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Practice perspectives on corporate communications

Practitioner perspectives on corporate communications have invariably been at odds
with theoretical and academic reflections on the field, as practitioners have always
been more immediately concerned with the ‘tricks of the trade’, or, put differently,
the skills and competencies needed by a practitioner to carry out the tasks that fall
within the corporate communications remit. At the very start, at the turn of the
twentieth century and right up until the 1960s, the period when press agents and
public relations officers were employed by corporations to channel and disseminate
information into the public realm, emphasis was laid within practice on the voca-
tional skills that were needed to do the job. Communications as an area of profes-
sional practice was in itself seen as a vocation and in need of talented individuals
who not only possessed a number of ‘personality characteristics’ such as charisma,
patience, discretion and honesty, but had also acquired a talent for handling people
and for coming up with startling new ideas. Sam Black, for instance, commented in
1954 that ‘it is not necessary to have had any specialized training to possess a good
public relations outlook’, as ‘so much depends on natural common sense and good
taste’. 22 Edward Bernays, one of the most influential figures in the field, equally
emphasized in 1952 that communications management ‘rests fundamentally on
ideas’, generated by a practitioner who is a ‘man of character and integrity, who has
acquired a sense of judgment and logic without having lost the ability to think
creatively and imaginatively’. 23
This vocational perspective on practice, which alongside the important personality
characteristics of a practitioner also emphasized a whole range of writing and pre-
sentational skills, has, primarily due to professional pressures, been complemented
with a management view since the early 1970s. Embedded in new understandings
and applications of analysis and planning for communications programmes, the man-
agement view emphasizes that a whole range of new competencies or abilities need
to be acquired by the practitioner including the ability to conduct research, develop
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strategy and plan for communications programmes. Communications itself needs
to be seen as a management function (alongside the other management functions of
finance, human resources, marketing, research and development, and operations)
within the organization. And practitioners, it has been suggested, need to approach
their work not so much as ‘technicians’, who are merely concerned with producing
communications materials and disseminating information, but as more rounded
‘managers’ who use research and planning as the bedrock for their communications
programmes and are able to think strategically about the use of communications for
organizational problems. 25
The management perspective has now, at the start of the twenty-first century, come
to full gestation within practice.The ‘management mindset’ has become ingrained
in the heads of many communications practitioners, influencing how these profes-
sionals approach their work, and the higher education sector that caters for their
development has increasingly shown a preoccupation with communications as a
management function. In fact, the traditional location of under- and post-graduate
courses on communications in schools of communications and journalism in the US,
UK and Europe (e.g. Annenberg School of Communications UCLA, Amsterdam
School of Communications Research), following a vocational view of the profession,