THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

DEALING WITH THE GLOBAL

CONDITION

Multinational corporations are driving the
rise of new markets, industries,
technologies and business types as well
as expanded global values. Some are also
supporting innovative market-driven
approaches and public-private partnerships
with the potential to address challenges that
have traditionally been the view of the public
sectormost notably in the areas of
reducing poverty, economic and
environmental sustainability, humanitarian
causes, and human rights.

At the same time, multinational corporations
and their leaders are facing growing public
expectations and awareness in terms of
their negative impact in these areas
corporate governance misdemeanors, and
non-accountability - all in the midst of
competitive pressures and financial
demands.

Though new market-driven approaches and
public-private partnerships offer potential to
mobilize private sector resources, networks
and problem-solving skills, they also create
new risks as well as leadership and
accountability challenges for both business
and government leaders. This is especially
the case when corporations are operating
under conditions of bad governance,
conflict, weak public administration,
inadequate developments or other
governance gaps and market failures. The
challenges of corporate responsibility
and good public governance are nearly
always connected.









QUALITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the
corporate marketing efforts as companies
try to win the trust and loyalty of
constituents. Corporate responsibility
constitutes an organizations respect for
societys interests, demonstrated by taking
ownership of the effects its activities have
on key constituencies including customers,
employees, shareholders, communities, and
the environment, in all parts of their
operations. In short, it prompts a corporation
to look beyond its traditional bottom line, to
the social implications of its business.

CSR is a concept whereby companies
integrate social and environmental concerns
in their business operations and in their
interaction with the stakeholders on a
voluntary basis.

Social responsibility of companies is defined
as responsibility to consumers, workers,
stakeholders and the community .The aim
of social responsibility is to create higher
standards of living, while preserving the
profitability of the corporation .

Companies while creating profit should also
be aware that they can contribute to
sustainable managing their operations in
such a way as to enhance economic growth
and increase competitiveness whilst
ensuring environmental protection and
promoting social responsibility, including
consumer interest.

Corporate Social Responsibility and
Environmental Management provides a
practical resource for the ever increasing
number of organizations concerned about
social and environmental responsibilities in
the context of sustainable development. The
author in this article evolved certain
principles for the management of
environment in relation to CSR.




CSR Environmental Objectives:

1. To examine the corporate social
responsibility in the light of environment
protection.
2. To discuss the impact of organizations
activities on the environment.
3. To study why the corporate social
responsibility principle needs to be
adopted?.
4. To study the legislative & judicial
perspective relating to corporate social
responsibility in relation to environmental
protection.

INCREASED ROLE OF MANAGEMENT

A managers role is very crucial in an
organization. The success of organization
depends upon managers ability in utilizing
the resources for achieving the pre-
determined goals. There are three areas
where a manger has to work:

Interpersonal Role

Interpersonal roles of a manger are concerned
with his interacting with people both inside the
organization and outsiders. There are three
types of interpersonal roles.

Figure Head: In figure head role manager
performs activities which are ceremonial and
symbolic nature. These include greeting the
visitors attending the social functions involving
employees, handing out merit certificates and
other awards to outstanding employees.

Leader: Managers leader role involves
leading his subordinates and motivating them
for willing contributions. Manager is
responsible for activities of his subordinates.
He has to set example of hard work and
dedication so that subordinate follow his
directions with respect.

Liaison Role: In liaison role manager serves
as a connecting link between his and
outsiders or between his unit and other
organizational units.

Informational Role
Informational role involves receiving collecting
of information and distributing them as
required. It is of three types

Monitor: In monitoring role manager collects
the information which can affect the
organizational activities by reading magazines
and periodicals, reports from the departments,
talking with others to learn changes in the
publics taste.

Disseminator: In disseminator role manger
distribute the information to his subordinates
and superiors by sending circulars, holding
meetings and making phone calls.

Spokesperson: In spokesperson role the
manager represents his organization or unit
with interacting with outsiders. These may
customer, financer, govt. suppliers or other
agencies in society. It can be done by
attending press conferences, meetings and by
issuing notices.

Decisional Role:

It is very important role. Manager has to take
decisions daily. In decisional role he performs
four roles.

Entrepreneur: As an entrepreneur the manger
assumes certain risks which can affect the
organization. He has to take decisions like
expansion or diversification, initiation of new
projects, development of older procedures etc.

As a Conflict Handler: As a conflict handler
he has to take care of certain disturbance in
organization such as resolving employee
disputes and strikes etc.

Resource Allocator: As a resource allocator
managers fulfill the demand of various units in
terms of human physical and financial. He
tries to utilize these resources in such way
that no department suffers for their
inadequacy.

Negotiator: As negotiator manager has to
take decisions regarding prices with suppliers
and customers. He also deals with trade
unions and negotiates with them regarding
working conditions and wage fixation.
EMPHASIS ON MANAGEMENT ISSUES

The role and mandate of the corporate
communications department in
organizations has seen numerous
definitions and evolutionary changes. As a
communications firm that specializes in
critical communications and strategic
communications, it is natural that our
perspective on corporate communications
include integration with issues
management.

Communicators often view this term from
the perspective of putting out fires, but we
look at issues management from a more
long-term, anticipatory perspective. Its
about recognizing, first, that issues never
really go away. Rather, they go over
through cycles.

The role of the communications professional
is not just to fight individual public relations
battles when they become too big to ignore,
but rather to exit the vicious reactive cycle
and begin managing issues while they are
still in their earliest phases. Its about
becoming the trusted advisor which gets
communications that proverbial seat at the
executive table.

There are some ways in which the
corporate communications team can evolve
its function, from merely blasting information
out to various publics, to serving as a value-
added, central intelligence unit for an
organization.

1. Use existing two-way channels as
sources for early issue detection

Many organizations already have numerous
communications channels through which
issue intelligence can be derived. The
problem is they arent being harnessed
diligently. These channels could include
both internal communications channels (e.g.
Intranet chat forums, leader blog comments,
meetings and town halls, anonymous
feedback lines/email, etc.) and external
communications channels (social media
channels, traditional media relations,
consultation meetings, open houses, etc.).
This means going beyond just engaging
stakeholders, but also ensuring there is a
process in place for identifying and tracking
issue warning signs at their earliest phases
(before they have become a matter of high
public/media concern). Your companys
day-to-day communications programs may
involve engagement with employees, the
media, or the community, and many other
audiences. In corporate communications we
always talk about the importance of two-way
communications channels with
stakeholders. But the practice of issues
management depends on it. Whether there
is one communicator, or multiple
communications staff or teams responsible
to engage different audiences, the
communications function must go beyond
day-to-day objectives and interactions and
ensure everyone is strategically aligned with
an overarching effort to monitor and track
issue themes over the long-term.

2. Develop a system
for issue assessment

Different issues may sit on different points
on a scale of severity or impact. As the
nature and types of issues vary from
organization to organization, there are
universal themes to watch out for. The key
is to develop a set of consistent, agreed-
upon criteria that allows the
communications team and senior leaders to
sing from the same song sheet when it
comes to assessing issue severity. One
example of a flag for higher severity issues
is when culturally held values are perceived
to be violated (e.g. environment, safety,
transparency, fairness, etc.) and whether
the issue raises questions of morals.
Another example is culpability is your
organization perceived to be at fault? What
about impact on the business? An issue
may have nothing to do with your company,
but rather a societal movement like a
lobby effort for new legislation that could
impact your companys license to operate.
Again, different organizations may have
different types of issues, but there are
common early issue warning signs that can
be pre-identified with your team to ensure
that what constitutes a high-impact versus a
low-impact issue is consistent from person
to person. And, each of these issues merit
different degrees of reporting and
responding.

3. Develop a protocol for tracking
and reporting

Regardless of where each issue ranks on
the severity spectrum, its important to
ensure all of them are being tracked and
monitored. While an issue might rank as low
impact now, that might not be the case in
several months or years by tracking each
issue and running it through the severity
assessment model from time to time, you
can keep your finger on the pulse of the
public sentiment around that issue. The
important thing to include in your process is
a built in escalation valve by which issues
tracked over the long-term are officially
escalated to senior management when they
hit a particular level of severity. This
requires a regular sitting issues
management team for some organizations
this team consists of senior communications
directors, and for other organizations issues
management is cross-functional, including
leaders from many different departments.
Regular established meetings of this nature
also serve the purpose of early issue
notification (for communications and
operations) as well as cross-departmental
coordination. For communicators, the issues
management meetings allow for proactive
notification of operational issues that
provide increased time for communications
planning and response. Conversely, these
meetings may surface potential operational
issues emerging from intelligence on the
communications side of which department
leaders may not have even been aware.
Issues that are determined to be of very
high impact, requiring higher cross-
departmental involvement should be
reported to the C-suite.

4. Provide a recommendation
for planning and responding

While full text books can be written on how
to plan and respond to issues, this post will
suffice to stress the importance of clearly
identified issue leaders, timelines and
deliverables. The most sophisticated
organizations will look at issues
management planning from the perspective
of all functions from corporate
communications, to government relations, to
legal, to policy development and so on.
However, from a corporate communications
perspective, it comes down to working with
leaders to determine the organizations
official positioning around core aspects of
the issue, which feeds into key messaging,
audience prioritization and the identification
of appropriate communications channels.

PROFESSIONALISM OF THE PUBLICS

In this transformative era in which social
and other digital media are redefining the
world of communication, companies in
nearly every industry require coordinated
and ongoing public relations campaigns to
achieve their goals. Customer experience,
online communities, and social networking
have created the need for PR professionals
with a very different set of skills than those
of their predecessors.

In todays fast-paced digital world,
professional communicators must be
equipped with of-the-moment skills and
insights in order to cut through the crowded
marketplace and inspire change.

Common starting points (CSP)

CSP is the idea of harmonizing
communication activities that led to the rise
of corporate communication. The hope was
that as a field it could combine the expertise
and practices of multiple communication
disciplines, including public relations,
marketing, organizational communication,
and human resource management, in order
to handle and integrate different messages
under one banner.

While viewed by some as evolving from
public relations, it is also seen as removing
the stigma from PR, which for many is
synonymous with press relations or
publicity.

Harmony through orchestration

The corporate communication function
fulfills this prophecy as it is seen as focusing
on the entire organization and thus should
be responsible for making sure that
communication is harmonized and the
corporate identity mix orchestrated well. The
problem is that orchestration must consider
the communication structure and the
various communication functions within
organizations.

While attempting to harmonize all
communication through one department
may sound sensible, it is difficult to realize
in practice.

There is evidence that more PR executives
are reporting to CEOs but still are not seen
as formal members of the leader group
through providing real input to strategic
decision making. Marketing and PR often
cooperate but the relationship is normally
more informal than formal and is frequently
dependent on the relationship between
employees in these departments.


FRAGMENTATION OF THE MASS MEDIA

Introduction

Fragmentation is a broad term used to
describe the transition of a population from
one comprised of few large audiences for any
one media product to another comprised of
more numerous smaller audiences. In
general, the number of people in the
population attending to products need not
change. Rather, fragmentation is assumed to
result from a substantial increase in the
number of options from which people can
choose. It is often assumed that fragmentation
involves the creation of audiences that are
less internally heterogeneous as they become
smaller, but that is not necessarily the case.
Indeed, the level of homogeneity of the
audience prompts a need for additional terms.
Segmentation can be used to describe
fragmented audiences that are internally
homogenous. Media producers typically find
such audiences desirable for the purposes of
grouping people for advertisers. As a result,
market segmentation is often a term used to
describe media outlet strategy. Media outlets
are able to segment the audience when (1)
they specialize their products to meet the
demands of the desired audience and (2)
people specialize their outlet and content
selection purposefully. Some observers have
decided that successful segmentation of a
populace results in polarization, the division of
people into like-minded groups who share
similar knowledge, opinion, or value profiles.

Background Texts

The fragmentation of mass audiences is, by
definition, a departure from a more
homogenous state of affairs. Specifically,
fragmentation is a disruption of a system in
which mass media content creates and serves
a mass public. Neuman 1986 describes that
basic system with a critical eye, setting up the
conditions for its weakening and describing
some of the stakes for democratic politics.
The traditional news system is also nicely
described in Bogart 1989, a review of
research on the newspaper industry and its
audience. Rice, et al. 1984 pivots from the
traditional mass media and looks ahead to the
coming of interactive video and computer
networks. Its predictions and
recommendations turned out to very useful for
media researchers studying the Internet and
multichannel television. These three works set
the stage for Negroponte 1995, a description
of the technologies possible and probable with
the digitization of mediated content. Davis
1999 provides a broad account of the many
ways that the Internet may be affecting
American politics, audience disruption among
them.