The past two months have been very busy and productive for the team and project. We are now deep into the analysis and write up of our research. Emily carried out brilliant thematic and content analysis on four of our magazines – BBC, Midland Bank, British Rail and the Post Office from the Second World War until the last printed issues in the 2000s. We sampled one issue every decade. Her media studies and media history background were invaluable here as she located visual themes alongside textual themes that we had overlooked. One fascinating find was that while these magazines radically reconfigured in the 1960s from organs of industrial welfare to employee and work focused newspapers, this took place a decade earlier at the BBC’s Ariel Magazine in the 1950s. This suggests that the switch to internal communication, while broadly taking place in the 1960s, occurred ten years earlier at the BBC. Detailed analysis of the documentary evidence from the BBC that we have gathered, which includes minutes of meeting for the editorial board of Ariel, memos and reports, should clarify this further.
We have also been engaged in writing up papers from the project. This includes positive revise and resubmissions (R&R) from two global 4* journals, one from business history and one from management/organization studies. These are the two academic fields that we are targeting on the project, and we are delighted with the outcome so far. The business history paper is in its second phase of R&R and we are aiming for publication by the end of this year. We have also written up a 11,000-word full paper for the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) conference in Athens in July which we will be presenting in Sub-Theme 41 Tracing the Past: Historical Methods for Studying Entrepreneurship, Imagination and Innovation. The paper concentrates on repair focused deinstitutionalization. We use this concept to explain the deinstitutionalization of house journals in the 1960s and their replacement by Internal Communication (IC) as the institutionalized practice of communicating with employees. This institutional theory thus explains the emergence of IC in the 1960s and 1970s. In accordance with the sub-theme, we also discuss at length our use of the innovative historical method of a dual institutional historical approach. This is a research approach whereby we divide our archives into two types; those of the institutionalizers which are professional groups and business associations and the practitioners which are organizations which adopt the institutions. This enables us to provide a comprehensive, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree institutional history of IC. Following EGOS, we intend to integrate feedback from the conference, rewrite the paper and submit it to a top management journal.
The team has also been very busy over the last month attending conferences. Michael attended the Netnocon Conference in Marseille, France at the end of May 2025. Netnography is the marketing and consumer behaviour method of ethnographically studying brand communities and consumer tribes online. Whilst this was from Michael’s PhD student Dr Tala Almaghrabi’s work on memes in online communities, we are aiming to present a historical paper next year based on the development of digital communication and intranets from the 1980s to the present.
Michael was also the keynote speaker at the Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) which was held at Brunel University in June and expertly organised by Dr Gurdeep Kohli. His paper examined the growth of public relations in the UK in the interwar period. This is a very important theme for our project as public relations was one of the cognate institutionalized practices which IC emerged from. In the post-1945 period IC in the nationalized industries of coal, electricity, gas, rail, steel and post office was mainly controlled by public relations officials. These were transformed into internal communication officers in the 1970s and 1980s.
We were also very busy with practitioner conferences and project partner engagement. Michael in June attended and presented at the Gallagher 2025 Communications Summit in London and the Institute of Internal Communication 2025 Festival in Tewinbury Farm in Hertfordshire. He spoke in both events about the emergence of IC in the 1960s and 1970s. Both conferences had superb keynote speeches and presentations which addressed a range of topics from AI to employee engagement to storytelling to organizational change. These conferences are invaluable to our research, and we would like to thank our research partners Gallagher and The Institute of Internal Communication for their support and generosity.
Finally, the whole team attend the Association of Business Historians’ annual conference which was held at Queen’s University in Belfast. We presented five papers in total at the conference which is an indication of the work and progress we have made on the project. Michael Heller spoke on the development of internal labour markets and the rise of IC in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. He also spoke on the emergence of IC in the 1960s and 1970s and the communication work and strategy of the project. Emily gave an excellent paper on the role of The Woman Engineer in fostering professional development and identity amongst women engineers in the twentieth century and Michael Rowlinson gave a fascinating paper on the historical academic literature on internal organizational communication.
We will spend the summer writing up our papers and attending conferences at EGOS and the Academy of Management in July where we will be presenting. We are also beginning work on organizing our two workshops at the end of the research project which we hope you can attend and producing a short video about the project for public dissemination and engagement. We hope you all have a pleasant and relaxing summer.