The Organisation of External Communication Disciplines in UK Companies: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis of Dimensions and Determinants

The subject of the organisation of a company's external communications has beencharacterised by enduring debate exemplified in the discussions on the relationshipbetween marketing and public relations as well as, more recently, in arguments fora greater "integration" or interaction between and consolidation of a company'scommunication disciplines. Despite this prolific attention to communication organisation in the literature, having resulted in a number of normative prescriptionsand suggestions, there has been little if any actual empirical research on aspectsof communication organisation across companies. Moreover, within the little priorempirical research, scant attention has been given, firstly, to conceptual development in the sense of defining constructs and developing valid measures of communication organisation, and, secondly, to the contextual factors that may make aparticular organisational arrangement of communication disciplines either more orless appropriate for a particular company. This paper therefore develops and testsa number of literature-derived propositions relating organisational dimensions toconditions in a company's internal and external environments. Findings of anexploratory empirical study show that the organisational relationship (in the formof different types of interaction and their degree of formalisation) between the twoprimary departments involved in a company's external communication programmesare correlated with such internal environmental conditions as the departments'domain similarity and resource dependence, as well as the prevailing organisational norms and cultural conditions within a company.