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 (2nd 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.