Forging Community in the Workplace: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Sabena's In-House Journal (1952-2001)

ABSTRACTPurpose - The main goal of this research was to prove that in-house journals are interesting from an historical perspective. An additional goal of this study was to examine how the in-house journal fits into a plethora of management techniques to forge community in the workplace.Design/methodology/approach - Empirical data were generated by means of a qualitative content analysis of Sabena's in-house journal. A total of one hundred editions, covering the last fifty years of the company's existence (1952-2001), were examined.Findings - In-house journals offer a unique opportunity to study management's efforts to strengthen social bonds within the company. The analysis of the data has shown that the existence of strong social identities within the company led to difficulties when they conflicted with the organization's interests.Research implications - Theoretical bridges have been built between concepts like 'organizational identification', 'commitment' and 'sense of community' that have previously been studied in isolation.Practical implications - Internal Marketing and Internal Branding efforts have their limits. Human entities are never perfectly malleable.Keywords: in-house journal, internal communication, organizational identification, commitment, sense of community, social identitiesINTRODUCTIONFew scholars have devoted their time to the study of the internal house journal. As a result, this important medium in the field of what Neha Sharma and T.J. Kamalanabhan (2012) have labeled Internal Corporate Communication (ICC) did not get the attention it deserves. This research shows that the internal house organ is an important historical source to learn about management's efforts to create a 'group feeling' at the organization.I have chosen to take the internal house journal of Sabena, the former national Belgian airline company, as my focal point. The first reason why this specific case needs to be examined in more detail is because the company produced an internal house journal on a monthly basis for most of its history. This makes it possible to take a longitudinal approach.A second reason is that the internal house journal can be used to gain insight into the life behind company doors. Reconstructing a company's history is an interesting exercise but becomes really important when the case has broader relevance. The bankruptcy of Sabena, and its partner Swissair a few days earlier, was the start of a new era for the European airline industry. The events triggered a debate about the viability of the European model in which every nation tries to keep a national carrier. The American model, following the free market principle, proved difficult to implement in Europe. One may ask whether Sabena and Swissair were the first in a long line of bankruptcies to come. The recent bankruptcy of the Hungarian carrier Malev seems to confirm this hypothesis.Notwithstanding the turbulent history of Sabena, group cohesion appears to have been strong. Journalists reporting the events during and after the bankruptcy often stressed the 'Sabenafeeling'. Analyzing the company's in-house journal offers me the chance to verify whether this feeling was also apparent from the inside and if so, how it developed.A last argument to defend the choice for this specific case is the fact that the internal house journal played a significant role in the airline's internal communication system. More so since online communication tools never got the chance to be deployed to their full extent. Even in 2001, the use of the Internet by employees was limited.Although having a closer look at the social and cultural aspects of work life at Sabena would be valuable in its own right, this research holds both theoretical and practical significance that transcends the context of the case. Trying to discover how an internal house journal can be used to study the development of group cohesion has forced me to take an interdisciplinary approach touching upon various concepts from different disciplines. …