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The Organization of Communications 141

passed on to communications practitioners within the individual business units. These
practitioners in turn develop their own communications plans, but need to adhere to
these values and procedures. As the chairman of the executive board once said: ‘the
corporate public relations department offers the frame, and professionals within
the business units each deliver a picture for it’. The second formal initiative is that the
corporate public relations department not only supports and counsels the executive
board on organization-wide communications, but also is designated as an internal
consultancy practice that the individual business units can turn to for advice and
assistance. As an internal consultancy, the department operates on a project basis
for communications practitioners in the business units, giving them value-added,
expert communications advice or assisting and helping them with developing and
executing communications plans. The corporate public relations department is, for
this purpose, staffed with three expert consultants (each specializing in an area of
communications) alongside the head of the department, an editor, a production
manager and two personal assistants.
Through these two initiatives, Sara Lee/DE seeks to balance the coordination and
management of communications issues at the central level, at the level of the whole
organization, with its decentralized management structure in which individual busi-
ness units manage their own communications plans. Individual business units are still
responsible for their own communications plans, but these two initiatives are seen to
ensure a greater coordination and collaboration across the organization, which leads
to consistency of communications and a better profiling of the corporation as a whole.

Questions for reflection

1. To what extent are these tensions between a central communications depart-
ment at group level and local communications practitioners at the level of
individual business units typical and therefore generally descriptive of all
multinational corporations? Which multinational corporations fall outside this
characterization?
2. To what extent do you believe Sara Lee/DE has implemented suitable initiatives
to deal with these tensions? What would you have done differently?

The public sector organization. An effective streamlining of communications activities
is just as important to organizations within the public sector as in commercial firms.
The public sector involves many different types of organizations, including national-
ized companies (e.g.utilities),government agencies and departments (e.g.the ministry
of defence), and public service organizations (e.g. hospitals and schools).The larger
organizations in the public sector (as opposed to, for instance, small government
agencies) traditionally have a strong presence close to senior management and
policy making of ‘public’ communications disciplines (e.g. media relations, publicity)
that are used to inform the general public, and traditionally little marketing
communications.This is a result of the direct or indirect control or influence exercised
from outside the organization by government in particular.With budgets being allo-
cated by government and missions imposed,there was traditionally little incentive for
public organizations to develop extensive marketing programmes, let alone think in
marketing terms about the products and services that they deliver. But, increasingly,