Makten över kommunikationen
en kvalitativ studie av kommunikatörens yrkesroll
The communicator has a professional role which is relatively unspecified and hard to define. To work with communication can mean several different tasks, who also might vary between different types of organizations. The purpose with our study is to clarify the professional title communicator and its meaning. By applying a power perspective on the communicators experienced professional role in meaning to find out who has the power over the communication. Our study is made of qualitative interviews with four professional communicators working in private organizations. We have used semi structured interviews in our study which means that we before we went through with the interviews defined themes which the interviews were built upon. This type of interview also made it possible for us to ask supplemental questions. Our interview material is considered through a hermeneutical perspective which means that we have interpreted the interviewed persons? answers to understand the experienced professional role. Thereafter we have applied theories of power on the empirical data. The result shows that the communicators have a relatively common opinion on the self-experienced role, since they see themselves as ?the go-to-person? in their organizations meaning the person who pulls the strings. Further on we can see that the communicator has a certain type of power, which generally originates from their communication skills and central position in the company. This position means an information advantage which also can give the communicator power. A factor that lies behind this is that the communicator is found in the middle of the organizations information flow. On this basis we can see a clear connection between the communicator?s professional role and the power of communication in organizations.