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53rd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association
“Communication in Borderlands”
May, 23-27, 2003, San Diego, CA, USA
Public Relations Division
Four Basic Communication Strategies,
Beyond the Borders of Traditional Public Relations Practice
1.Introduction
Since 1978, Broom has fathered the debate about roles in public relations practice, being abstractions
of the everyday activities of public relations practitioners (Dozier, 1992:329). In the same year, Katz
and Kahn (1978) introduced roles as a central concept in organizational theory. A role can be seen as
“the expected behavior associated with a social position” (Banton, 1996). Broom’s research (Broom,
1982; Broom & Smith, 1979) was focused on the consultant’s roles enacted for senior management by
public relations experts. Broom and Smith (1979) conceptualized four dominant roles: the expert
prescriber, the communication facilitator, the problem-solving process facilitator and the
communication technician. Research indicated that the first three roles were highly interrelated, being
part of a common underlying manager’s role. In addition to conforming that the first three roles were
indeed interrelated, Dozier (1984) found two major roles (the manager and the technician) and two
minor roles (the media relations specialist and the communication liaison). Dozier (1992:334) finally
concluded that “the manager and technician roles emerge empirically time and again in studies of
different practitioners”.
His manager-technician typology has been tested numerous times (for an overview, see Dozier 1992;
Toth et al., 1998; L. Grunig et al., 2001) in various countries, including the Netherlands (Ruler, 2000).
This Dutch research project confirmed the veracity of J. Grunig’s lamentation (cited in Dozier,
1992:336) that “in carrying out their duties, those who were both responsible for communication
Convention