WEEK 1: What is Corporate Communication?
WEEK 2: Stakeholder Theory & Issue Management
WEEK 3: Corporate Identity, Positioning and Branding
WEEK 4: Public Relations
WEEK 5: Media Relations
WEEK 6: Corporate Communications and Digital Media
WEEK 1: What is Corporate Communication?
Learning Goals:
● What is corporate communication and strategic communication?
○ Defining the field and central concepts
○ Use of metaphors
● What are possible perspectives on StratCom/CorpCom?
○ Dominant corpcom vs cco perspective
○ What does metaphor-from-metonymy mean?
○ What are the implications of these perspectives for scholarship and practice?
Christensen, Morsing & Cheney
● Encompass all communications (of an organisation) within one perspective
○ Images of wholeness and totality
● Help us to make sense of complex phenomena
○ Whole vs. parts
Hallahan et al (2007)
● Less and less differentiation between traditional communication activities.
● Media economics and technology change the communication work.
● There is an expanding variety of methods to influence stakeholders.
● Purposeful influence as an organisational goal is key to strategic communication.
● “Strategic communication focuses on how the organisation itself presents and promotes
itself through the intentional activities of its leaders, employees, and communication
practitioners.”
● → Unifying framework
Strategic
● Management focus is dominating the field…
○ bu t it does not necessarily imply power and control of management over
stakeholders (asymmetry)
● Broader perspective: strategy is not objective, and culture and gender free
, ○ Strategic allows for the study of organisational change, stakeholder communication
etc.
○ Organisational symbols are created through communication practice
● ‘Strategic’ includes the study of all communication practices
...but what about communication?
● Strategic communication is about informational, persuasive, discursive, as well as
relational communication when used in a context of the achievement of an organisation’s
mission.
● Communication
○ Transmission vs. interactive model
● Meaning
○ A postmodern approach focuses on “how social relations today are shaped
principally by competition, conflict, struggle and domination.
● Influence
○ ...persuasion is the essence of strategic communication.
Christensen, Morsing & Cheney
● We argue that the field of corporate communication would benefit from a figure ground
reversal aimed at a better understanding of how communication organises rather than the
traditional focus on the organisation of communication.
● An organisation is neither a single unit not can it be managed and controlled as such.
● The organisation of communication (functional) vs. how communication organises
(non-functional/CCO)
What is CorpComm?
● We argue that the mind-set of corporate communication no longer is an exclusively
managerial project, but an ideal that is shared and kept alive by many different actors
inside and outside the organisation.
Metonymy & Metaphor
● Metonymy takes the whole (an organisation) to be indicated by its parts (e.g., the number
of levels in an organisation, the size of the body of rules governing procedures, the rates of
mobility between and within organisational slots). The whole is thus represented by the
parts, the essential features of a whole are reduced to indices.
Critique on Corp Comm Research
● Idea of metaphor-from-metonymy: unity, simplistic
● Organisation as panopticon
● Underlying models of communication: conduit, control
● Dominant perspective in practice
, Organisational Communication
● CCO: Communicative Constitution of Organisations
● Formative aspect of language, sense making, social processes and dynamic
● Polyphony of the organisational voice
WEEK 2: Stakeholder Theory & Issue Management
WEEK 3: Corporate Identity, Positioning and Branding
WEEK 4: Public Relations
WEEK 5: Media Relations
WEEK 6: Corporate Communications and Digital Media
WEEK 1: What is Corporate Communication?
Learning Goals:
● What is corporate communication and strategic communication?
○ Defining the field and central concepts
○ Use of metaphors
● What are possible perspectives on StratCom/CorpCom?
○ Dominant corpcom vs cco perspective
○ What does metaphor-from-metonymy mean?
○ What are the implications of these perspectives for scholarship and practice?
Christensen, Morsing & Cheney
● Encompass all communications (of an organisation) within one perspective
○ Images of wholeness and totality
● Help us to make sense of complex phenomena
○ Whole vs. parts
Hallahan et al (2007)
● Less and less differentiation between traditional communication activities.
● Media economics and technology change the communication work.
● There is an expanding variety of methods to influence stakeholders.
● Purposeful influence as an organisational goal is key to strategic communication.
● “Strategic communication focuses on how the organisation itself presents and promotes
itself through the intentional activities of its leaders, employees, and communication
practitioners.”
● → Unifying framework
Strategic
● Management focus is dominating the field…
○ bu t it does not necessarily imply power and control of management over
stakeholders (asymmetry)
● Broader perspective: strategy is not objective, and culture and gender free
, ○ Strategic allows for the study of organisational change, stakeholder communication
etc.
○ Organisational symbols are created through communication practice
● ‘Strategic’ includes the study of all communication practices
...but what about communication?
● Strategic communication is about informational, persuasive, discursive, as well as
relational communication when used in a context of the achievement of an organisation’s
mission.
● Communication
○ Transmission vs. interactive model
● Meaning
○ A postmodern approach focuses on “how social relations today are shaped
principally by competition, conflict, struggle and domination.
● Influence
○ ...persuasion is the essence of strategic communication.
Christensen, Morsing & Cheney
● We argue that the field of corporate communication would benefit from a figure ground
reversal aimed at a better understanding of how communication organises rather than the
traditional focus on the organisation of communication.
● An organisation is neither a single unit not can it be managed and controlled as such.
● The organisation of communication (functional) vs. how communication organises
(non-functional/CCO)
What is CorpComm?
● We argue that the mind-set of corporate communication no longer is an exclusively
managerial project, but an ideal that is shared and kept alive by many different actors
inside and outside the organisation.
Metonymy & Metaphor
● Metonymy takes the whole (an organisation) to be indicated by its parts (e.g., the number
of levels in an organisation, the size of the body of rules governing procedures, the rates of
mobility between and within organisational slots). The whole is thus represented by the
parts, the essential features of a whole are reduced to indices.
Critique on Corp Comm Research
● Idea of metaphor-from-metonymy: unity, simplistic
● Organisation as panopticon
● Underlying models of communication: conduit, control
● Dominant perspective in practice
, Organisational Communication
● CCO: Communicative Constitution of Organisations
● Formative aspect of language, sense making, social processes and dynamic
● Polyphony of the organisational voice
