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The Organization of Communications 147

best-practice US firms, challenges this preoccupation and suggests that there should
be less focus on ‘who is in charge?’ and ‘who belongs to what department?’ and
rather an emphasis on developing more knowledge about horizontal processes and
structures of integration.As he emphasizes the importance of horizontal structures:
‘integrated communication is not necessarily about putting public relations, market-
ing communications and other communications professionals into a single depart-
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ment, but about integrating their [work] processes’. Gronstedt therefore suggests
that each company should have a sufficient or fair number of horizontal mechanisms
in place, as this not only leads to better coordination of the work of communications
practitioners,but also to more job satisfaction,greater identification with the company,
and generally more competent professionals.

5.5 What explains structure?

Vertical and horizontal structures of communications organization may vary across
companies.Because of historical precedents,powerful coalitions,organizational size or
environmental factors, companies might differ in how communications disciplines are
arranged into departments, in terms of whether they have a central, independent
communications department,and also in the degree and kind of coordination mecha-
nisms that have been installed between communications disciplines and departments.
The nature of these differences was documented in detail in Sections 5.3 and 5.4,
which dealt with differences in vertical and horizontal structures across different types
of companies. At this point it is worth mentioning that there is a lot of academic
debate about why there are such differences in communications organization across
companies,in terms of what factors seem to determine vertical and horizontal structures,
and whether there is an ‘optimal’ or best way of organizing communications for dif-
ferent types of companies (i.e.whether the company is a small business,manufacturing/
service firm, public organization, professional service organization or multinational
corporation).

Explaining structure: contingency versus power-control

The debate about what determines structure centres on two different schools of
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thought: contingency and power-control theory. Both offer alternative frameworks
for studying and explaining organizational structure. Contingency theory, first of all,
is a so-called structural-functionalist theory of organizational structure suggesting that
organizations are very much dependent on the constellation of environmental factors
affecting organizations at any point in time.This perspective was initially developed
in the 1960s in the works of Chandler (1962) and Lawrence and Lorsch (1967),among
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others. The situational factors affecting organizational structure such as environ-
mental (in)stability, technology, size and strategy that they studied came to be called
contingency factors, and the related body of work came to be called contingency
theory. Here the basic principle is that of interdependency. Companies are seen to
adapt their formal organizational structure to align it with factors in their environ-
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ment. A characteristic of contingency theory is that, as a theory, it assumes that such