Communications and legitimacy

It is fun to get back blogging after a break of four years.  Now seems the time to do it as I get into my doctorate on how PR practitioners are working with organisational legitimacy agendas.  I am going to blog around the issues of legitimacy as I believe the process of blogging will help in developing ideas and commenting on agendas relevant to my doctorate.

The last few days of research have opened up important avenues for me to develop.  In particular Sethi's important work in 1975 on the legitimacy gap.  It is interesting that it took a later generation of authors such as Heath and Coombs to bring the legitimacy gap into mainstream communications literature.

Leadership agendas - stakeholders, corporatism and public diplomacy

Attended this week a very good session at the IoD to launch Dr Roger Hayes and Dr Reggie Watts' book on leadership.   The book provides an excellent insight into current and emerging stakeholder agendas and their influence and agendas for leadership.   Roger has been a great supporter to the PR programmes (postgraduate and undergraduate) at Greenwich and to the re-validation of the programmes which we are currently working on for commencement in 2016.

The event had some great input from the audience.  Has the focus on leadership at the "top" of the organisation become too powerful a discourse?   Input from the floor suggested that actually an emerging focus is on leadership in middle management which is now seen as crucial for successful organisations.

Another important topic raised, was that of "corporatism" and the sense that major brands and organisations have become so powerful that they  are beyond the power of governments (and stakeholders) and there is a need for some mechanism of international governance.   The implication behind this was that stakeholder agendas have perhaps lost their momentum to the power of the corporation.  Interesting to note that one politician who has been speaking on "corporatism" is Nigel Farage and that a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review criticises Hillary Clinton's campaign as being too "corporatist."  Is "corporatism" a discourse which is growing in power?  It is not a term I have been particularly conscious of for a number of years, but I will start to look out for it now.

Agendas around corporatism tie in well with the work which Greenwich and our European partners explored in terms of lobbying and governance in the EU.  Also with the new proposal which we have applied to the EU for funding this year which is exploring the role of PR as public diplomacy.

Governance of major organisations is an interesting agenda to be discussing in the same week which has seen one of the most powerful global non-governmental organisations, FIFA, brought low by an old fashioned form of governance, the law.

FIFA will discover that it will be very hard for them to be masters of their own destiny now that the "court of public opinion" has been supplemented by the actual courts.  The trouble with power leaders such as Sepp Blatter is they can travel so far without listening to their stakeholders; but there always comes a day of reckoning.   National governments will not allow FIFA to run rings around them in the future as they have done to date.

Public diplomacy is focus of new Erasmus ISP application

PR as public diplomacy.   This has become the focus of a pan-European application by a number of universities across Europe including Turkey to the EU for funding for an Erasmus ISP or integrated study programme.

There is increasing interest in the concept of public diplomacy by the PR and communications industry particularly its application in the business context where some have called it corporate diplomacy.  This draws on work in political communications and international relations and other disciplines and highlights developments where diplomacy rather like lobbying has come under pressure to move into the public arena from the metaphorical "smoke filled room" - a much loved phrase by journalists to describe a secret deal hidden away from public gaze.

The concept of public diplomacy and its application to business draws on these influences as well as from lobbying, inter-cultural communications, PR, growing transparency agendas and wider societal pressures for business to show its contribution to society not just to the bottom line.

The application for an Erasmus ISP in this field seeks to help develop definitions, curricula, and best practice in industry for an emerging area of strategic communications.  Greenwich was part of an earlier Erasmus IP on lobbying and government relations in the EU with a number of universities across Europe (Belgium, France, Portugal, Romania, Spain and  Sweden).  Nearly all the same team have come together for a new application but this time with the addition of Bilgi University in Istanbul.  A notable feature of ISP applications is they have to show strong links with industry, and that is something which very much plays to the strengths of Greenwich.    Part of the proposal will include a planned conference at Greenwich in 2018 bringing together all partners and industry stakeholders.  

The academic team making the application include the following universities: University of Lorraine, University of Bucharest, University of Bilgi, CEU, Cardinal Herrera, University of Greenwich. 

Leadership styles and decision making in a crisis - sub-text to CIA report

The Senate Intelligence report on torture by the CIA after 9/11 published this week, has an important sub-text which to date has not really been covered by the media.  George Tenet, Director of the CIA (1997-2004) as the report highlighted, allowed "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", by CIA operatives and contractors during his time at the CIA.  However the FBI, under Robert Mueller, who took over the FBI, just two weeks before 9/11 refused to countenance torture, in spite of coming under great pressure from the White House to allow it.

                                         

                                           
                              George Tenet, CIA Director, receives Presidential Media of Freedom, 2004.

It is not often that we can see two leaders of major organisations facing the same decision in the same timescale and the reputational damage incurred (and in the case of the FBI avoided) by a decision taken many years before in the heat of the moment.

I, only became aware of this a few weeks ago, buying a remaindered book in the local bookshop in Greenwich, titled The Black Banners, the inside story of 9/11 and the war against Al-Queda.  Turns out to be a fascinating book written by one of the leading FBI interrogators of the time, called Ali Soufan, an Arabic speaking operative with great insight of Al-Queda.  He highlighted the very different approaches of the FBI and the CIA and the fact that the CIA as an intelligence gathering operation, never had a tradition of formal interrogation for criminal justice - in stark contrast to the FBI.   As a result, the CIA after 9/11, instead of drawing on the FBI's expertise, took its own path under great pressure from the White House to produce instant results, with heavy consequences for the USA and the CIA.  The hiring of outside contractors to undertake the torture is an element of the report which is particularly shocking.

Ali Soufan's role in the early interrogations of Al-Queda operatives using traditional techniques; witnessing early CIA torture; alerting FBI senior management to CIA behaviour and later evidence to Congressional committees has made him a powerful and credible witness in the US and globally.  He has gone on to found a commercial security intelligence service.

His story provides a demonstration also, of the behaviour, that a manager in the front line, under great pressure, may have to resolve drawing on expertise and personal ethics.  Not often, do such decisions come back many years later, with brickbats or laurels, but certainly they have this week for the CIA, the FBI and Ali Soufan.

UK Treasury shows its skill at media framing although politicisation of government announcement raises questions

The Conservatives must be delighted by the coverage which the announcement by the UK Treasury has received for its decision to repurchase £218M of bonds issued in the 1920s by Winston Churchill and related primarily to Britain refinancing First World War costs.  The story has received good coverage not only the financial media where such a story would normally be covered but across mainstream media as well, even international media - I think I saw it in Le Figaro.

Bond repurchases do not normally gain much attention but the Treasury press announcement is a master class in media framing:

• 2014 is a 100 years since the start of the First World War and the UK is just about to commemorate those who died at Remembrance Sunday so timing was excellent.
• Exceptional public interest in the display of poppies at the Tower of London has highlighted that the First World War has a strong hold on the imagination of the British people further enhancing impact of story.

Picture: Daily Telegraph. 

• A new biography written by Boris Johnston on Winston Churchill has just come out and Winston Churchill was Chancellor when the bonds were first issued. Links with Churchill are key requirement for any Conservative future leader.
• The Treasury has managed to link the story back into much earlier British history including the South Sea Bubble (18th century) which it claims the bonds, when first issued were also clearing up.  This aspect of the story seems a bit far fetched however the overall message which the Treasury clearly wanted to emphasise is that Britain pays its debts.  This is always a good message to remind international capital particularly as UK bonds are no longer AAA with all credit rating agencies.  Certainly the announcement has been well received going by comments from bond analysts. 

Apart from the media framing by the Treasury, the rather clunky message by the Chancellor in the announcement, even stronger in his tweet “We’ll redeem £218m of 4% Consols, including debts incurred because of South Sea Bubble. Another financial crisis we’re clearing up after ...” shows that a UK election is not far away and political point scoring in a government announcement even from such a powerful department as the Treasury is now standard.  (What would former No.10 press secretaries Harold Evans and Henry James have said - having worked with them, I am sure they would not have approved.)       

Building identity for United Kingdom

One of the results of the Scottish referendum is it has made us think what does it mean to be part of the United Kingdom or related terms such as Great Britain.   The UK as a concept and as a narrative is something which many of us have been re-learning in recent weeks.   In fact, the concept of the UK made up of differing nationalities such as Scottish, Welsh, English is not straightforward and so the referendum, particularly the thought that the UK might be broken up has made us reflect on the concept. One person who has helped us think through the concept and the benefits which it brings, is Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister and Chancellor and still a Scottish MP in Westminster.   His speech the day before voting in Glasgow is magnificent; in its rhetoric, its persuasive content, its narrative and for helping us realise the benefits of the Union and the dangers of nationalism.  As well as being available on Youtube, transcripts of the speech are on both the Independent and the Mirror.

Public sphere-like communications develop in UK financial sector

We are starting to see a number of organisations realising that the issues they are facing are too great to be resolved by their own actions.  They need help.  They need to share the pain, even the guilt in the public sphere.  The method which seems to be developing is by commissioning a report from an outside expert or organisation and by doing so opening up problems and agendas to public debate.  

This is what might be termed an emerging form of public sphere communications which Inger Jensen from Roskilde University anticipated in her 2001 paper titled Public Relations and emerging functions of the public sphere. To gain legitimacy, companies need to "launch problems in public as being of common concern."

We are seeing this develop most noticeably in the banking sector.

• In 2012 Barclays commissioned Anthony Salz, to lead an external review of Barclays' business practices. 

• This approach has now been followed by RBS which following receipt of the Lending Review Report which it commissioned from Sir Andrew Large, a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England has today commissioned a further report from Clifford Chance to investigate further. 

While in contrast, these are very different from the process which has been inflicted on the poor Co-operative Bank with major government and regulatory enquiries heaped upon it.  There is no sense that the Co-op Bank is in control of the gathering debate even terminal crisis facing the brand at least in banking.   A media firestorm created around the Chairman of the bank has influenced the Treasury and government to use the bank as a political football which may do immense damage to the mutual sector in the UK.  A very different form of communicative process with very little rational discussion at the heart of it.

This is an area which I am wanting to explore in my doctorate and I would welcome input from practitioners and academics.