Who’s in? Analysing the impact of inclusive communication policy and processes on organisations seeking to include diverse publics
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2022
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Many organisations acknowledge the need to include diverse publics, but most struggle to do so. A case study approach investigated an organisation from each of the not-for-profit, government, and for-profit sectors with a reputation for including diverse publics. Each organisation’s inclusive policies and processes from 2008-2019 were analysed and interviews held with their publics with disability and from a Non-English-Speaking Background (NESB) between 2017-2018.
A mismatch between the diverse publics’ norms of culture and the organisations’ norms of practice was found. Gaps in communication processes prevented effective feedback mechanisms to inform change; business goals took priority over mission statements supporting the values of inclusion; and the lack of relationships with advocacy groups left NESB publics with no one to speak for them. Staff with lived experience of disability or as a NESB shared some of these publics’ norms of culture but they were unable to use this understanding to influence the organisations’ norms of practice.
The study demonstrated that strategic communication processes could improve inclusion of diverse publics. A key conceptual contribution of this study is the observation that embedding strategic communication processes to build on Habemas’s ideological framework of communicative action leads to new knowledge and understanding for organisations, through support for an open exchange of ideas with diverse publics.
Four significant implications for practice were identified: establishing feedback mechanisms on inclusion is important for understanding current needs and promoting future services; communicating with diverse publics requires specialist skills; programs of education for strategic communicators need an emphasis on establishing processes that bring together the norms of culture of diverse publics with the potentially constraining norms of practice of organisations; the changes required in organisations to ensure that diverse publics are included need to focus on access, requiring the implementation of culturally sensitive strategic communication processes.
This study’s originality lies in its close study of mainstream organisations widely regarded as industry leading in relation to their inclusive approach to diverse publics. It revealed practices that covertly excluded diverse publics, and identified staff were unaware.
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