Page 45 - Corporate Communication

Cornelissen-02.qxd 10/9/2004 9:04 AM Page 34

34 Mapping the Field

2.2 The birth of communications management

As the words at the beginning of this chapter suggest,communications management – any
type of communication activity undertaken by an organization to inform, persuade
or otherwise relate to individuals and groups in its outside environment – is not ter-
ribly new. Whenever people have depended on one another to complete tasks or
meet their needs, they have formed organizations. The act of organizing, at first
in clans, families and feudal structures, already required people to communicate with
other workers, as well as (prospective) buyers. The modernization of society, first
through farming and trade, and later through industrialization, created ever more
complex organizations with more complicated communications needs. The large
industrial corporations that emerged with the Industrial Revolution – predomi-
nantly at the turn of the twentieth century, first in the United States (US) and the
United Kingdom (UK), and from there spreading out over the rest of the Western
world – in particular required, in contrast to what had gone before, professional
communications officers and a more organized form of handling publicity and pro-
motions.These large and complex industrial firms, and the support of society that
they sought, made it clear that effective communication techniques and campaigns
needed to be developed by expert professionals to gain and maintain that support.
Walter Lippmann in his famed book Public Opinion (1922) wrote in the early years
of the twentieth century about this need of modern industrial organizations for
publicity makers and press agents to inform and persuade the general public and to
sell their wares:

The development of the publicity man is a clear sign that the facts of modern life do not
spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known.They must be given a shape by
somebody, and since in the daily routine reporters cannot give a shape to facts, and since
there is little disinterested organization of intelligence, the need for some formulation is
being met by those interested parties. 1
In the first instance, and right up until the early 1900s, organizations hired publicists,
press agents, promoters and propagandists to this end.These press agents played on
the credulity of the general public in its longing to be entertained, whether deceived
or not, and many advertisements and press releases in those days were in fact exag-
gerated to the point where they were outright lies.While such tactics can perhaps
now be denounced from an ethical standpoint, the ‘press agentry’ approach to the
general public (see Table 2.1) was taken at that time, simply because organizations
and their press agents could get away with it.At the turn of the nineteenth century,
industrial magnates and large organizations in the Western world were answering to
no one and were immune to pressure from government, labour or public opinion.
This situation was aptly illustrated at the time by a comment made by William Henry
Vanderbilt, head of the New York Central Railroad, when asked about the public
rampage and uproar that his company’s railroad extensions would cause.‘The public
be damned’, he simply responded.Yet, the age of unchecked industrial growth soon
ended, and industrial organizations in the Western world faced new challenges to
their established ways of doing business. The new century began with a cry from
‘muckrakers’ – investigative journalists who exposed scandals associated with power,