Source of the Month

Source of the Month September 2025

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Deinstitutionalization, Reinstitutionalization, Social Change and the Origins and Purposes of Internal Communication in the 1960s and 1970s Deinstitutionalization is the process through which institutions that structure and legitimate social behaviour and practice are undermined, critiqued and ultimately revoked. Deinstitutionalization is an important way of historically explaining change, as the process ‘unfreezes’ history, so to speak, […]

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Meetings, Bloody Meetings: Source of the Month (May 2025)

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John Cleese is perhaps the most famous figure in British internal communication, though not many people would know it. He is, of course, most famous for iconic comedies such as Fawlty Towers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But he has spent a much larger part of his career running (and starring in) the films of one

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Deinstitutionalization and Reinstitutionalization: The Emergence of Internal Communication in the 1960s and 1970s – Source of the Month (April 2025)

Industrial Welfare Society, Research methods, Source of the Month /

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

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Miss Rail News and Changing Times in 1960s Britain – Source of the Month (March 2025)

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Miss Rail News was a popular competition run by the Rail News newspaper. Launched in 1963, it served both the employees of British Rail (who received a free copy) and a wider community of rail aficionados (who paid 6d a copy).  Rail News was launched at precisely the moment that a self-consciously modern national railway

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Internal Communication at Midland Bank – Source of the Month (February 2025)

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Our source of the month for February is the minutes of a meeting to discuss terms of reference for a Communications Audit/Study held at the Midland Bank in 1983. The Midland Bank had been active in the development of internal communication (IC) since the early 1960s and was a pioneer in its development. We have

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Never Knowingly Uncontrolled: Managing a Workforce of Partners at John Lewis – Source of the Month (July 2024)

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The John Lewis Partnership today is iconic for its distinctive business model: a partnership that is both owned and operated by its employees. However, this was not always the case. The transformation into this distinctive structure was initiated by John Spedan Lewis, the son of the founder. In stark contrast, the senior John Lewis had

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Channelling the Vibe: BBC Internal Communication in the TV Era – Source of the Month (June 2024)

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Last month’s blog post explored the behind-the-scenes strategy of internal communication at the BBC through its archive of minutes and memos. The story went from the inception of the BBC’s first magazine in 1928 up to its first reader questionnaire of 1959. This month’s blog post continues this story up to the present day. The

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Ariel Reconnaissance: Uncovering the Origins of the BBC’s Internal Communication – Source of the Month (May 2024)

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In our eighteen months of study, no archive has rivalled the BBC’s behind-the-scenes insights into internal communication strategy. Spanning 1927 to 1989, its archive holds a collection of minutes and memos that tell a story of how the initiation of a magazine in 1927 evolved into a major organisational operation. An almost continuous run from

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Boots on the Ground: Employee Welfare and the Five-Day Week – Source of the Month (April 2024)

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Today is the ninetieth anniversary of an important step in employee welfare. On 30 April 1934, Boots Pure Drug Company Limited began an experiment with having a five-day working week. The interwar period was an important time in the evolution of industrial welfare. Emerging from the aftermath of the First World War, figures in the

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Chapter 5 of the History of Internal Communication (1878 to 2024): The Digital Era and the Journey into the Future

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Across this week, we have explored the major chapters in the history of internal communication. The final chapter, which we are still watching unfold today, has seen digital technology revolutionise the way that we communicate. Although the origins of digital technology are much earlier, the 1990s is the decade in which it began to have

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