An Institutional History of Internal Communication in the United Kingdom

In the twenty-first century, organizations frequently wrestle with the risk of appearing impersonal to their staff. Internal communication (IC) between employers and employees has become a vital element of personalising the organization and of creating and augmenting organizational voice and engagement amongst employees.

In addition, IC is used for a range of other strategic organizational goals, including change management, building organizational culture, enhancing organizational identity and branding, stakeholder relations, innovation, education, equality, diversity and inclusivity, and organizational sensemaking.

IC can be defined as the strategic and operational use of communication by management within organizations that treats employees as stakeholders. It currently employs over 45,000 people in the UK. The effort to develop effective forms of communication has a much longer history than many realize and stretches back to the emergence of large-scale organizations in the late nineteenth century.

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, this project is undertaking an institutional history of internal communications in the UK since 1880. It seeks to integrate historical research with organizational theory, including institutional theory and rhetorical history. Its archival research is unprecedented in terms of scale and scope. Unilever is one of twenty UK-based organizations that the project will study and an interesting one due to its approach to employer–employee relations. The building of Port Sunlight is a testament to how Lever Brothers tried to build a positive relationship with its employees from the late nineteenth century, based on attaining productivity through welfare.

By the 1960s, Unilever had twelve company magazines aimed at different audiences. These consisted of corporate publications, house magazines for individual companies within the group, and international magazines. The project’s research will build a greater understanding of how the organization communicated with its staff and the ways in which this developed over time.