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Summary Strategic Communication of Organizations (SCoO) week 1 - 6
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Strategic Communication of Organizations (SCoO), first exam, week 1 - 6. Summary of all articles for the first exam.
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Strategic Communication of Organizations (SCoO) – Exam 1 (week 1 to 6)1. Corporate communication
1.1 Defining strategic communication (Hallahan et al., 2007)
1.2 Images of corporate communication: definitions and metaphors (Christensen et al., 2008)
1.3 Bridging corporate and organizational communication (Christensen et al., 2011)
2. Stakeholder theory & Issue management
2.1 Stakeholder theory of corporations: concept, implications (Donaldson et al., 1995)
2.2 The stakeholder model refined (Fassin, 2009)
2.3 Monitoring the issue arenas of the swine-flu discussion (Luoma-aho et al., 2013)
3. Corporate identity, positioning and branding
3.1 Corporate identity, branding and reputations (Abratt et al., 2012)
3.2 Aligning identity and strategy: corporate branding at B.A. (Balmer et al., 2009)
3.3 The dynamics of organizational identity (Hatch et al., 2002)
4. Public relations
4.1 Models of public relations and communication (Grunig et al., 1992)
4.2 Organizational listening: a gap in PR theory and practice (Macnamara, 2016)
4.3 Defining the ‘object’ of PR research: new starting point (Edwards, 2012)
5. Media relations
5.1 Agenda-setting effects of news on public’s images about org. (Carroll et al., 2003)
5.2 Making sense of an interface: corp. comm. and the news media (Cornelissen et al., 2009)
5.3 Frame complexity and the financial crisis: comparison US, UK (Kleinnijenhuis et al., 2014)
5.4 News value of press releases as predictor of agenda building (Schafraad et al., 2016)
6. Crisis communication
6.1 Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: SCCTheory (Coombs, 2007)
6.2 Maintain legitimacy: controversy, order of worth, public justification (Patriotta et al., 2011)
6.3 When frames align: PR, news media, and the public in times of crisis (Meer et al., 2014)
1.1 Hallahan et al. (2007): Defining strategic communication
1. What is the purpose of this study?
This article endeavors to set the stage for an academically driven approach to strategic
communication. This study examines the nature of strategic communication, which is defined as the
purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission. Six relevant disciplines are
involved in the development, implementation, and assessment of communications by organizations:
management, marketing, public relations, technical communication, political communication, and
,information/social marketing campaigns. The nature of the term strategic is examined, and key aspects
of communication are identified.
2. What is the rationale for strategic communication?
Strategic communication examines organizational communication from an integrated,
multidisciplinary perspective by extending ideas and issues grounded in various traditional
communications disciplines. Communicating purposefully to advance the mission of the organization.
As suggested by the examples (p. 7 - 9), the term strategic communication makes sense as a unifying
framework to analyze communications by organizations for at least four reasons:
First, the ability of communicators to differentiate between traditional communications
activities and their effects is rapidly disappearing.
Second, important changes in public communication are being driven by technology and by
media economics.
Third, organizations use an expanding variety of methods to influence the behaviors of their
constituencies - what people know, how people feel, and the ways people act - relative to the
organization.
Fourth, strategic communication recognizes that purposeful influence is the fundamental goal
of communications by organizations.
Communication theory and research must focus on how communications contribute to an
organization’s purpose for being.
3. Why is it problematic that the term strategic is so strongly associated with a modernist
approach to management?
Part of the problem with the term strategic is that it has been strongly associated with a modernist
approach to management. Critics of this approach argue that strategic communication privileges a
management discourse and emphasizes upper management’s goals for the organization as given and
legitimate. Strategic implies organizations and their functions are evaluated in terms of economic
contribution and “rational” economic goals.
The goal of the modernist approach is a world that can be controlled through administrative
procedures, the elimination of dissension and conflict, and the blind acceptance of organizational goals
and roles. The role of communication in this approach is to ensure information transfer from the
supervisor to the subordinate in order to gain compliance and to establish networks to ensure the
organization’s power in relations with the public.
The mere mention of the term strategic thus evokes a one-sided approach to organizational
management that is based in asymmetrical or top-down communication that does not permit for the
exploration of alternative approaches to studying the communication practices of organizations.
These perspectives have been strengthened by the fact that strategic planning is being taught in
undergraduate programs (public relations, advertising, and marketing) that emphasizes goal setting,
measurable outcomes, and action plans.
Viewing strategy in such a very basic manner, however, does not do justice to its richness and also
loses perspective of the many existing readings of the term.
4. What do these authors mean by ‘an emphasis on communication’?
The emergence of strategic communication as a unifying paradigm for studying purposeful
communications by organizations provides an important opportunity to reinvigorate and refocus the
study of organizational communications onto how organizations present and promote themselves and
,interact with their audiences (i.e., putting communication back into the study of communication by
organizations).
Refocusing on communication is important for two reasons: (a) Theoretically, without their
communication science roots, disciplines such as management, advertising, and public relations lose
their conceptual and methodological apparatus; and (b) such an initiative focuses interest on the
fundamental processes at a time when some disciplines have lost sight of their primary focus.
Strategic communication is about informational, persuasive, discursive, as well as relational
communication when used in a context of the achievement of an organization’s mission.
5. What are, according to these authors, the chief models to research and understand
communication?
First is the so-called transmission model of communication, which conceptualizes
communication as the one-way emission of information. Shannon and Weaver’s model is a widely
cited one-way model of communication focusing on the transmission of signals through a channel with
a limited feedback capacity
Second is an interactive model of communication that argues that communication involves the
creation and exchange of meaning between the parties in a communication activity. This interactive
approach has its roots in symbolic interactionism as well as in Wiener’s (1948) cybernetics theory,
which showed how communication processes can be seen in terms of action and reaction.
1.2 Christensen et al. (2008): Images of corporate communications: definitions and metaphors
1. What distinguished corporate communication from other management-oriented disciplines?
Corporate communications is defined primarily by its vision – by its goals and implied assumptions
for the communication project involved. In a number of important respects, these ambitions and
assumptions set corporate communications aside from other management-oriented communication
disciplines.
In contrast to the fields of marketing- and organizational communication, traditionally
concerned with consumers and employees respectively, the aim of corporate communications as a
distinct field of theory and practice is to manage all communications that involve the organization as a
whole.
The objective of corporate communications, thus, is different not simply because it claims to
include a broader range of communication activities or to address more audiences across formal
organizational boundaries but because its purpose is to organize the organization’s communication
activities as one coherent entity.
2. What is meant by “the metaphor of holism”?
Corporate communications relies on a metaphor of holism: the desire to encompass everything within
one perspective or framework.
The notions of holism and synergy refer to systemic properties or characteristics of the whole. Applied
to corporate communications, the notion of synergy suggests that the total image of the organization is
an emergent quality: a quality that comes into existence produced through the continuous interaction
between individual symbols and messages. The task of the corporate communicator is to make sure
that the synergy is positive; that discrete symbols, messages or activities support each other to produce
an enhanced combined effect.
3. Could you think of any other metaphors to describe corporate communication?
- Aside from the ones that are already mentioned in the text
, Ideals and notions of communication have always been based on more or less implicit metaphors
emphasizing different aspects of the communication process. A metaphor is a way of describing a
phenomenon in terms of something else. A metaphor creates or asserts a link between two different
domains and in this way helps us to acquire new insights and make sense of the world. As such,
metaphors are fundamental to our understanding and shaping of social reality. Metaphors help us
make sense of the world by allowing us describe one phenomenon in terms of another. Metaphors
highlight certain features of an object while downplaying or ignoring others.
Organizational scholars have suggested that the most prevailing metaphors of organizational
communication are the following: conduit, lens, linkage, performance, symbol, voice, and discourse.
The metaphor of voice captures the idea of organizations and their members speaking. The conduit
metaphor emphasizes the transmission of messages in a linear and one-way fashion; the performance
metaphor highlights social interaction and coordinated behaviour.
Metaphor of corporate communications: Corporate communications is the “body” of
communication: a “body” that represents the voice of the corporation by including and integrating its
many different dimensions into one unifying expression. We use the body metaphor in a mode that
allows us to investigate the implications of the idea of an entity orchestrating all dimensions of an
organizations’ communication.
A corporation is a “body of people”, a groups of people authorized to act as an individual.
Approaching corporate communications metaphorically as the body of communication has several
advantages. It allows us to investigate new dimensions of the corporate body and to ask questions
about wholeness, parts, interdependency, balances and imbalances. As a metaphor for the corporation,
the “body” allow us to challenge contemporary values and assumptions about professional
communication management.
4. What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of using metaphors that you listed?
- Spider / octopus
1.3 Christensen et al. (2011): Bridging corporate and organizational communication:
review, development, and a look to the future
1. What do these authors understand by corporate communication? List the elements.
To manage all communications under one banner.
Its purpose is to organize the organization’s communication activities as one coherent entity.
Characterized by a common mind-set, a certain way of thinking about and approaching an
organization’s communication, shaped by images and ideals of unity, wholeness, and totality.
The vision of wholeness unfolds into a goal of projecting a consistent and unambiguous
image of what the organization “is” and stands for.
Corporate communication conceives of itself as the integrated communication discipline par
excellence (the best of its kind), claiming to pool all possible communication disciplines and
supply an all-encompassing framework for their integration.
A central characteristic of corporate communication as a field of research and practice, thus,
is that it conceives of the organization as a single unit in communication with its stakeholders.
2. What do the authors mean by the concept of metaphor-from-metonymy?
Metonymy takes the whole (an organization) to be indicated by its parts (e.g., the number of levels in
an organization, the size of the body of rules governing procedures, the rates of mobility between and
within organizational slots). The whole is thus represented by the parts; the essential features of a
whole are reduced to indices.
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