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160 Corporate Communications in Practice

managers are more likely to participate in the organization’s decision making and
strategic planning.

While the manager and technician roles are very distinct in terms of the activities
performed within them, it is important to note that these two general roles are con-
ceptual abstractions. In other words, manager and technician role activities are
different,but neither mutually exclusive nor in opposition to each other.As Dozier and
Broom point out:‘all practitioners enact elements of both the manager and techni-
cian roles which are themselves simply useful abstractions for studying the wide range
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of activities that practitioners perform in their daily work’. As such, senior commu-
nications managers, for instance, do not exclusively occupy themselves with manage-
rial tasks as they are often still engaged in handling routine technical communications
tasks (media relations, publicity, the production of in-house newspapers, etc.).
Nonetheless, the concept of predominant role types has proved useful in thinking about
and studying roles in communications practice. If a practitioner enacts activities of the
manager role set with greater frequency than activities of the technician role set, then
this practitioner can be categorized as a manager. Such categorization is helpful not
only in understanding the tasks and activities carried out by practitioners, but also for
explaining practitioner involvement in decision making and for thinking about the
further professional development of communications practitioners.

The strategic importance of roles

First of all, the concept of two dominant role types – managers and technicians – is
helpful in capturing and explaining daily behavioural patterns of individual practitioners.The
two roles are important theoretical concepts because they explain how people
behave in carrying out their job responsibilities and predict the result of that action.
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Academic research on roles in communications practice has, for instance, examined
how the roles communications personnel play relate to variables such as environ-
mental uncertainty, size of the department, gender and length of professional service.
Environmental uncertainty, for instance, implies that when decisions about organi-
zational responses to the environment become more novel and non-programmed,
practitioner roles change from technician to manager. Practitioners working in
organizations faced with such uncertain environments then shift activities from gen-
erating communications to making strategic decisions – or helping management to
do so. Equally, the size of the communications department matters: for practitioners
to focus on managerial tasks they usually require a support team to release them from
technical tasks. Hence, manager roles tend to be found more often in larger com-
munications departments (i.e. more than five or six people). A third factor, and the
one often igniting the most response, is that gender determines role enactment. In
various studies it has been observed that women were more likely than men to
perform the technician role.According to some this just reflects the widespread influx
of women into the communications profession (who start their careers working in
technician roles) that is here today, although for others it indicates a glass ceiling for
women who are disadvantaged in terms of career advancement (as they are hindered
from progressing to manager roles).And, finally, the length of professional service of