The A-Team

According to Ian Somerville, Emma Wood, Mark Gillham the authors and researchers of this journal. The purpose of this article is to present and discuss the results of research conducted among Scottish communication professionals, which investigated their perception of and attitudes toward recent trends and future developments with respect to the free organisational publication which is the use of new media in the public relations world.

In this article, they finds that first, there have been significant changes in purpose, content, design and distribution of free organisational publications in recent years, but for the predictable future communication professionals foresee important roles for both print and electronic organisational publications. Secondly, practitioners tend to adopt the rhetoric and language of “technological determinism” when discussing new media technologies. That is, they tend to see themselves as relatively powerless in the face of “technological advances” and see their role as simply adopting what is given to them. This article argues that viewing the technology/society relationship from a more “social shaping” perspective will allow practitioners to utilise new media technologies in ways which will benefit them and their stakeholders.

This article also provides a more complete picture of the “value” of free organisational publications and also draws lessons for practitioners on how best to employ print and electronic publications and how they should respond to current claims made about new media technologies.This article is to conclude what is, in many ways, a quite different new media environment from that analysed by other researchers regarding this matter. This study also theorises practitioner discourses in a more comprehensive way than many earlier studies by examining them in the context of the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between technology and society in the new media and public relations world.