The Low-Flying Communicator: Understanding public relations in a regional context

When searching for key concepts that describe what public relations (PR) is basically about, one quickly comes across the term boundary spanning: “Those who work with publics span boundaries – they interact with people outside their own group or organization” (Springston & Leichty, 1994: 697). Boundary spanning must be understood in its social dimension; it is the ability to change the perspective and contribute to a corporate identity as a “looking-glass self” (Cooley, 1922/2007: 184). Boundary spanning enables an organisation to look at itself from the perspective of an external stakeholder, such as a critical activist group.

The respective boundaries have traditionally been between the organisation and the outside world, positioning PR primarily within the context of external stakeholder communication. Falkheimer and Heide (2014) take it a step further and look at internal processes as a context, where boundary spanning is also needed in order to respond to the polyphony of organisational communication (Trittin & Schoeneborn, 2017). Communication professionals could take a mediating role when, for example, comparing how legal and HR departments handle the same problems in different ways. Thus, Falkheimer and Heide (2014) go beyond a traditional understanding of public relations as external stakeholder management; they propose the broader term strategic communication, which ought to be developed into a “transboundary field of knowledge”.

Boundary spanning as a role definition for professional communication is convincing on normative grounds, but that does not imply that it is the most convenient and effective way of doing PR in each and every context. This study examines PR as a sense-making practice embedded in a regional context: How much organisational boundary spanning is actually claimed and required here? Is there a modified or alternative role constituted by practitioners when accommodating with the regional context? And how do ambitions and expectations of communication students and alumni match or mismatch with a regional understanding of doing PR?

Much research on practitioner roles in the field of PR has been guided by the idea of strategic boundary spanning (Hoffmann et al., 2007; Leichty & Springston, 1996), even though the term is not used much anymore. The concept of PR as “relationship management” (Ledingham & Bruning, 1998) follows similar ideas. It turned into a more popular label and today describes a widely accepted understanding of strategic PR. In PR role research, the paradigm is reflected in Dozier and Broom’s (1995) seminal manager-technician dichotomy. The respective functionalist perspectives on PR roles as strategic relationship management have been both differentiated and challenged over the years (for an overview, see Johansson & Larsson, 2015). A range of context factors affecting PR practices have been taken into account. In sheer numbers, the most ambitious approach is the PR contingency theory that introduced 87 independent variables (Cameron et al., 2001). However, all of these context factors are confronted with one dependent variable alone. PR’s boundary-spanning practices are measured on an advocacy-accommodation continuum aiming to identify to what degree PR influences or adapts to its stakeholders. The perceived need of PR as such is not a variable; neither did it contribute to PR role definitions that have been proposed over the years. Thus, both PR role concepts and newer developments such as the PR contingency theory have a “blind spot” in common, which triggered this study: looking at a distinct context that might question the relevance of PR per se.

It is within the context of cross-cultural PR research that a marginalisation of the PR function is observed and discussed. Functionalist scholars usually end up with a deficit diagnosis after measuring the degree of PR professionalism in “underdeveloped” countries against Western standards (for an overview, see Sriramesh & Verčič, 2020). Respective research is guided by an ethnocentric mindset insisting on PR as an indispensable institution for “modern” societies (see the critique by Hoffmann, 2016). However, Aldrich and Herker (1977) argued more than 40 years ago that boundary-spanning positions in organisations are not necessarily prioritised by managers – once more, it depends on the context. They argue that boundary-spanning roles might be to some degree dispensable for well-established organisations within rather homogenous and stable environments – be it in the Global North or Global South (see also Meznar, 2005; Miles, 1987). Accordingly, there is also some empirical evidence from Europe that reveals a kind of paradoxical PR role whose key feature is a perceived lack of organisational importance. Röttger and colleagues (2003), for example, found that only a minority of the largest companies in Switzerland employ full-time professionals in a PR function – instead, broad job profiles dominate. PR is accomplished alongside other tasks and the job titles reveal no connection to communication at all. This falls in line with results from Denmark. Despite a considerable development and expansion of strategic communication during the twentieth century, PR continues to labour under an ambiguous status. Examining the Danish public sector, Kristensen (2010) found that communication professionals in Denmark often occupy a secondary position within their organisations.

Broad job profiles and the downplaying of the PR function are primarily critically discussed as a dysfunctional professional encroachment (Lauzen, 1992): employees without a specialised PR education and expertise take over PR functions. The potential subordination of PR to marketing through concepts such as integrated marketing communications are often perceived as a threat to the PR profession (Hutton, 2010). PR scholars express concerns about these tendencies, explaining them with internal structures and a top management that ignores the added value of PR (Lee, 2013). However, they hardly explain these tendencies through external context conditions. Reducing PR encroachment to an organisational pathology makes it impossible to incorporate it into a role definition that makes sense for organisational members when being confronted with a distinct organisational context.

We will argue that while PR encroachment might be critically discussed, it can still make sense in a regional setting. This may also affect role understandings of communication students in a regional higher education institution. We did not find any study identifying PR roles in regional contexts, and we only found one empirical study that systematically relates PR roles to PR education. Berkowitz and Hristodoulakis (1999) aimed to analyse differences between the role beliefs of practitioners and students. However, the predetermined decision to apply the traditional manager versus technician duality resulted in an idiosyncratic operationalisation (e.g., creativity as a technical skill) and an untransparent cluster analysis – including decisions such as: “Through heuristic methods, a two-cluster solution was chosen” (Berkowitz & Hristodoulakis, 1999: 97). It is a type of study that reproduces the aforementioned blind spots in the research instead of discovering something new.

With this study, we aspire to discover something new. It starts from the stunning observation that there are hardly any empirical insights on PR in regional contexts. Moreover, research on PR roles has not yet responded to the increasing interest in dynamic processes of “vocational anticipatory socialization” (Myers et al., 2011). PR roles in different contexts are not only determined by senior professionals, but also by ambitions and expectations of communication students and graduates. This turns the regional microcosm of communication practice and education into a promising field of research.

When exploring such an unknown territory, it is important not to be guided by taken-for-granted assumptions that have been claimed or described in other contexts. Taking boundary spanning as an unquestioned benchmark would bear the risk that we automatically end up with a deficit diagnosis – similar to much functionalist international PR research measuring global communication practices against Western “standards”. This study avoids such a pathologisation of potentially deviant role understandings. Instead, we aim to understand regional communication practices and student expectations as a microcosm in its own right. This, of course, does not mean forfeiting any critical perspective on the research subject. What makes sense for practitioners and students on the one hand, and is effective for organisations on the other, might still be challenged on normative grounds. Thus, we formulate two broad research questions which facilitate not only an explorative and unbiased – but also a critical – search for answers:

Which role understandings do communication practitioners constitute when relating their work to the regional context?

We completed our case study in the North Jutland region of Denmark. Its capital is Aalborg with approximately 114,000 inhabitants. The analysis is based on 1) qualitative interviews with communication heads of the largest companies in the region, 2) owners of communication agencies, and 3) alumni who graduated from Aalborg University. Furthermore, we conducted focus groups with 4) bachelor’s students and 5) master’s students from Aalborg University:

Companies Co1–Co7: We extracted from the global Orbis database the 25 biggest companies with headquarters in North Jutland. The annual financial turnover – ranging from DKK 161 million to 2.6 billion – was used as an indicator for company size. We contacted the respective heads of communication by phone; seven agreed to an interview, five informed us that they do not have anybody in charge of communication, and thirteen rejected our interview request.

We chose focus groups with students over individual interviews in order to encourage peer discussions. It made the situation more comfortable for the students and avoided any potential association with an exam setting. The first focus group comprised one first-semester student and two ninth-semester students; the second focus group comprised three first-semester students and one ninth-semester student. We did qualitative face-to-face interviews with all other respondents. A pre-test was conducted with a communication professional from Aalborg University. The overall response was 43 per cent. We collected the data between mid-November 2017 and mid-February 2018. The average meeting length was 57 minutes. We guaranteed anonymity and the respondents agreed to the use of the data for scientific purposes.

All interviews and focus groups were conducted in English. When contacting the respondents, first by phone and also before we started with the interview on location, we asked them whether they felt comfortable doing the interview in English; they had no reservations. We had fluent conversations with them and they were able to express what they wanted to tell us. Naturally, they made occasional grammatical mistakes, but we stayed with a literal transcription of all communication. The following questions in particular related to the role of the regional context:

How does the location in North Jutland affect the corporate communication of your company? What would be different, for example, if you were located in Copenhagen? (Asked of communication heads and alumni.)

Overall, our data analysis followed basic principles of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). First, we selected all excerpts relating somehow to the spatial dimension of the work or studies of the respondents – for example, the location in North Jutland – but have also included references to the global dimension of the business and the teaching programme. After some inductive reorganisation of categories, we ended up with four main themes contributing to role understandings by practitioners and students within the regional context: 1) Respondents described how they perceived the context and how or why they find it relevant for business communication. The second and third themes describe in detail how respondents claim and discuss two key characteristics which feed into regional PR roles: 2) the ambivalent broadness of communication practices and education, and 3) the prioritisation of a marketing orientation while at the same time downplaying public accountability. This led to the final theme which is 4) the discussion of recruitment challenges within the regional microcosm of communication practice and education.

The aggregation and interpretation of the four aforementioned themes which resulted from our grounded coding will answer our research questions: the identification of a practitioner and related student roles, which have not yet been found by previous research. We will argue that these roles are guiding sense-making practices that are particularly meaningful in a regional context. However, that does not necessarily mean that they are consistent, dominating, and uncontested. Accordingly, our analysis will also highlight ambivalences, tensions, and normative implications of regional PR roles.

In this study, we did not analyse the professional communication of companies whose headquarters are located in global hubs such as New York, London, or Singapore. Instead, we looked at the region of North Jutland in Denmark. How do heads of communication from the biggest companies in the region, PR consultants, alumni, and students perceive communication practices and education? What are their ambitions and expectations? Do they identify with a normatively ambitious boundary-spanning role or does the regional context feed into different understandings? The results reveal such a different understanding. The interviewees discussed some significant characteristics of the regional context that contribute to a distinct constitution of practitioner and student roles. First, personal contacts and networking matter more than professional skills. Second, the culture of Janteloven is suspicious towards any kind of self-promotional communication creating the impression that oneself is superior and standing out from the rest. Instead, mediocrity turns into a cultural value. Third, these tendencies are supported by the industry context. Most respondents engage in a more relaxed style of B2B communication. All of this feeds into the role of the low-flying communicator (research question 1). It is the role of an “all-rounder” who prioritises the instrumental logic of marketing over the societal orientation of strategic communication. Thus, the findings of this study reveal the regional practice of low-flying communication as a concept that is challenging the added value of professional communication as societal boundary spanning. Key to the identified concept is the instrumental downplaying of public visibility as a condition for transboundary communication. Instead, the regional public sphere turns into a communicative comfort zone. Critical media and other stakeholders claiming a role of the company as a corporate citizen are largely absent in the data.

The low-flying communicator corresponds with a specific regional student role we identified (research question 2). We might refer to this person as the immobile decision-delegator. They study at the local university, because North Jutland is their home. For the same reason, students are looking for jobs in the region after graduation. They choose a broad programme because it allows them to postpone reflections about their own professional future. They feel less prepared to take on professional responsibilities. These students need extensive guidance, both in their studies and in their jobs. Such a student role is noteworthy not because it is necessarily the dominating one, but because it makes sense primarily within a regional setting. Accordingly, the data also reveal ambivalences that leave room for a transition into more ambitious role understandings. A rather broad communication programme and equally broad job profiles are attractive for students who deliberately choose the freedom and personal development opportunities such an education and respective career opportunities offer.

In conclusion, two potential matches and two mismatches emerge when relating regional student and practitioner perceptions to each other: 1) the graduate as an immobile decision-delegator being smoothly socialised into the low-flying communicator role constitutes a match of restraint; 2) the ambitious and independent graduate contributing to a polyphonic understanding of corporate communication as societal boundary spanning would be an alternative positive match challenging it. In turn, tensions will arise from “crossbred” role expectations; 3) there will be a mismatch if the rather immature decision-delegator is unable to cope with the expected independence at the workplace; and 4) there will also be a mismatch if the ambitious student with a broad horizon is frustrated by a narrow-minded “marketing imperialism” in regional companies. As a practical and normative implication, we conclude that universities and employers should be committed to and support the positive match which would ultimately require a substantial reassessment of the low-flying corporate communication culture.

A single explorative and qualitative case study in unknown territories carries limitations along with it. Future qualitative and quantitative research could take our results as a starting point and look at different organisational contexts, other countries, and other cultures. Qualitative research could scrutinise in more detail the ambivalences of roles and matches we have identified, while quantitative research could measure their context-dependent prevalence. In particular, comparative research designs could over-come limitations of this study by systematically contrasting metropolitan PR practices with regional PR practices. Moreover, regional PR in the private sector, which has been the focus of this study by including only companies and agencies, could be compared with PR roles in public institutions and civil society institutions. Going forward, both qualitative research, identifying modified or different types of regional communication roles, and quantitative research, testing the generalisability of our case study findings, would be valuable.

Moreover, our results could inspire theory building in PR. Here, we have provided the first study extracting a PR role from a regional context and relating it to aspirations and expectations of communication students. We have identified roles not previously identified by any study. There is a reason for it: what we found is the paradoxical role of a PR practitioner who is not self-promotional. Such a role has been overlooked by previous research because it started from the unquestioned assumption that PR is necessary always and everywhere. A potentially delegitimising PR role questioning the functionality of publicity in distinct social contexts turned into a blind spot within existing PR role research. Future theory-building could help to incorporate the paradox of the low-flying communicator into existing role models.

As a practical implication, we acknowledge the regional effectiveness of low-flying communication at least in the short term. However, the refusal of a boundary-spanning role that would significantly engage with publics beyond the market could, in the long term, decrease the organisation’s ability to learn, innovate, and build relationships with those publics. The dilemma becomes most visible in the field of employer branding. Graduates who search for their future employer by consulting the Yellow Pages of the local phonebook might provide less sustainable value and inspiration than the ones keen to expose themselves to a whole world of opportunities.

Finally, what might be effective from an organisational perspective is not necessarily desirable on normative grounds: Should companies located in remote regions not also be accountable to their publics and accept public scrutiny? Should it not be an ethical commitment to engage with publics, even though there might be no immediate return of investment? Discussing these questions is important, while “blame games” should be avoided. There is no reason for a company to impose a proactive public relations model upon regional media if these can be satisfied with promotional marketing material. In turn, there is no reason for media to do more than transmitting such marketing material, if the audience expects nothing more than product information from regional business news. Hence, “flying low” under the radar of public scrutiny makes sense and is effective for many communication practitioners in regional settings. Nonetheless, a normative dilemma remains: the low-flyer veers away from the ideal of boundary spanning as a professional role understanding in PR.