Corporate communications: audiences, funding and crisis management

Who are the key audiences of corporate communications? Is the communication department adequately funded? And how are crisis handled? This paper reports an empirical research conducted in 20 British organisations, with a focus on these three questions. It is found that internal publics, financial PR and opinion formers are viewed as the three most important audiences. Although most organisations now are more conscious of their corporate identity than ever before, the function is generally funded inadequately

Corporate communications in practice: the profile of pr directors in the british companies

In spite of being seen as an increasingly important function of management, public relations (PR) or corporate communications (as is called in this paper) remains a subject which is seriously under-researched. This paper reports an empirical study conducted in 20 British organisations with a focus on the director of corporate communications. It examines the origin and role of corporate communication executives and identifies those essential characteristics that constitute the most successful communication practitioners

Is Corporate Communications A Strategic Function?

Corporate communications, or public relations (PR) as hitherto it has largely been known, has become an increasingly important function in business organisations. Yet little has been published on the role and function of communication executives. This paper reports an empirical study conducted in 20 British organisations with a focus on the director of corporate communications. It examines the role and tasks of corporate communication executives and discusses their status within organisational structure and the impact of corporate communications upon the strategic planning process

Melt conditioned direct chill casting (MC-DC) of wrought Al-alloys

Melt Conditioned Direct Chill (MC-DC) casting is a new development for producing high-quality billets and slabs. In the MC-DC process, liquid metal is continuously fed into a MCAST (melt conditioning by advanced shear technology) machine, where the liquid metal is subjected to high shear rate and high degree of turbulence provided by a twin screw mechanism at temperatures either above or below the alloy liquidus, and the conditioned liquid metal is then fed continuously into a Direct Chill (DC) caster to produce billets or slabs. The MC-DC process is applicable to both Aland Mg-alloys. In this paper we present our experimental investigations of the effects of processing parameters on the microstructural and compositional uniformity of 5xxx and 7xxx series Al-alloys. It has been confirmed by our experiments that the MC-DC process can produce billets and slabs with fine and uniform microstructure, uniform chemical compositions and much reduced cast defects, such as porosity and cracks

Theory of Direct Scattering, Trapping and Desorption in Atom-Surface Collisions

When gas atoms or molecules collide with clean and ordered surfaces, under many circumstances the energy-resolved scattering spectra exhibit two clearly distinct features due to direct scattering and to trapping in the physisorption well with subsequent desorption. James Clerk Maxwell is credited with being the first to describe this situation by invoking the simple assumption that when an impinging gas beam is scattered from a surface it can be divided into a part that exchanges no energy and specularly reflects and another part that equilibrates or accommodates completely and then desorbs with an equilibrium distribution. In this paper a scattering theory is developed, using an iterative algorithm and classical mechanics for the collision process, that describes both direct scattering and trapping-desorption of the incident beam. The initially trapped fraction of particles can be followed as they continue to make further interactions with the surface until they are all eventually promoted back into the positive energy continuum and leave the surface region. Consequently, this theory allows a rigorous test of the Maxwell assumption and determines the conditions under which it is valid. The theory also gives quantitative explanations of recent experimental measurements which exhibit both a direct scattering contribution and a trapping-desorption fraction in the energy-resolved spectra.Comment: 46 pages including 14 figure