Public Relations, a Home for Internal Communication?

Abstract

The complexity of organizational life demands internal communication at all levels, from interpersonal exchanges between employees and managers to mass messaging from management to all workers in the trenches.This breadth of communication explains the diversity of social science disciplines that aim to understand communication within organizations, including organizational psychology, organizational sociology, journalism, and speech communication (Grunig, 1992).Scholars have examined internal communication through organizational theories (Thompkins, 1987), managerial perspectives (Goldhaber, 1993), organizational psychology (Drenth et al., 1988), and public relations (Ruck & Welch, 2012).This multidisciplinary work has made clear that internal communication involves far more than disseminating information: it is a tool through which an organization and its members manage their relationships with one another to inform, motivate, and co-create meaning (Tkalac Verčič et al., 2023).It is a critical driver of organizational culture, engagement, and effectiveness.Research on internal communication has grown exponentially since 2011 (Lee & Yue, 2020), reflecting the growing recognition of its importance.Despite so much attention from so many reaches of social science, internal communication has yet to find its definitive disciplinary home.The fact that internal communication has gone by many names over the years -internal public relations, employee communications, business communications, internal marketing, staff communication and many more (Lee & Yue, 2020; Tkalac Verčič et al., 2012) -underscores the challenges of defining it as a distinct area of study.This poses a problem: without a proper home, theorizing about internal communication risks falling out of step with organizational reality, which digitalization, and crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have been transforming rapidly.Since the 1980s, research on internal communication, often under the rubric of organizational communication, has been dominated by speech communication scholars and their theories (Grunig, 1992).As a result, even recent literature on internal communication may still rely on outdated transactional models (Welch & Jackson, 2007) that do not fully capture its strategic function in organizations.The most logical home for internal communication may be public relations, which are better positioned than other fields for integrating analyses of strategic messaging and of relational dynamics.Rooted in mass communication, public relations has long prioritized the understanding of how organizations manage their relationships with their publics.This relational and strategic perspective aligns closely with the core functions of internal communication.By claiming internal communication as its domain, public relations could provide it with a fruitful home for future theoretical and practical research.At the same time, bringing internal communication into the fold would enable public relations to fulfill its potential as a discipline bridging internal and external stakeholder engagement.Through quantitative, deductive analyses and strategic planning, public relations can elevate internal communication beyond its fragmented roots, fostering a more integrated and impactful approach to managing the relationships that sustain organizations from within.The articles in this Special Issue demonstrate powerfully the complexities of internal communication in an evolving digital landscape and the need for a new generation of theories and methods to understand and harness it for greater organizational efficiency and employee satisfaction.The bibliometric review by Yue et al. (2024) sets the stage by tracing the growth of internal communication research within public relations, identifying trends and gaps that require future interdisciplinary and empirical research.The other articles in the Special Issue explore many of these trends and gaps.Yang and Kim (2024) examine the role of inclusive leadership in guiding internal communication during crises.They demonstrate that fostering psychological empowerment and safety

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