Outreach and engagement
Apologies for our belated research blog and source of the month. We will be resuming monthly features with the recruitment of Dr Emily Rees on the project as our new research fellow. Emily has been working hard on the project over the last three months. She has updated our website and made it more navigable.
She is also working assiduously on a public exhibition which we plan to hold in Newcastle for the month of November 2025. Our research partners will take part in this, and we also plan on reaching out to major local businesses and employers in the Newcastle and Tyneside area. The exhibition will be a history of internal communication (IC) in the United Kingdom but will be themed around major contemporary issues of IC in the workplace in the UK such as employee experience, technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Equality, Diversity and Inclusiveness (EDI) and employee voice. We will also hold a workshop on the history of IC which will coincide with the exhibition and will be open to both practitioners and academics. We hope many of you will take part in this.
Archival research
Research was carried out in November, December and January at the archives of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and HSBC. We would like to thank the archivists at both companies for their fantastic support. Both archives held substantial records on IC. GSK has an incredible online archive which holds records of annual and townhall meetings from CEOs from the 2000s. This is an invaluable record. It also has extremely detailed records, including verbatim minutes of meeting, of staff management committees in the post-war period. HSBC’s records revealed an engagement with ‘Internal Communication’ from 1961 onwards. In 1975 the bank set up an Internal Communication Committee and embraced video in the 1980s. These dates are very early and mark out the Midland Bank and broader national retail bankers in the UK as pioneers in the development of IC in the UK.
We also have fascinating records in the early 1980s on PRESTEL, an early digital videotex service launched by British Telecom in 1979, which has been referred to as ‘The British Internet that Never Was’, and VIEWDATA which was a digital information bulletin system adopted by branches in the Midland Bank. This shows that digital IC was being developed in the 1980s in the UK, and its platforms were forerunners of intranets that were introduced in the latter half of the 1990s.
Research at GSK and HSBC also demonstrated the importance of the 1971 Industrial Relations Act and the 1982 Employment Act in catalyzing the development, adoption and spread of IC in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s (see this month’s Source of the Month). Both acts obliged large-scale employers to communicate with their employees and to demonstrate that they were doing so. Up until the 1970s there was no legal obligation for employees to communicate with their workers.
These two acts are evidence of what William Richard Scott calls regulative institutionalization. They were vital moments in the history of IC and the archives of both GSK and HSBC include important records on how this impacted on how communication was practiced in these organizations. This is vital to our growing understanding of how IC emerged in the vital period of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s which has received very little historical attention.
Industry conferences
Michael Heller attended the Unily Unite 24 Conference in the City of London in October, which was an incredible experience and was highly valuable for our research, particularly in enhancing our understanding of the development of intranets and digital technology in the latter part of the history of IC. Unily, a UK-based company, is one of the largest producers and suppliers of intranets in the world. One could refer to it as the Microsoft of IC! Most large-scale companies in the UK, including universities, use their platforms and software.
This was a fantastic conference that was held on October 15 and October 16 and featured a host of expert speakers and round tables addressing core issues of IC, predominantly around the impact of AI on work and employee experience, technology and intranets. This was an incredibly professional and well-organized conference that had attendees and speakers from all over the world and from global corporations. It demonstrates the highly developed current state of IC, its intricate relationship with technology and its global character. It also emphasizes the recognized impact of AI on IC. Michael’s talk is avaiable below and other talks can be accessed here. We would like to thank Unily for inviting us and for their wonderful hospitality.
Future academic conferences and publications
December and January were also spent busily preparing conference proposals from the project. We have submitted a Professional Development Workshop (PDW) proposal to the prestigious Academy of Management Conference (the largest academic management conference in the world), which will be held in Copenhagen at the end of July 2025. Our PDW is on the history of internal communication and employee voice, and we have papers which cover the UK, USA and Japan. We very much hope to see you there.
We also submitted papers to the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) and the Association of Business Historians (ABH) where we hope to talk in both conferences on our research on the deinstitutionalization of company magazines and their reinstitutionalization as IC in the 1960s and 1970s. We have also proposed a research panel at the ABH on the history of internal communication.
Finally, we are delighted to announce that we have received a Revise and Resubmit in January from a major global academic journal for our first submitted academic article from the research project. We have a lot of work to do in 2025 which we will keep you informed of.