented in Table 5.1.

Research with UK and European companies. A study in 2000 by the Centre for
Corporate and Public Affairs in the UK paralleled the results of these US studies,
suggesting that rather than integrating all communications disciplines into one and
the same department, the majority of UK organizations have brought disciplines
such as media relations, government relations, employee communications, commu-
nity relations, investor relations, corporate design and issues management together in