How does one approach the issue of stakeholder relationship management (or, better, governance..) from an operative perspective?
This is the basic question which scholar Tom Watson from Bournemouth University in the UK, recently posted on his blog
and which I have attempted to address, from a process perspective, in an essay recently which was posted on this here blog.
You will also be interested to know that Tom Watson is in the process of a third (final?) Delphi round with some thirty scholars and professionals from various countries (I have the privilege of being one of those), and the issue he is challenging us with is certainly not a minor one, from any perspective: priorities for public relations research.
To the very specific question he poses: who is the owner of the relationship: the PR professional or the business line? I firmly reply that the owner is the specific function. The pr professional is only (and when very fortunate..) the listening and communication expert, and supplies know how and resources to enable each manager to manage his/her own relationship systems.
In any case, to more clear, and to push a step forward from the stakeholder relationship management process issue to its more operational aspects, I would like to link you to a power point involving-publics.pptas well as a contenuto-slides_revtmf.docwhich I delivered last Thursday in Lisbon in the context of the fourth international symposium on global corporate communication on the issue: corporate communication as a sustainable and active contributor to democracy.
The presentation deals only the first two steps of the process I suggested in that paper, into a real life case history (of course, had I had the time to expose I would have also gone through the other steps of the process…).
The case is that of Mo.Ve, a Belgian based NGO which for now five years has been thematizing the very relevant question of sustainable mobility in European metropolitan areas an how public policies of major urban centers, regions, states and organizations like the European Union can and must engage in stakeholder rleationship governance practices in order to succeed in reducing congestion and pollution in our metropolitan areas.
I will not go into details because they are in the two attached documents.
What I do wish however to underline is that the presentation has four parts: a) a brief description of move; b) a brief description of the first steps of the process; c) what actually was implemented of these two steps and what the results were; d) a skeleton indication of the other steps.
I hope the documents are suffuciently clear, and that they might stimulate new ideas and further thoughts.
