What do Communication Managers Do? Defining and Refining the Core Elements of Management in a Public Relations/Corporate Communication Context

Abstract

This article presents the findings of the second stage of an international collaborative research program designed to map, explicate, and compare the main elements of the managerial role performed by communication/public relations practitioners working in a range of organizational settings and different cultural contexts. It builds on earlier qualitative research among U.K. and U.S. public relations practitioners designed to uncover the nature of the managerial roles they perform. In this study, a survey distributed to 900 U.K.-based communication practitioners was factor analyzed, revealing a five-factor interpretation, which suggests a more contemporary, empirically based conceptualization of key dimensions of the communication manager's role than currently offered by the traditional manager role typology advocated within the existing public relations roles literature.