The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication: A Guide to Internal Communication, Public Relations, Marketing, and Leadership

Outsourcing

In large organizations, the complexity of communication tasks means that more communicators with increasingly specific roles and areas of expertise are hired. In these situations, a key strategic decision is whether to hire these communicators as employees or as external contractors. Over the past thirty years, the tides of outsourcing have shifted many times. In the 1980s, many organizations embraced new technologies such as videotape and videoconferencing for communicating with their employees and external audiences; in the 1990s, these technologies expanded to include desktop publishing, multimedia, and Internet/intranet sites. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw enormous growth in social and mobile media. When corporate ...