Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Public Relations Management in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology / According to George Bernard Shaw, “The main difficulty with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” Effective internal communication is crucial for successful organisations as it affects the ability of strategic managers to engage employees and achieve objectives (Welch & Jackson, 2007:177). According to Toth (2007:480), internal communication is one of the most important specialities of public relations, it is the force that develops “structures and cultures” within an organisation. Mersham and Skinner (2001:8) infer that communication permeates all activities in an organisation: it represents an important work tool through which individuals understand their organisational role and integrates organisational subunits. According to Grunig and Hunt (1984:23) symmetrical public relations models will increase the likelihood of employee job satisfaction and their satisfaction with the organisation as a whole. In addition, Toth states that “satisfied employees are more likely to be loyal to the organization they can identify with” (2007:481). The author further propounds that “the more participative the culture, the more symmetrical system of communication”. To augment the aforementioned statement, Kitchen argues that an organisation’s communication system and models are an important contributing factor for staff morale and productivity (2001:81). Employees tend to have higher morale and are more motivated in the workplace if all channels of communication are open. To extrapolate “open communication” systems, this paper will distil Grunig and Hunt’s (1984:21-31) symmetrical model of public relations as departure point to effective corporate communication, but also focus extensively on the internal communication matrix (Welch & Jackson, 2007:185) that will provide answers to the anti-luvial question on who communicates, to whom, in what way, with what content and for what purpose (Welch & Jackson, 2007:185). A modern organisation cannot function effectively without a positive internal climate and well-functioning channels of internal communication. To research the goals of the organisation’s internal communication strategy it should be responsive to employee needs and concerns (Seitel, 2004:288). The author further propounds the importance of internal publics as a stakeholder by arguing that in the new information era, managers have realised that the assets of the institution lie very much in the hands of the employees (Seitel, 2004:288). According to Garbarino (1977:32) the concept of culture is not new, as Ethnographers have studied the cultures of various societies since the 17th century. It is however only since the 1980’s that the impact of culture on organisational processes is being studied by scholars (Smircich & Calas, 1987). Organisational-or corporate culture is understood to be the firmly implanted values and assumptions of the organisation (Ouchi, 1981; Schein, 1990). Martin, Sitkin and Boehm (1985:99-124) identified two schools of thought regarding the question of cultural change. Cultural pragmatists argue that it can be changed due to the fact that it is a cultural efficiency managed to suit organisational goals set by the dominant coalition. Wilkins and Ouchi (1983:479) on the other hand argue that corporate culture is something that develops over time through unconscious evolution among a majority of people in the organisation, not through the dominant coalition. “Cultures specific to an organization evolve over time and influence the way in which individuals in the organization interact and react to the challenges posed by the environment” (Sriramesh et al., 1992:584). Sriramesh, Grunig and Dozier (1996) followed the lead of other organisational scholars (e.g. Wilkins 1983a) by using organisational culture to explain variables of primary interest to scholars in the field of public relations. They used corporate culture in particular to explain the nature of the communication system inside organisations. Grunig, Grunig and Dozier (2002:482) generated theoretical propositions about two distinct types of organisational culture which they contrasted as “authoritarian” and “participative” cultures in the Excellence study. This study further aims to establish the importance of values, symbols, meanings, beliefs, assumptions and expectations as an integral part of corporate culture, and that there is a symbiotic, reciprocal relationship between culture and communication. According to Sriramesh et al. (1996:239) altering one “will facilitate a modification in the other”. Siehl (1985) emphasised, after looking at change of leadership in organisations, that “once the desired value system was identified and articulated, the entire workforce (not just the managers) may have to strive to change or manage the organisation’s culture.” (Sriramesh, Grunig & Dozier 1996: 237). Sorge and Warner (1997:09) argue that “the core of culture is values”. Deal and Kennedy go so far as to say that they are of the opinion that successful companies succeed because their employees can “identify, embrace, and act on the values of the organization” (1982:21). The aim of this study, based on theory, is that there is a reciprocal relation between internal communication and corporate culture based on open symmetrical communication at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) can potentially modify the organisational culture of the University.

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for social media use. Social media platforms and applications have the potential to increase communication channels, support learning, enhance research, and encourage community engagement at PSE institutions. As social media implementation and administration has developed in PSE, there has been minimal assessment of the substance of social media guideline and policy documents. The first objective of this research study was to examine an accessible, online database (corpus) comprised of 24, 243 atomic social media guideline and policy text documents from 250 PSE institutions representing 10 countries to identify central attributes. To determine text meaning from topic extraction, a rotated latent semantic analysis (rLSA) method was applied. The second objective of this investigation was to determine if the distribution of topics analyze in the corpus differ by PSE institution geographic location. To analyze the diverging topics, the researcher utilized an iterative consensus-building algorithm.Through the maximum term frequencies, LSA determined a rotated 36-factor solution that identified common attributes and topics shared among the 24,243 social media guideline and policy atomic documents. This initial finding produced a list of 36 universal topics discussed in social media guidelines and policies across all 250 PSE institutions from 10 countries. Continually, the applied chi-squared tests, that measured expected and observed document term counts, identified distribution differences of content related factors between US and Non-US PSE institutions. This analysis offered a concrete analysis for unstructured text data on the topic of social media guidance. This resulted in a comprehensive list of recommendations for developing social media guidelines and policies, and a database of social media guideline and policy documents for the PSE sector and other related organizations. Additionally, this research stimulated important theoretical development for how organizations socially construct a semantic structure within a community of practice. By assessing the community of practice, comprised of PSE 250 institutions that direct social media use, a corpus of documents provided unstructured data to evaluate the community. The spontaneous participation and reification process of the social media guideline and policy document corpus reaffirmed that a corpus-creating community of practice can instinctively form a knowledge-sharing organization that provides meaning, values, and identity. These findings should stimulate further research contributions, and provides practitioners and scholars with tools to measure, understand, and assess semantic space for other artifacts developed within a community of practice in other industries, organizations, or distributed associations.

This study focused on factors that may influence freshmen students when choosing their colleges, specifically those who attend metropolitan universities such as the University of North Texas. In addition to identifying major characteristics of the institution that attract students, it also explored the sources of information that students considered important when making their choice about where to attend college. The primary instrument for gathering the data was focus groups. These informal, small groups provided a format for in-depth discussion and probing questioning about the needs, wants and influential factors driving freshmen college choice. Ten focus groups were held with between six and ten students in a specially designed room on the campus of the University of North Texas. A professional moderator was employed and sessions were observed via a two-way mirror and tape recorded for later transcription. The major questions addressed in the focus groups included: What factors influenced students the most to attend the University of North Texas? What did they consider the level of friendliness on campus? And how did the marketing materials that the university distributed impact their decision to attend? The study found that the factors that most influenced freshmen to attend the University of North Texas were low cost, convenient location and the good academic reputation of their field of study. Students believed North Texas to have a very friendly campus and were pleased with the overall academic environment. They were not, however, impressed or greatly influenced by the marketing materials currently being used by the University and suggested ways to improve the design and distribution of these materials to make them more effective. Additional observations were made concerning these and related questions. A partial transcription of the focus group sessions is included.