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The Organization of Communications 149

company and its communications department varies or is contingent upon relationships
between the company and its outside environment.

The power-control perspective on communications organization. The power-control
perspective on communications organization is largely associated with the group of
academic researchers of the IABC Excellence study into public relations. These
researchers, including James Grunig, Larissa Grunig and Dozier, argued that earlier
studies from a contingency perspective had produced little if any explanatory evi-
dence of why communications is actually organized across organizations as it is.This
group of academics critiqued Schneider’s study in particular, which had taken an
environmental perspective towards explaining the structural variation of organiza-
tions but had provided only a minimal explanation for the structuring of the com-
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munications department. Such weak and insignificant links between environment
and organizational structure subsequently led these researchers to suggest the power-
control perspective as a more viable theoretical framework to research and explain
structural variations of communications. For exactly these reasons, Larissa Grunig
motivated the turn to the power-control perspective, which suggests ‘that organiza-
tions do what they do because the people with the most power in the organization –
44
the dominant coalition – decide to do it that way’. The rationale here, from the
power-control perspective, is that the lack of contingent relations between environ-
ment and structure indicates the considerable latitude of choice among the domi-
nant coalition of senior managers, permitting them to devise structures and
organizational responses that in the light of environmental needs ‘satisfice’ rather than
45
‘optimize’. The idea is thus that perceptions and choices of senior managers within
the company, which are influenced by intra-organizational power and the forming
of coalitions, are the main determinants of the structuring of communications. In
other words, as research within the power-control paradigm suggests the structuring
of communications is dependent upon the intra-organizational power of the com-
munications function in terms of the valuable resources and knowledge that it holds
(which other departments are dependent upon) and its perceived value by the domi-
nant coalition within a company.
In summary, both the contingency and power-control perspectives offer alter-
native theoretical frameworks for studying and explaining the way in which com-
munications is vertically and horizontally structured within companies. Both have
been supported with some empirical data in research, and go some way towards
explaining the variance in structures discussed in Sections 5.3 and 5.4.The size of the
organization, for one, clearly explains some of the variance in vertical structures across
companies. Small businesses generally have communications responsibilities located
with one or a few managers in other functional areas (marketing, human resources)
within the organization. When organizations grow larger, however, and adopt a
multidivisional structure (with each division catering for a certain product-market com-
bination),the proportion of communications personnel it contains equally increases,and
communications disciplines will be taken together into departments or separate
units.This is particularly evident in the consistent findings that in large manufacturing
and service companies communications disciplines are arranged into separate com-
munications and marketing departments. Second, the domain similarities and resource
dependencies between disciplines, as discussed above, may be seen to account for the