How are institutions able to change? If institutional structures which create recursive and taken for granted social structures – from dining to families to society to politics to working and way beyond – are so embedded in our social behaviour, how are we able to alter them? If we are trapped, as DiMaggio and Powell (1983) argued, inspired by the German sociologist Max Weber, in an iron cage of rationality and institutions, how are we able to escape, regain our agency and change the institutions which govern our social behaviour? Yet even a brief survey of history – whether political, social, cultural or economic – will show that change and not stability is the norm. This has created what is known as the paradox of institutions and has spurred an entire field of research which has asked how do institutions change when they are so entrenched and encompassing?

Institutional theory has developed the concept of deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalisation to understand institutional change (Scott, 2001; Greenwood, Suddaby and Hinings, 2002; Maguire and Hardy, 2009). It has also created the concepts of institutional entrepreneurship (DiMaggio, 1988) and institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006) to explain the process of institutional change. The former relates to agentic, reflexive and resourceful individuals who are able to change institutions for their own benefit. The latter relates to the work individuals and groups do to create, maintain and change institutions. Much of this is achieved by focusing on the process of institutionalization – the procedure and practice by which institutions are created, used and operationalized – rather than looking at institutions per se as social phenomena. This invariably involves the use of history as institutionalization is by nature a historical process which extends over time.

Internal Communication (IC) is an excellent historical candidate to understand the process of institutional change. From the 1880s to the 1960s IC was effectively house journals supported by other channels such as memos, circulars and notice boards. It was written and it was based on top-down, one-way communication. The word and concept of IC did not exist and only began to slowly emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. IC was based on two-way communication, it was managerial and was focused on work and strategy. In stark contrast to house journals, it was predominantly oral, emerging out of the new system of briefing groups, consultative committees and eventually team meetings. It was also based on using and integrating multiple channels of communication, of which house journals were only one, and it was an avid user and adopter of technology – CCTV and film in the 1960s and 1970s, videos and computers in the 1980s, and digital technologies and intranets in the 1990s. The emergence and establishment of IC from the 1960s to the 1980s can be seen as a process of deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization. Company magazines and the written word were deinstitutionalized and were replaced by the system of IC. This was a slow and uneven process which took decades. The British Association of Industrial Editors, for example, did not change its name to the British Association of Communicators in Business (CiB) until 1995 and did not change it to the Institute of Internal Communication until 2010.

Our source of the month is a cartoon which was published in the magazine Industrial Welfare which was the monthly journal of the Industrial Welfare Society. The Industrial Welfare Society was founded in 1918 and was an association which promoted the use of industrial welfare in British companies. It had over seven hundred members which included most of the major corporations in the UK.  It was a major promotor of house journals or company magazines along with the British Association of Industrial Editors which was founded in 1949.

The cartoon was taken and reproduced from the cartoon character Bristow, a humorous middle-aged office worker who regularly appeared in the London daily newspaper, The Evening Standard. It ridicules the house journal in a gentle humorous way by depicting it as farcical, diversionary and out of touch with the workplace.

In 1962 John Garnett became Director of the Industrial Welfare Society, a role he held until 1986. Garnett radically changed the Industrial Welfare Society and played a major role in changing labour and industrial relations in the UK. He believed that industrial welfare, which had been the mainstay of labour relations and personnel management in Britain for almost a century, was out of date and was playing a pejorative role in labour relations and employment in British companies. He strove for a change to modern personnel and human resource management in which managers focused on making work meaningful and rewarding to employees, and workers were treated as partners and important resources. By doing this, worker commitment and engagement would be improved and in the process labour and industrial relations and productivity would benefit. In a period that had witnessed the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which had ended a culture of deference in Britain, and the industrial actions and strikes of the 1970s this was a powerful and attractive philosophy.

A major element in Garnett’s thinking was that communication and the provision of information regarding work and company policy to employees was vital. The existing system of company magazines was hopelessly out of date and was part of the welfarism that Garnet was intent on dismantling. In 1965, for example, he changed the name of the Industrial Welfare Society to the Industrial Society. In the 1960s and early 1970s a number of articles regularly appeared in Industrial Welfare and its successor Industrial Society which attacked company magazines as obsolete and mocked and ridiculed them. This, including the above cartoon, can be seen as part of a process of institutional work by Garnett, the institutional entrepreneur, to deinstitutionalize company magazines. In their stead the Industrial Society promoted the use of the new communicational method of briefing groups whereby messages were cascaded down organisations through several levels of management through meetings of ten to fifteen employees which relied on two-way oral communication. Along which the promotion of other forms of communication such as consultative committees, employee reports, film, CCTV and video this emerged into the concept and practice of IC. Garnett and the Industrial Society can be seen as playing a major role in developing, promoting and institutionalizing IC. The application of institutional theory to the history of IC and the action taken in the 1960s and 1970s is vital to understanding its history and its historical emergence as a business and organizational practice.

References

DiMaggio, P. & Powell, W.W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Isomorphism in organizational fields. Advances in Strategic Management 48(2), 147-160.

Greenwood, R., Suddaby, R. & Hinings, C.R. (2002). Theorizing change: The role of professional associations in the transformation of institutional fields. Academy of Management Journal 45(1), 58-80.

Lawrence, T.B. & Suddaby, R. (2006). Institutions and institutional work. In S.R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T.B. Lawrence & W.R. Nord (Eds.). Sage handbook of organization studies (2^nd ed. , pp. 215-254). London: Sage.

Maguire, S. & Hardy, C. (2009). Discourse and deinstitutionalization: The decline of DDT. Academy of Management Journal 52(1), 148-179.

Scott, W.R. (2001). Institutions and Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage Publications.

The post Deinstitutionalization and Reinstitutionalization: The Emergence of Internal Communication in the 1960s and 1970s – Source of the Month (April 2025) appeared first on An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the UK.

From Industrial Welfare, the magazine of the Industrial Society, in April 1965.

What did you take as the message of this picture? For many of you, it was probably the environmental consequences of a throw-away culture. When this advert was produced in 1965, the complete opposite reaction was anticipated from readers. The hope was that they would be impressed by the hygiene of a cup that would only ever be used once. Context is everything when communicating a message!

For internal communicators, one of the challenges in crafting messages is understanding how context will influence the way in which that message will be interpreted. A story that resonates positively in one organizational culture may be met with resistance in another. Likewise, a communication strategy that aligns with prevailing societal values today could become outdated and ineffective in the future. One of the jobs of the internal communicator is to navigate the ever-changing nature of organizational culture, societal values, and technological advancements. Contextual sensitivity is crucial in fostering effective communication that both aligns with the ethos of the organization and resonates with its members.

Historical Context

Context is also everything for historians. Just as internal communicators have to be sensitive to changing societal values, historians must be attuned to the different cultural values of past societies. Historical sources are, by definition, examined out of context.

Historians find themselves working with a wide range of sources. Often these are written documents, but anything that gives us a clue about the past can be a source, such as objects, architecture or even the landscape. Sadly, these sources were not created to assist the people of the future with understanding the past! One of the challenges of the historian is to understand the actual motive behind the creation of the source. Written sources, in particular, are often penned with a very specific agenda.

For much of the twentieth century, magazines were the main form of internal communication. Although the earliest magazines originated in the late nineteenth century, they became widespread across British industry after the First World War. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, many managers were greatly concerned about the growing labour movement and the power of the trade unions in Britain. When today’s historians read early company magazines, they must remember that they are looking at tools that were designed to cut out trade unions and build direct bonds between the employer and employee. This is a strategy that is often referred to as union substitution.

Michael Heller suggests there should be three key elements to a historian’s approach to source material. The first is ‘contextual analysis’, which entails a consideration of the context in which a source was created and the agenda behind it. Given sources are shaped by their context, we can be more confident in our historical detective work if we find different types of sources that support our view of history. This process of looking for multiple types of sources that are linked to and validate each other, known as ‘triangulation’, is the second of Heller’s elements of historical research. The third is ‘colligation’, which involves considering how the different sources can be combined together to create narratives about the past.

The Challenges of the Historian

A consequence of contextual analysis is that a key element of historical research is immersing yourself in another culture. In this sense, it is not so different from what an anthropologist aims to do with modern-day cultures. Historians and anthropologists alike face the difficulty that you can never truly step into another person’s shoes. This is particularly difficult for historians, though, who do not have the option of going to live in the society that they are studying! Much assumed cultural knowledge has been lost with time and it can be difficult to bring it back to life.

Historians wrestle with a struggle between detail and the big picture. Due to the challenge of understanding context, historians have an obligation to examine the topic that they are studying in detail. The tricky part is that this is not the only consideration The danger of focusing on details is losing sight of the bigger picture. Among historians, there are often debates between those who favour creating theories about the bigger picture and those who see these theories as abstract to the point that they have failed to take account of the context of the source material.

Another challenge faced by historians is that they cannot avoid being influenced by their knowledge of developments that have happened since the time they are studying. In looking at early company magazines, we are aware of what internal communication has now grown into. Knowing the result of a football match before watching it can make the outcome seem inevitable as the game unfolds and, in the same way, it is difficult to examine company magazines in their own right rather than as precursors to modern internal communication.

This challenge of viewing history backwards is known as ‘teleology’. During our research, it came as a surprise to us to find that a number of long-standing magazines that we considered a great success actually faced the possibility of being disbanded in their early years. The reason this seemed a surprise is because we allowed ourselves to see modern internal communication as an inevitability rather than remembering that even the most successful magazines were only an experiment in the context of the time.

The Benefits of History to Internal Communication

Historians may face many challenges but studying history is not futile! On the contrary, this project has received support from many partner organizations because it has a lot to offer for internal communication. Even if we can never put ourselves in the shoes of people from past cultures, looking at how communication functioned in radically different contexts provides perspective on the trending topics of the twenty-first century like remote working or the emergence of AI. We can gain a greater understanding of the fundamental principles of good communication by seeing how it functioned in a radically different society.

Communication between employees has been vital for as long as large organizations have existed. For this reason, the practice of internal communication predates the actual use of the term. While organizations operate very differently today than they did in the late nineteenth century, the important ideas about cooperation and communication have not changed to the same extent. When we are deciding how to deal with social and technological change, it can be helpful to remind ourselves of these underlying principles of good communication and to see how the challenges of the past were tackled. Although the past is a foreign country that we can’t visit, with good historical research practices it is one that we can learn from.

Sources

Industrial Welfare, April 1965, p. 87. The Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS.303/B19/1/47.

Heller, Michael (2023). Rethinking Historical Methods in Organization Studies: Organizational Source Criticism. Organization Studies, 44(6), 987-1002.

Maclean, Mairi, Charles Harvey, and Stewart R. Clegg (2016). Conceptualizing Historical Organization Studies. Academy of Management Review, 41(4), 609-32.

Rowlinson, Michael, John Hassard, and Stephanie Decker (2014). Research Strategies for Organizational History: A Dialogue between Historical Theory and Organization Theory. Academy of Management Review, 39(3), 250-74.

Ruck, Kevin, & Heather Yaxley (2013). Tracking the Rise and Rise of Internal Communication from the 1980s. The Proceedings of the International History of Public Relations Conference.

Wadhwani, R. Daniel, Roy Suddaby, Mads Mordhorst, & Andrew Popp (2018). History as Organizing: Uses of the Past in Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 39(12), 1663-83.

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