SCoO – STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS OF ORGANISATIONS
INTRODUCTION MEETING
Basic of corpcom > it’s like a body. It works as a whole.
Legal entity with rights and liabilities that may conduct business as a profit seeking business or not
for profit business.
US: Business corporation: for profit
Business with:
Legal entity
Organization
- Public
- Company
- NGO
- A street gang/ church
Difference between corporation and organization: a organization doesn’t have to be a legal entity.
Corporate communication: a management function that offers a framework for the effective
coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall purpose of establishing and
maintaining favourable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is
dependent.
Stakeholders can be:
- Marketing
- Recruitment
- Investor relations
- Governmental communication
- Public relations
Marketing & PR > not the same but overlapping.
- Image/branding
- Media strategy
- Corporate advertising
- sponsorships
Marketing is more producing what you can sell.
PR concerns the (media) relations with the stakeholders.
! Corporate communication: an integrated framework for managing communication. !
Other labels:
- strategic/business communication
- management studies
academic perspectives
functional: organisational perspective, focus on management, organizational success, using it as a
tool, image, reputation. > focuses on the effect.
Non functional: societal perspective, wider context, focus on creation of meaning, sense making,
communication as a process. > focus on collective sensemaking.
,LITERATURE 1 - CORPORATE COMMUNICATION
What is corporate communication?
corporate news > Brexit: metonymy> Brussels represents the EU as a whole. Crashing out is also a
metaphor for leaving. This means that the EU is powerful.
Learning goal
How can metaphors be used to describe Corpcom?
What does metaphor-from-metonymy mean?
What are possible perspectives on CorpCom?
What is the COO?
Hallahan, K., Holtzhausen, D., Van Ruler, B., Vercic, D., & Sriramesh, K. (2007). Defining strategic
communication. International journal of strategic communication, 1(1), 3-35.
Strategic communication serves always a goal and is intentional. the goal is to become a unity, to
improving the reputation. the reputation is crucial for the organization and they need strategic
communication. (unified body of knowledge)
Strategic communication to examine how organizations use communication purposefully to fulfill
their mission.
What does Strategic mean?
Strategic is a multidimensional concept that needs to be examined broadly. Strategic has always a
purpose (economic contribution) and is most of the time for management within an organization.
Tweestrijd: top down maar ook weer niet.
Traditional view (top down)
IMC (integrated marketing communication): coordinating the activities of disparate outside vendors
and consultants.
Strategic communication differs from integrated communication because its focus is how an
organization communicates across organizational endeavors. The emphasis is on the strategic
application of communication and how an organization functions as a social actor to advance its
mission. it focuses on how the organization itself presents and promotes itself through the
intentional activities of its leaders, employees, and communication practitioners.
Rationale for strategic communication:
1. The ability of communicators to differentiate between traditional communications activities
and their effects is rapidly disappearing.
2. Important changes in public communication are being driven by technology and by media
economics. (the web makes it impossible to differentiate what is advertising vs. publicity.)
3. Organizations use an expanding variety of methods to influence the behaviors of their
constituencies. (the effects of any particular communication activity can be validly examined
in isolation.)
4. Strategic communication recognizes that purposeful influence is the fundamental goal of
communications by organizations.
,Modernist approach of SC: the role of communication 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. (top down)
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.
implications of the term strategic:
- the term strategic is understood as having originated in warfare and is in its strictest sense
described as the art of war.
- strategic also implies that communication practice is a management function.
- also used in conjunction with change management
- associated with survival and efficiency.
- does not necessarily imply power and control of management over other stakeholders
Communication practitioners are the agents used to establish corporate ideologies, a process that is
often associated with the creation of meaning in the service of power. (sensemaking!)
Communication agency will be influenced by organizational power based in the hierarchical
importance of the position itself and the class and gender of the agent.
emergence of strategic communication > refocus science, important because:
1. to lose their conceptual and methodological apparatus (top-down management)
2. it interest on the fundamental processes at a time when some disciplines have lost sight of
their primary focus.
Two major models of communication
1. Transmission model: the transmission of signals through a channel with a limited feedback
capacity.
a. one way, too sender oriented.
b. how we get information from here to there.
2. Ritual model: Interactive model of communication: the creation and exchange of meaning
between the parties in a communication activity.
a. two way.
b. how we manage to get along overtime.
c. building shared reality (sensemaking!).
Dimensions of meaning
- denotative: dialogue> ongoing process of learning in which meaning develop.
- connotative: creates shared meaning
Influence
- physical force
- patronage
- purchase
- persuasion (to promote the acceptance of ideas)
New paradigm of communication >
, - to advance the organization’s mission.
- strategic is multidimensional.
- researchers have an important opportunity to renew their interest in examining and
understanding what organizations actually do to create and exchange meaning with others.
- includes examining how an organization presents itself in society as a social actor in the
creation of public culture and in the discussion of public issues.
Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Cheney, G. (2008). Prologue: Images of corporate
communications: Definitions and metaphors. In L. T. Christensen, M. Morsing & G. Cheney (Eds.),
Corporate communications: Convention, complexity and critique (pp. 1-9). London: Sage.
corporate communications is merely a label for a field of practice: internal and external activities
that organizations bring together and seek to manage under one banner.
A management function that offers a framework and vocabulary for the effective coordination of all
means of communications with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favourable
reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is dependent.
most understandings > wholeness and totality.
Holism
The idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its
components alone. > unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of their parts.
Synergy
the phenomenon of two or more discrete influences or agents acting in common to create an effect
which is greater than the sum of the effects echt is able to create independently.
The relevance of use of metaphors for organization and communication
Metaphors is a way of describing a phenomenon in terms of something else to make sense of the
world.
But they carry blind spots. > they highlight one aspect of the problem.
it is important to combine different metaphors.
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.
Christensen, L.T., & Cornelissen J. (2011). Bridging corporate and organizational communication:
Review, development and a look into the future. Management Communication Quarterly, 25 (3),
383-414.
‘we believe that current corporate communication research is mostly focused on the controlled
handling and organization of communication.’ aim is to provide connections between the two
visions.
corporate communication seen as an umbrella term, thus seen as a common ‘mind-set’: a certain
way of thinking about and approaching an organization’s communication.
corpcom defines a whole range of new managerial activities focused on the integration, coordination
and orchestration.
