Page 170 - Corporate Communication

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158 Corporate Communications in Practice

6.2 The roles and practices of
communications practitioners

On a day-to-day basis, practitioners working in communications are engaged in a
broad variety of activities ranging from, for instance, editorial work, internal coun-
selling, handling of inquiries, gathering information, looking at data from research,
talking to press contacts,drafting communications plans,delivering presentations,pro-
ducing communications materials (brochures, visuals, etc.), and administrative tasks
within the department.The job of communications practitioners, at various levels of
seniority, thus consists of a broad range of activities that in its scope and variety not
only varies with the tasks that have been assigned to a communications department
(i.e. whether the department is a service unit or is involved in counselling and deci-
sion making at the senior management level), but also with the range of issues and
enquiries from stakeholders that are directed to communications practitioners for
handling.In companies where stakeholder groups indeed wage many claims upon the
organization and raise issues that require a response, practitioners often work at an
unrelenting pace to counsel management,draft resolutions and policy documents,and
respond to and communicate with those outside stakeholder groups.
As in many other organizational jobs, practitioners often work at a fast pace and
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under pressure on a whole range of different tasks and activities. While these acti-
vities may be characterized by variety and brevity, and thus differ from practitioner
to practitioner, academic research has established that despite this variety practition-
ers can generally be cast in two broad role types: managers and technicians.These
general roles are based upon the outlook of a practitioner upon the job and the general
range of activities that he or she performs.

Communications managers and technicians
Katz and Khan in 1978 initially identified the importance of the role concept in
organizations. They defined organizations as role systems and ‘role behaviour’ as
‘recurring actions of an individual interrelated with the actions of others so as to
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yield a predictable outcome’. An organizational role is, of course, an abstraction; a
conceptual order imposed on the many activities performed by individuals in organi-
zations to make sense of organizational behaviour and explain its causal factors and
its consequences. Working with the role concept, Glen Broom pioneered roles
research in communications to explain the pattern of activities performed by prac-
titioners.Using a battery of 24 self-reporting measures of roles activities,Broom con-
ceptualized four dominant theoretical roles, which he argued captured the main
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patterns of activities that communications practitioners perform. These four theoreti-
cal practitioner roles comprised:

1. The communications technician role: in this role, the practitioner provides
the specialized skills needed to carry out communications programmes. Rather
than being part of the management team, technicians are concerned with
preparing and producing communications materials for the communications
effort of the organization.