From ‘Public’ to ‘Stakeholder Relationships’: A Challenge to Governance in Organisations
| Date | 01 February 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00129.x |
| Author | Toni Muzi Falconi |
| Published date | 01 February 2012 |
From ‘Public’ to ‘Stakeholder
Relationships’: A Challenge
to Governance in
Organisations
Toni Muzi Falconi
Methodos Spa, LUMSA University, NY
The quality of the decision-making process has always
been important in public, private and social organisations
and a prime focus for management studies. In the last
20 years, the social, political and technological dynamics of
globalisation have created hurdles that have caused costly
delays in the actual implementation of many organisational
decisions. As a result, the time factor – once an important
quantitative indicator – has also become a highly relevant
indicator of the actual quality of the decision.
Among the factors that have led to this review of tra-
ditional and consolidated decision-making processes is
the growing awareness – by organisation leaders as well
as management scholars – that the attitudes, opinions
and behaviours of the internal, boundary and external
publics affected by decisions have increasingly influ-
enced the overall quality and effectiveness of an organi-
sation’s governance and management. Awareness of this
factor is fairly recent and certainly not universal; what is
clear, however, is that in both the science and practice
of management there is a progressive awareness of a
sharp change to be faced.
Traditional managers, as well as representatives of
management-related professions, are seeking to deal
with this change and to understand the effects of the
many redundancies, reductions and simplifications of
what once were complex tasks (an aspect of disinterme-
diation) that are caused by global interconnectedness.
One managerial function and related profession more
significantly affected by this discontinuity is ‘public rela-
tions and communication management’. This author pre-
fers the simple term ‘public relations’, as one key effect
of this discontinuity is that communication is now the
leading tool through which organisations are able to
develop relationships with their stakeholders. An even
better, and more comprehensive, description would be
‘stakeholder relationships’, but it will take some years
before this term is generally accepted.
In recent years the body of knowledge on public rela-
tions has seen a dramatic transition from being typically
20th-century US centric and ethnocentric to being more
open, involving significant contributions by scholars from
Europe, Africa, Oceania, Asia and Latin America. These
days, one can refer to a global body of knowledge, form-
ing part of what has become a global profession: today,
less than one-quarter of the 2.5–3 million public rela-
tions professionals in the world operate in the United
States.
1
From a professional practice perspective, the more
familiar aspects of public relations (such as mainstream
publicity and media relations, event organisation and
public affairs and lobbying) have undergone a significant
process of disintermediation. Further, also due to the
onset of the digital environment, the practice is gradually
moving from a paradigm of one-way-communication-to-
the-public to a paradigm of many-way-relationship-with-
stakeholders. Moreover, broadly accepted 20th-century
myths – such as gatekeeping, message control, privacy
or monopoly of knowledge – are breaking down. For
example, media representatives and public policy influ-
encers today represent only two of the many stakeholder
groups with whom organisations need to engage. Organi-
sations also need selective engagement with groups such
as suppliers, consultants, investors, educators, distribution
networks, local communities, active citizenship groups,
media and, of course, employees and customers. All these
stakeholders are claiming attention and affecting the
organisation’s objectives.
This means that leaders in these organisations need to
carefully identify, map, listen to and interpret interests
and expectations of different stakeholder groups; to deli-
ver ad hoc policies for management to implement; and
to select ad hoc indicators to evaluate which stakeholder
group in a specific situation is more relevant to the
fulfilment of the organisation’s objectives. Today, both
Global Policy Volume 3 . Issue 1 . February 2012
ª2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2012) 3:1 doi: 10.1111/j.1758-5899.2011.00129.x
Practitioner Commentary
114
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