Topic Organizations in the media
1.1 What is an organization?
Understanding the functioning of organizations helps us
To understand their behaviour
To improve their strategic communication and media relations
To understand and improve their interaction with stakeholders and society at large
An organization is…
A group of people working together to reach a goal (profit, public goals, etc.)
By using their environment
Boeing: you need to use the environment: you need to use resources (like steel
produces, electricity, people who work for you, technology knowledge)
You need all kinds of things from your environment (outside of your organization)
and employ that to reach your goal
They accomplish tasks and use technologies
Most of the time you need to separate bigger goals into smaller pieces/tasks
You make small tasks and accomplish them and use technologies
They encounter uncertainties
Not all organizations are always successful in accomplishing tasks
Boeing: people are reluctant with a certain type of airplane because there have
been accidents
Or uncertainties with regards to resources (if steel prices go up)
They need leadership: leaders develop strategies that help to reach goals
Leadership (like a CEO) is important, because they develop strategies and try to
make sure the goals are reached
An organization is… (Rainey, 2009)
Structures and processes help with coordinating these tasks
Structures are the relatively stable, observable distributions of work and
responsibilities across the divisions or organization (like an organizational chart that
, shows the organizations’ structure)
Processes are the less directly observable dynamic activities (two people meeting
each other at the coffee counter and talk about their work and might include that)
Why do people do this? Because of public service motivation (= doing something for
society at large) But in the private sector it’s mostly about motivation to make money
or to make greater airplanes.
Incentives make (groups of) individuals work within those structures and processes
Incentives are the reason why people do things
Salary, cars, laptops, etc.
The interplay between structure, processes, incentives and the goals determine the
success of the organization.
Differences between organizations
Contingency theory: “organizations differ from each other (even KFC and MAC)
because they have to adapt to different circumstances”
- Internal adaptation: different tasks, size and strategic decisions
- External: technological, legal, economical, political, demographical, ecological and
cultural developments
Difference between Emirates and Easy Jet is that they target very different
groups (high class business people vs low cost flying) and they organize differently
- …Including the media landscape
1.2 Why are media relevant to organizations?
Media play an important role, because the media can report about organizations and
media inform members of the organization
Employees of the uni make sense of the uni from the inside, but if the uni is in the news
the news informs us as employees.
The news penetrates the organization from all kinds of ways: employees are informed, the
media reports about organizations
The organization’s environment influences the organization
Organizations can try to influence the media, but they also influence you
, Media are an autonomous aspect of this environment as well as an intermediate
between other parts of the environment and the organization
Differences between organizations
Goal
Ownership
Financing
Ownership
Size
Commonality: they all want to survive (even though they fulfilled their goal like Philips
with their light bulbs, they switch tasks and goals)
Media in the organizational environment (media are important for survival because…)
(Jacobs & Schillemans, 2016)
Media report in a critical, neutral or favorable way
They (thus) inform stakeholders such as citizens/clients, competitors, the political
realm, investors, employees, etc.
They also can lead to organizational anticipation: the possibility of coverage is taken
into account for decision-making
The uni starts to think about research topics that are interesting for a larger public
so that you will be covered in news. So you take the possibility of media attention
into account in your behavior
1.3 Reputation and legitimacy
We assume that there’s a relation between the media and the organizations’ reputation.
Boeing’s reputation was heavily destroyed because of the crashes of the 727 MAX. How can
they restore the faith of people using those airplanes?
Boeing advised the airlines to put people on another flight, if they want to.
This shows that people saw Boeing in the media and started to check the type of
airplane for their flight
So the interaction of communication plans / strategies with the media can give
, unintended effects (you don’t always know what the effects are of being discussed in
the media)
Reputation and legitimacy
Airlines and airplane manufacturers: climate change discussions, crashes, heavy competition.
Legitimacy = “Legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an
entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of
norms, values, beliefs and definitions.” (Suchman, in: Deephouse & Suchman, 2008)
Perceptions that people have of the actions of a company/actor and whether these
actions are in general acceptable/desirable according to their own norms. (difficult to
measure)
We all have our own norms though
However, if companies start to sell babies most of us would disapprove and are not
legitimate
But what about the tobacco industry (bad for health) or the airlines (climate change
and flying shame)? Are airlines legitimate?
On the one hand: they help people get to different places, but on the other hand
it’s destroying our planet
if you are perceived as illegitimate, you need communication strategies and
research the public debate
Reputation
“Reputation is a generalized expectation about a firm’s future behavior or
performance based on collective perceptions (either direct or, more often, vicarious)
of past behavior or performance”
…”embedded in a network of multiple audiences”
Reputation is an expectation about how a firm will behave in the future based on what
the firm has been doing in the past.
If Boeing had great constructions and no crashes, they would have a reputational
capital.
Reputation is in the eye of the beholder of a specific audience or stakeholder group
