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138 Corporate Communications in Practice

26
outside world or to internal stakeholders’. This is not to say, of course, that the
communications director should not have a seat on the executive board and should
remain in this advisory capacity,but the UK study did show the current impediments
to such a move. One the one hand, there is still a considerable lack of understanding
and a lack of commitment to communications among senior managers.On the other
hand, many senior communications practitioners often do not meet the needs of
senior managers to provide communications advice and an input into corporate
strategy in ways that contribute to the accomplishment of organizational objectives
and that affect the bottom line (see also Chapter 6 for a more detailed look at the
knowledge and skills of the communications practitioner). In other words, as the
communications practitioner Osborne puts it, strategic corporate communications
stands or falls with highly qualified input from the communications professional at
the decision-making table; and only then will there be such a receptive environment
for that contribution. The practitioner therefore will need to produce strategically
focused recommendations for strategic corporate action, bringing to the attention of
top managers a broad understanding of the strategic management process and of
those issues which may affect and impact upon a company’s reputation. 27

Vertical structure in different contexts

The research evidence discussed above shows some significant and consistent find-
ings on the departmental arrangement and reporting relationship of communications
in companies across the continents, but is only limited to large companies (generally
organizations with more than 500 employees) operating commercially in the manu-
facturing and service sectors. Large companies from the Fortune 500 list, for instance,
are well researched, while less attention has been paid to other types of organizations
like the small business or the public organization.The following paragraphs therefore
take a closer look at four different types of companies and the vertical structure of
communications within them: the small business, the multinational corporation, the
public organization and the professional service organization.

The small business. Small businesses (organizations with less than 250 employees)
operate in a single market or small number of markets with a limited range of prod-
ucts and services.The scope of the organization is therefore likely to be restricted to
the primary operating processes, its products and services, and the market(s) that it
serves.It is therefore unlikely that small businesses have central service or staff depart-
ments such as communications to undertake complex analysis of the environment;
rather, it may be senior managers themselves, perhaps even the founder of the firm,
who have direct contact with the marketplace and other stakeholders (local govern-
ment, community, etc.). In terms of organization structure, this means that many
small businesses are likely to have a simple and lean ‘functional’ structure, with the
core functions of operations, marketing, finance and human resource geared towards
producing a single product and bringing it to the market. Communications has often
not evolved into various fully-fledged disciplines in small businesses (as there is a
lesser need for specific strategic expertise in, say, issues management), but promotional