European Communication Research Articles

Towards a more Successful European Communication: Research Findings and Media Policy Recommendations

In the context of media developments world-wide including convergence of media system, journalism homogenization, diversification of political communication, it is important to understand how these processes will affect (trans)formation of the European public sphere. There has been no European news agenda across media in Europe so far, except for rare cases when European Union becomes an issue of top importance across Europe. Most often these are sensational events, crises or official meetings of the EU representatives. On the other hand, journalists are confronted with their audience, which is poorly informed and has inadequate knowledge about the EU. The aim of the article is to reassess the major challenges of European social imaginary by addressing key measures to be taken to communicate Europe effectively.

European communication policy: Does it work as it should?

Abstract

Mapping communication management competencies for European practitioners

Purpose – The principle focus of the European Communication Professional Skills and Innovation (ECOPSI) Research project reported in this paper is to develop understanding of the competences held by senior communication practitioners and the contributing knowledge, skills and personal attributes that are relevant to their role. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on 24 months of desk and empirical work by the research team in three core phases: the benchmarking report based on literature reviews in each country region; quantitative data collection from communication practitioners in 42 countries across Europe; qualitative data from 53 interviews across four senior practitioner roles in the six regions of the study’s focus. Findings – The findings highlight the competencies needed by senior practitioners through the creation of the Communication Role Matrix with critical evaluation of the current contemporary issues faced by the sector. Research limitations/implications – The authors acknowledge a limitation of the study regarding the selection of the four studied professional roles. ECOPSI has proven a common understanding of theses four studied roles in Europe, but further research on the competencies of diverse roles performed in the profession would need to be explored for a more comprehensive appreciation of the full spectrum of public relations and strategic communication practice. Practical implications – The paper draws together findings from across Europe and presents a practical interpretation of the project in the form of an online self-diagnostic tool based on an online portal for practitioners to self-complete. Social implications – The programme improves the professionalism of practitioners across Europe and their ability to work across borders in a European and wider international community of communication practitioners. Originality/value – This study benchmarks the educational and practice landscape in six key regions of Europe to demonstrate that the elements focusing on skills, knowledge and personal attributes of European communication professionals can be synthesised using competences as the foundational element. The originality is also reflected in the self-diagnostic tool for the project based on an online portal.

An inquiry into the transformation of the PR roles’ concept

Purpose – Recent years have seen resurgent interest in professionalism in public relations, with several initiatives to enquire about the state of the communication profession and its part in organizational strategy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a quantitative investigation into the work roles of European communication professionals. In particular, the research investigates different professional roles, as developed in previous roles research, while taking a particular look at managerial role enactment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors report the findings of an explorative study among 551 European communication professionals. The measures are used in this study are closely aligned with previous roles research, but modernized. The authors analyzed the data with factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Findings – The authors unfold four distinct contemporary managerial tasks (“diagnosis,” “coaching,” “liaison,” and “execution”), extending previous research rooted in distinguishing these managerial tasks from more technical ones. As a result the authors show that managerial role enactment is predominately determined by education and work experience, with a diminishing gender gap when it comes to performing managerial tasks alone, and that these roles just partly relate to salary but highly relate to job satisfaction, particularly when it comes to taking part in management decision making (tasks that require responsibility, accountability, job diversity, and also an analytical, strategic mindset). Originality/value – The results of the study point to the further transformation of the PR Roles’ concept, turning a more execution oriented job profile into a more managerial and strategically oriented profession.

CEO Communication and Reputation in the Czech Republic: An Inspiration for Czech SMEs

Abstract The article endeavours to explain approaches to strategic communication by chief executive officers (CEOs) and other executives. A CEO's good communicative capabilities can have a positive impact on both corporate reputation and the efficiency of the organization as such. Supporting the reputation of the company through appropriate CEO communication should be a key goal of communication professionals in large companies as well as in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This article uses data from the European Communication Monitor (ECM), which is a unique and largest transnational survey on communication management. The critical overview of this survey, carried out among communication professionals in the Czech Republic, describes the Czech approach to CEO strategic communication, and may be an inspiration for SMEs in the Czech Republic.

Risk culture and crisis communication

This paper continues with the discourse on risk cultures that was prominently conducted in social science in the 1980s and 1990s. Though several authors applied different framings to risk culture, the basic idea was that late modern societies should be considered, in general, as risk societies or risk cultures. Taking and building upon this idea, this paper proposes its own approximation to the topic. The proposed framework shows several similarities to the cultural theory concept of Douglas and Wildavsky. However, whereas the cultural theory concept distinguishes between different societal subgroups and their specific way of dealing with risks, the framework suggested in this article distinguishes between risk cultures of a given society, which do not necessarily correspond to nation states. A typology distinguishing three different risk cultures is proposed, which emerged out of an empirical comparative study on socio-cultural factors of risk perception, alerting and crisis communication in Europe. The three different ideal-typical risk cultures found here are: individual-oriented, state-oriented and fatalistic. The typology is further elaborated and conclusions for crisis management and communication are drawn, which should allow the development of more appropriate communication measures to enhance compliance of citizens in case of disaster.

On organizing educational research communication in Europe: Past experiences and possible futures

In this note I will comment on the development of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) as a European educational research organization and the current situation. In doing so I will put forward a few matters concerning the social and intellectual organization of the EERA and the visibility of educational research in Europe.

Design procedure of UHF RFID reader antennas based on ETSI and FCC standards

This paper presents the design procedure of two ultra-high-frequency radio frequency identification reader antennas used in searching tagged items. They consist of microstrip arrays with alternating orthogonal dipoles, which are fed in series by a pair of microstrip lines. The dipoles are designed properly to provide the required bandwidth. The inter-element distance is adjusted to the center frequency, where the elements provide in-phase excitation and create two orthogonal electric-field components that give beams with direction diversity. Simulated results show that the return loss bandwidth (RL > 13 dB) of the first antenna design covers the required frequency band of ETSI (865–868 MHz) standard. In addition, simulated and measured results of the second antenna design indicate that the return loss bandwidth covers both the frequency bands of european telecommunications standards institute (ETSI) and federal communications commission (FCC) (865–928 MHz) standards. Regarding the coverage volume in the vicinity of the antenna, it was deduced that both antennas can read tagged items in a semi-cylindrical volume that extends to a radius of more than 50 cm. Finally, a case study of reading tagged books in front of a library cabinet with six shelves has been presented.

Francisco Political Communication in Europe: The Cultural and Structural Limits of the European Public Sphere

Francisco Political Communication in Europe: The Cultural and Structural Limits of the European Public Sphere

Universal Service Obligations and Public Payphone Use: Is Regulation Still Necessary in the Era of Mobile Telephony?

In this paper, we analyse empirically whether universal service obligations for the provision of public payphones is still relevant in the European electronic communications market. We use micro-level data on 106,989 households from 27 EU countries, during the period 2005 to 2009. We first estimate the impact of universal service obligations on public payphone use. Then, we set up a counterfactual scenario to predict the average use of public payphones if no universal service obligations were imposed in the EU countries. We find that universal service obligations do not have any significant impact on public payphone use. Only coverage obligations, i.e., when the law imposes a minimum number of payphones depending on the density of population, have a positive, though low, impact on payphone use. Our counterfactual model predicts that if universal service obligations had been absent, between 2005 and 2009 public payphone use would have been 15 percent lower.

Resisting Oppression

Aboriginal writing produced on Flinders Island off the coast of Van Diemen's Land, Australia, between 1836 and 1847 portrays continued resistance and attempts to influence public opinion and government policy. The journal, petition to Queen Victoria, private letters and colonial press coverage document the tumultuous existence Van Diemen's Land's surviving Aboriginal people endured. Leximancer software and a manual content analysis are used to identify the key themes and communication devices existing within the documents. Applying a typology of public sphere characteristics over the content analysis provides evidence of the existence of a subaltern Aboriginal public. This paper concludes that the Flinders Island people adopted European communication structures to overtly and covertly resist colonial domination and to exert control over their own lives. The documents and events surrounding their production suggest that the surviving people, despite being from different tribes in Van Diemen's Land, formed an Aboriginal subaltern public through which they took a unified stand against colonial oppression.

“The language of Europe is translation”

Umberto Eco’s statement “the language of Europe is translation” suggests that translation is one of the main assets of daily communication in Europe. While such a statement undoubtedly is a stand against national—or, in many instances, nationalistic—language cultures, it also raises a series of questions which can be discussed within a re-formulation of EST’s aims and scope: Which ‘Europe’ is meant here? What sort of translation concept underpins this statement? In which way do migration movements shape today’s translation landscapes? What are the control mechanisms behind the phenomenon of translation understood in Eco’s sense? This paper discusses the limits of Europeanness and its potentially transgressive nature against the backdrop of EST’s founding moment in Vienna and the city’s central shaping force in pluricultural issues in the Habsburg Monarchy. It argues that translation has the task of breaking the deadlock of identitarian differences and the political practices based on them. So, what is the impact of these reflections for future activities in EST?

Increasing power and taking a lead - What are practitioners really doing? Empirical evidence from European communications managers / Incrementar el poder y asumir el liderazgo - ¿Qué hacen realmente los profesionales? Evidencias empíricas sobre los gestor

The aims of the paper and presented research are to monitor trends in communication management and to evaluate specific topics that include decision-making style, leadership style, role enactment and the power of communication departments in Europe. This paper is based on data from the European Communication Monitor (ECM) annual research, the most comprehensive analysis of communication management worldwide. The ECM is an annual research project conducted since 2007. The ECM 2011 collected quantitative data through an on-line survey from 2,209 participating professionals from 43 European countries, with representation of every European region. This paper presents original connections about previous theory and offers empirical evidences about vertical and horizontal power of communication departments into organizations. On despite of the limitations of a self-reported survey, these evidences open new directions or research on hierarchical and social dimensions of power. The aim of this paper is to deepen the understanding of the power of communication management in organizations. Concretely, the paper aims to develop knowledge and understanding about horizontal and vertical power and the relationships established between these dimensions of power and strategic roles, decision-making and leadership styles that communicators play. The paper presents original ideas by critiquing and re-focussing the literature and theory of power and leadership in organizations. The paper also presents new empirical data to support these arguments.

The European public sphere and the debate about humanitarian military interventions

Studies on the democratic control and legitimacy of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) have thus far mostly focused on formal institutions. However, a comprehensive analysis requires including the ‘sociocultural infrastructure’ in which such formal institutions are embedded. Students of democracy have argued that the public sphere is a crucial dimension, if not a precondition for all mechanisms of democratic control in general. This paper investigates whether and in which ways Europeans participated in transnational European communication on humanitarian military interventions (1990–2005/2006). The paper analyzes a full sample of 108,677 newspaper articles published in leading newspapers of six EU member states, and the US as a comparative case. It demonstrates that the ‘national’ arenas of political communication are intertwined and allow ordinary citizens to make up their minds about common European issues in the highly controversial and normatively sensitive realm of humanitarian military interventions.

Political Communication in Europe: The Cultural and Structural Limits of the European Public Sphere

Seoane Pérez discusses the issue of the EU’s perceived communication deficit, arguing that this is not the result of a lack of commitment from EU leaders and journalists, but rather of cultural and structural limitations. Based on an analysis of the situation in two regions, Galicia in Spain and Yorkshire in the UK, he claims that there are two important challenges that limit the EU’s democratic potential: a lack of ‘domesticisation’ and a lack of ‘politicisation’.

Communicating the European Ombudsman’s Mandate: An Overview of the Annual Reports

The purpose of this paper is to explore the communication strategy of the European Ombudsman (EO), focusing on the evolution of the Annual Reports (ARs) of the office from 1995 to 2010. The EO was created to bridge the gap between citizens and the EU Institutions; therefore the EO office may be seen, inter alia, as a vehicle of European communication per se. The ARs are the Ombudsman’s main instrument of political pressure and an opportunity to communicate the outcomes of the preceding year to a broad audience. It is shown that the ARs have improved significantly in terms of layout and structure, while the EO now uses a dynamic logo and website. The various communicative activities presented in the ARs are proof of the EO’s efforts to improve the office’s public image, thereby strengthening the Ombudsman’s so-called ‘moral authority’ in the context of a rather limited mandate. In terms of the legal and political messages of the ARs, the article focuses particularly on the evolution of the notion of maladministration, inter-institutional relations and the creation of a European Network of Ombudsmen. Another section addresses the similarities and differences of the two office-holders of the period under examination regarding their perception of the mandate. The article generally assesses the EO’s efforts in the communication field positively. However, from a communication-policy perspective, it is doubtful that the EO could respond to the possible preference of some citizens to contact him/her on issues which concern a national entity implementing EU law when such matters are excluded from the EO’s jurisdictional ambit.

The Need for Effective Communication

The paper presents part of a PhD research on the management of European communication on rural development. Improving communication and facilitating the access to information do not guarantee the comprehension of the European message. The paper emphasizes the need to adapt the informational phenomenon to the expectation horizon of the rural population, to its need for appropriate information. The European communication, besides the informative and propagandistic character, has a powerful social character too, being part of the public space. The relationship between the ordinary European citizens and the European Union consists of a mixture of rights and obligations, entailed by the European citizenship. In order to benefit from their European citizenship European citizens should be properly informed.

En‘vision’ing Europe's crisis: Intertextuality in news coverage of the Eurozone crisis in Chinese, Indian and Russian press

European political communication studies are marked by a lack of attention to the visual. Yet there is a need to go beyond strictly textual analyses towards an understanding that visual images also play an important role in constructing a European Union (EU) identity both within and outside the Union's borders. This analysis explores the relationship between visual and textual imagery of the EU in international news discourses; a comprehensive intertextual approach which remains an under-researched perspective in studies of visual imagery in general. The study focuses on the intertextual imagery of the EU and its economic crisis in three ‘emerging’ powers; China, India and Russia. The three states are among the main poles in a multi-polar world – an emerging order characterized by power shifts and increased interdependence. In this new global design, the ‘emerging’ powers compete with the EU and USA, and contemplate their own responses to the EU's economic crisis, as well as calculate its effects. This study explores those responses as presented in the leading business papers of each country and asks how the relationship between the visual and textual imagery of the EU contributes to raising visibility and creating cognitive and emotional responses to its on-going crisis.

Different treatment of hate speech in the process of communication in Europe and the U.S.

The question how to treat the hate speech in the communication process is complex and there is no easy answer. Two existing models, American and European, are entirely different towards hate speech and its positioning in the room that belongs on the freedom of expression. In the American legal system, hate speech is an integral part of freedom of expression, while in Europe it is an abuse of the basic human rights for free speech. Hence, in these two approaches permanently is present the issue: is there any limit in democracy for freedom of expression and if so, where to draw the line. The dilemmas are not easy to solve and there is no universal answer: sometimes and the best intentions to prevent the spread of hatred in the communication processes could be easily stray into a ban with totalitarian character of a different opinion and criticism; On the other hand, and excessive openness for different views and perspectives in society could be deformed in the abuse of the right for free speech and losing of sense of responsibly for publicly spoken speech and harming of another one. Unfortunately, the state does not have a universal 'instrument' that would show whether something is freedom of expression or its misuse. This is a question that American and European legislation are attempting to answer for a while, however without definite conclusion and universally acceptable solution.

Sprach- und Kommunikationsanalysen zu den Meinungsumfragen im Eurobarometer 2010-2012

The article is dealing with aspects of European communication based on Eurobarometer 2010-2012 exploring the evolution of the public opinion of the EU Member States. The analysis of the European communication will be realized by linguistic and communication research tools such as semiotic-mythological method, discursive method, socio-psychological method, semantic differential, contrastive method and questionnaires. The general aim of the article is concentrated on the research of interconnected impacts of public opinions along central European questions and in comparison between opinion items in Poland and Germany.