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The definition of lobbying in the Introduction has more than a legalistic touch about it. This is hardly surprising given the role of lobbyists in influencing the exact words contained within legislation or regulation. But lobbying and affairs do not work in a vacuum. Landscapes that influence politicians change daily – governments and how they work change regularly, media content and consumption also fluctuates, but primarily, what market research people encapsulate as ‘public opinion’ changes as a result of influences exerted from a variety of sources. So, if lobbying and about current affairs are closely associated with the creation or alteration of laws, any student of the subject will be initially surprised to find that many existing statutes date from decades, if not centuries, ago. Thousands still apply in the UK .You can study why laws were made at a particular point in history and the issues that were deemed important enough for politicians to devote time to creating new frameworks for society. A huge range of issues and groups can influence why laws are made, and the public affairs department of any institute or organisation will need to understand why issues generate laws – as well as the processes to ensure that a institute’s own perspective is understood by lawmakers. Whilst it would be fair to say that ‘society’ changes fairly rapidly as a result of many beneficial and many not so beneficial factors, it is also worth remembering that the general landscape that surrounds ‘society’ also changes rapidly as well. general knowledge about the history of how public relations became a large industry is fascinating enough, but beyond the scope of this Report. However, understanding how communications change in response to societies does have a huge relevance to modern work. The whole principle of communicating a message to a group of people is not new. There have always been people involved in initiating publicity campaigns – in Rome; you can still see the work of an early publicist, responsible for creating theatrical posters and ensuring that citizens attended performances. Move forward and by the twentieth century the public relations industry was beginning to develop in the UK. By 1948, a group of PR people came together to create the Institute of Public Relations. Just over fifty years later, research showed that the number of PR people now exceeded the number of journalists employed in the UK. The development of the industry has been fast. In the 1970s, there were still a significant number of companies in the UK who did not employ anyone to deal with press enquiries; investor relations had yet to be developed as a communications process and only a few, large companies had groups of employees devoted to ‘public affairs’. So, if current affairs were a rare function in the 1970s, an outsider could justifiably be expected to ask what might have changed over the intervening period to create the current industry. I wonder how much time and effort has been expended in recent years in this activity. If the benefits can be so enormous, how is it that companies in the 1960 and early 1970s managed to trade reasonably well without it? Initially seen as another modern management technique imported from America, the real reason for the growth in public affairs arose from a major shift in the ways in which legislators and regulators perceived the role of business in everyday life. Far from being a fashionable transitory management philosophy of its time, those who engaged in public affairs found that it was capable of adding an edge to an organisation’s mission in life. Because public affairs could often differentiate one organisation from others in the same field it consequently contributed greatly to the age-old divide between success and failure. Commerce has changed greatly over the last three decades. The public’s perceptions and aspirations have become sharper through their greatly increased access to a diversifying media. In many ways, public affairs activities have reflected and tracked that change. It would also be fair to say that, in turn, public affairs has both contributed to that change and accelerated its own development. In the past, it simply did not matter whether a institute performed public affairs programmes. Institute activity was invariably national or local in basis, was relatively self-contained and was not manipulated by legislation to a degree in any way comparable to the current business environment. Whole swathes of industry and business have become far more international in focus, with ‘globalist’ and a conformist tendency to one overall strategy being goals that feature widely.
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