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The Organization of Communications 139

tactics are used and are added to the extant responsibilities of one or a few of the
‘functional’ managers, often the marketing manager.

The multinational corporation. The key issues around communications, and the
organization of it, are substantially different for multinationals than those facing the
small business. Here the company is likely to be diverse in terms of both products and
geographic markets. It may be that the company is in a range of different types of
business in the form of subsidiary companies within a holding company structure, or
divisions within a multidivisional structure.Therefore, issues of structure and control
at the corporation,and relationships between businesses and the corporate centre,are
usually a major strategic issue for multinational firms. One key structural considera-
tion in organizing communications is, as Argenti suggests, to have ‘all communica-
tions focused by centralizing the activity under one senior officer at a corporation’s
headquarters or to decentralize activities and allow individual business units to
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decide how best to handle communications’. Centralization of all communications
responsibilities by placing the majority of communications professionals in a staff
department at the corporate centre perhaps has advantages in terms of greater corpo-
rate control and coordination of all communications programmes to stakeholders,
ensuring consistency and achieving greater efficiency as research and communica-
tions materials can be shared. Decentralization, devolving communications responsi-
bilities to departments within the separate business units, requires a larger apparatus
of personnel, but delivers advantages as communications can be attuned to the
specifics of the business unit and the geographic market and stakeholders that it
serves. Decisions over whether to centralize or decentralize communications are
often also based on the identity structure of a company: centralization is likely to be
greater in the case of a monolithic identity structure (where the company and its
business units carry the same name), while decentralization is often preferred for
endorsed and branded identity structures (where the business units profile their
own distinct names). The rationale behind this is that in branded and endorsed
identity structures, greater leverage can be given to communications practitioners
within the individual business units in their communications to markets and stake-
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holders. A related issue in this regard is the extent to which the centre adds to or
detracts from the value of its businesses. For the communications staff department
at the corporate centre, this means that it must deliver value-added advice and
assistance to the communications practitioners in the individual business units if it
wants to secure a receptive environment for its involvement.Van Riel suggests that
this requires the department to move beyond a technician view of communica-
tions, where it is seen as part of organizational routine and overheads and just deals
with programmed decisions such as using weekly news briefings and publishing the
monthly employee newsletter. Rather, practitioners within the corporate staff depart-
ment need to provide expert and strategic advice and develop useful tools such as
an overall communications strategy, so that the communications activities of the
different parts of the company can be coordinated, and so that individual business
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units see their part in the overall communications strategy. The case study in Box 5.1
illustrates some of these challenges in communications organization facing multina-
tional companies.