Internal Communications - History of Internal Communications

History of Internal Communications

Large industrial organizations have a long history of promoting pride and a sense of unity among the employees of the company, evidenced in the cultural productions of Victorian-era soap manufacturers as far apart as the UK's Lever Brothers (right) and the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York.

Internal communications is fundamentally a management discipline, but as a discrete discipline of organizational theory it is correspondingly young. Stanford associate professor Alex Heron's Sharing Information with Employees (1943) is an outlier among texts which focus solely on the factors involved. Theorization in academic papers accelerated in the 1970s, but mainstream management texts mostly post-date 1990.