The influence of economic theory and terminology on other disciplines has been increasing in recent years, which involves not only measuring social phenomena, for example, with economic parameters, but also extending economic logic to other areas.
The linguistic field has not been an exception. Sperber and Wilson throughout the 80s and 90s developed their work within the relevance theory, which meant a change in the focus of interest in communicative studies. Now, the growing importance that communication has acquired in organizations and the economistic or instrumental approach to communication, allows us to assess from this perspective the relationships between economic organizations and the theory of relevance.
The relevance theory
Relevance is a concept linked to the communicative act that, in no case, should be considered in absolute terms. Therefore, Sperber and Wilson establish an analogy between the functioning of communication and the functioning of the economy, according to the parameters of cost and benefit and in a double sense:
- Productivity depends on the size of the company, but it seems difficult to admit that a company is productive when production is very small. On the other hand, production does not depend solely on the value of the goods produced, since it is necessary to take into account the costs of production. The smaller these are, the higher the productivity.
Communicative relevance, like economic productivity, depends on these two factors, and is productive or relevant to a greater or lesser degree. But before reaching a conclusion, it is worth clarifying some questions about the approach of Sperber and Wilson, especially those that may be related to organizational communication.
A dichotomy of great interest - whose origin is found in Grice's theory of the principle of cooperation and which distances itself from the classical model of communication - is the one established between informative intention and communicative intention, which are distinguished by their purpose: Informational intention informs the listener of something, while communicative intention informs the listener of our intention. In this sense, it is interesting to note the communicative turn that is introduced through this distinction.
The sender loses its hierarchical role in the communication process and the information is transmitted depending on the receiver; who is responsible for both receiving the information and interpreting the issuer's intention. Communication success remains in the hands of the receiver and the sender must try to ensure that their message can be properly interpreted.
The role of the recipient is completed - and, in part, due - to the force that context acquires in the theory of relevance.
The context does not only refer to the physical situation in which communication occurs, but it also extends to cognitive processes, so that the context is chosen by the receiver to interpret the information transmitted by the sender.
In this way, it is possible to explain why information is relevant for a receiver but not for another, and it is also possible to understand why the difficulty of accessing a context - an academic or too technical context - causes communication to fail while the receiver cannot. interpret the information or the intention of the issuer appropriately.
We therefore collect the relevant conditions as formulated by Sperber and Wilson:
Grade 1 condition: An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in that context are large.
Grade 2 condition: An assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required for its processing in that context is small.
In other words, the relevance depends on the contextual effects and the processing effort, or in economic terms, it depends on the communication benefit and cost.
The contextual effect will be great if it supposes a modification in the assumptions of the receiver and the processing effort will be less if the receiver has access to the context to interpret the intention of the sender.
The relevant context
Communication is, without a doubt, a dynamic factor of the organizational structure, since it allows adapting to the environment both internally and externally. In this way, the improvement of the organization is understood as a greater effectiveness in the organizational performance.
If profit continues to be the main motive that guides the conduct of companies, relevance is the main concept that guides communication. It is not surprising, therefore, that relevance is a more defined objective than that of communication itself, stated in a general way. In short, it would be more than implementing communication, achieving relevant communication.
Karsten Pedersen is an author who draws attention to the need for communication to be relevant to be successful, and for this he analyzes several theories on relevance, including that of Sperber and Wilson.
As it is the receiver who decides if the information is relevant or not, Pedersen stresses the impossibility of predicting the target groups of the communication with certainty, since the context varies according to the receiver as well as the effort each one makes to process a information.
According to this approach, a good communication strategy, in addition to considering the transmission channels and the content and form of the information, should aim to discover the context in which your information is relevant.
Of course, this objective runs into difficulties stemming from the cognitive - belonging to the recipient - rather than the physical nature of the context. However, the contact itself that opens the communication and the consequent feedback and self-regulation processes help to configure this context.
Of course, to achieve communicative relevance, a high degree of flexibility and openness towards the receiver is required. On the one hand, the receiver is the one that feeds back the message emitted and provides enough material for the sender to self-regulate it, so that it modifies it based on the receiver's response.
Thus, relevance is feasible as a dynamic phenomenon, once contact between the interlocutors is achieved, and shows the risks of too rigid communication strategies that prioritize the transmission of relevant information but do not guarantee the achievement of relevant communication..
All this allows us to speak of context or relevant environment. The environment, as seen by Antonio Lucas Marín, is equivalent to the external elements of the organization that, in one way or another, influence the organization. Taking Dunlop as a reference, Lucas Marín proposes an example of three context factors that influence society's industrial relations system:
a) the technological characteristics and the workplace that constitute a series of rules accepted by the labor community,
b) the market imperatives that affect the actors, and
c) the situation and distribution of power in society as a whole.
The context factors that influence the organization demonstrate that the organization cannot act or be considered in isolation, but it also shows that the context is not something external to the organization but, insofar as it is cognitively processed, it is part of it.
Sperber and Wilson make the difference between the physical environment and the cognitive environment, since the latter is constituted by the mental representations that the subjects make. The cognitive environment is a set of facts that are manifest - that is, perceptible - for an individual. Hence, the communicative relevance resides in the fact that the receiver and the sender share a mutual cognitive environment or, in other words, that both share the same assumptions regarding the transmitted information. The three factors mentioned above suppose, rather than contextual factors, part of the cognitive context, while they are assumptions shared by the sender and the receiver.
Although it is true that the relevance depends on the receiver, it is also true that the issuer has to assume the responsibility of communicating in a relevant context and of communicating about assumptions shared by the receiver that allow it to consider the relevant information.
If so, the processing effort will be less - since the basic assumptions decrease the processing costs - and the contextual effects will be greater - the basic assumptions presuppose that the information transmitted adds something new and relevant to said assumptions.
The descriptive or summary paragraph
Preferred recipients
To create a relevant communication context, each organization must define its own stakeholders, groups that influence or have been influenced by the organization's activity. According to Bettina Alonso, two groups can be distinguished:
a) Primary stakeholders: they are involved in some of the transactions carried out by the organization and are necessary for its existence.
b) Secondary stakeholders: they are not necessary for the survival of the
organization but they influence or can influence it.
The communication relationships between the organization and its stakeholders are diverse and vary depending on the relationship of interest established between them. It is obvious that the links that relate an organization to its investors, consumers or clients are different from those established with the media or public authorities.
On the one hand, the first links are primary, as they are necessary for the survival and functioning of the organization. On the other hand, as all relationships influence the organization, what varies is the type of relevance that must be obtained so that stakeholders or interest groups process the information transmitted by the organization due to contextual effects.
Organizations as broadcasters must self-regulate their messages, so that the messages are tailored to different groups to achieve their relevance: what is relevant to shareholders is not necessarily relevant to consumers or local authorities. The organizational capacity to communicate effectively depends on the capacity to communicate in a relevant way depending on the receiver.
Relevance, as communication oriented towards the receiver, places us in what has been called the change from product to perception. This is to emphasize that it is the perception of an organization or a product that produces the value of an organization.
The reduction in value to the product is insufficient because, as we have pointed out, the number of stakeholders involved is not limited only to consumers, but includes other groups affected by the actions of the organization. The value can be synthesized, then, as the sum of the relationships with the stakeholders. If the relationships with them are strong, the value of the organization will be greater and vice versa.
Perception, understood as the relationship between the organization and its stakeholders, can be associated with the corporate image, defined as the perception of the organization's publics.
The value of the organization can also be understood in these terms: the better the corporate image of an organization, the greater its value. Capriotti offers a more precise definition of corporate image as: "the structure or mental scheme about a company that has its audiences, made up of the set of attributes that audiences use to identify and differentiate that company from the others."
Thus, consolidating a good corporate image vis-à-vis its audiences configures additional information about the organization that reduces the impact of situational factors and conjunctural factors.
In this way we recover the concept of cognitive environment to underline the importance of corporate image. The fact that some assumptions are perceivable to an audience and shared with the organization favors that the information issued by the organization is relevant. The most general context –like any crisis situation– is processed based on this cognitive environment, in which the image of the organization guarantees the relevance of its information, since greater importance is given to one factor –good corporate image– than others - the situation.
Instrumental communication
The achievement of relevant communication depends on the relationships established with the organization's stakeholders or stakeholders. If this relevance is achieved, the perception of the organization is strengthened, so that its corporate image is positive and its value increases. In this sense, it is a preferred objective of organizations to define their preferred recipients, their stakeholders.
Initially, we commented that the relevance theory reflected the influence of economic thought on linguistics; hence its suitability to understand the importance of communication in the organizational field.
Now, this cognitive conception of communication is marked by the instrumental nature of the cost-benefit relationship. Therefore, it is necessary to ask ourselves if it is possible to ignore the important social dimension of communication and reduce its function to the mere obtaining of the benefit and its dependence on the receiver as an individual driven by exclusively economic interests.
