Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

Big D continues: “The job of the president’s communication advisors is to identify in advance (better than after the fact) any threats to the president’s preferred meanings and to neutralize them rhetorically. (In fact, the oft-stated claim about how much a president values soldiers’ lives is exactly that sort of pre-emptive rhetoric, designed to head off the opposite claim – that the lives of America’s youth are expendable to the powerful class – before it’s even made.)”

I believe we are in violent agreement here, except for the notion that we can inoculate against the president’s say-do disconnect with rhetoric alone. The president’s actions in these matters are of great importance, as D points out.

Maintaining control over key meanings is almost always possible, although it is sometimes easier and sometimes harder to accomplish depending on how the context shifts across time. For example, if a president’s own son is among the soldiers sent to fight a war, it is a relatively easy task. If, on the other hand, the president cancels a program to provide basic armor plating for military vehicles used by soldiers fighting that war, it becomes relatively more difficult, ceteris paribus. Both examples are elements of the broader symbolic environment (i.e., context) that influences interpretation, but that environment does not entirely determine interpretation.

Agreed.  The environment is not the entirety of interpretation. As a counselor to leadership, I argue for no attempt to spin or otherwise mask the reality of the organizations actions – much literature in crisis communication says much the same thing.  Big D adds:

Certain types of management make certain types of communication relatively more or less difficult. I am then in a position to say to the leaders of my organization that their actions could put at greater risk our ability to defend certain identity claims and could require a different communication strategy (which might or might not be successful within any given time frame).

Excellence theory applies (perhaps without attribution) dialogic and rhetorical theories. Its focus, however, on the management of the function and its underpinnings of empirical research does seem to de-emphasize other theories. Jeff says that Excellence: “…doesn’t really address…the actual way that symbol systems work through discourse to construct meanings that then become the basis for action. That’s the hard stuff, especially when you’re talking about public communication. [Excellence focuses] instead on the easy stuff – management – which is why [Prof. James E. Grunig is] so popular.”

D believes (and I agree) that management effectiveness is “a hell of a lot easier to measure and explain than communication effectiveness. PR people, however, are seldom going to out-manage the managers, and they are too ready to throw up their hands or have no clear answers when the communication work gets most difficult, which is also when it becomes most important to the organization.”

I don’t think we disagree at all – I am, however, differentiating effective communication from the assumption that it can cure everything, every ill that befalls an organization. The PR measurement Holy Grail is quantifying the impact on a business of communication activity – and the inability of PR to overcome bad management action is often used as a pretext to criticize us and what we do.

Lastly, Big D writes:

Here’s the bottom line for me: Over the past few years I probably interviewed more than 25 people for communications positions at my company. Only a handful, at best, could provide even a rudimentary explanation of how messages related to actions, i.e., how exactly it is that the words they were responsible for stringing together were connected to the outcomes the organization sought. Most of the applicants could talk for hours about project management, working with outside agencies, and so on, but few of them knew a damn thing about communication itself. Do we really need to wonder why we get such little respect as a profession?

We certainly should be experts on communication – why it works and how to improve it – but we also must apply the management function as well. In the course of applying Excellence, we’ll rely upon Rhetorical and Dialogic theories and the traditional mass media theories of forming opinion. I don’t see these as mutually exclusive.

A great discussion. Thanks D!