The effect on an organization of communication with the outside world: the relationship between free flow of information and an organization's effectiveness

Abstract

We pay lip service to ‘communication’, a concept which came to us from the United States and became fashionable among industrial advisers and a few managers in the 1950s—to the extent that some companies appointed managers of communication. This job appears to have had a variety of specifications, but the incumbents might be summed up generally as a combination of information officer with an internal public relations function. The term ‘public relations’ is no longer of use in describing an organization's relations with the outside world, because PR has assumed overtones suggestive of defensive and selective propaganda, a one‐way flow of ‘image building’ information, rather than the two‐way flow recommended by the communication experts (of course, there is an inward flow, but it amounts to little more than monitoring the media to pick up clues as to the effectiveness of the outward flow).

Citation

Robertson, A. (1975), "The effect on an organization of communication with the outside world: the relationship between free flow of information and an organization's effectiveness", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 27 No. 8, pp. 339-345. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb050521