The Pretoria school of thought: from strategy to governance to sustainability

Abstract

Spurred by the movement in the early 1980s to search for the characteristics of excellently managed corporations (Peters & Waterman, 1982), the Excellence Study in Public Relations and Communication Management was launched in 1985 (Grunig, 1992). The resultant Excellence Theory (Dozier, Grunig & Grunig, 1995) provided the impetus for a global search for excellence in communication management that started in the 1990s and still continues. South Africa (SA) contributed to this movement by further exploring the value-added contribution that communication management could make to the organization. The worldview that resulted has come to be known as the Pretoria School of Thought (De Beer, 2010) – a paradigm that focuses on the conceptualization of communication management in the strategic context of the organization.