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96 Corporate Communications in Practice

strategic action and evaluation stages. Each of these stages is discussed in some detail
as, figuratively speaking, they are the grist for the mill in strategy, and as they are
important when it comes to considering how, in practice, managers might develop
and implement a corporate communications strategy. Such an understanding of the
full process of strategy is also important, as still in many organizations managers pay
lip service to the notion of corporate communications as a strategy and rather view
it as a tactical plan.The final part of this chapter builds on from this review of strategy
practices to raise some challenges and issues concerning strategy development in
corporate communications.Among other things, it discusses the need for executive
support and for savvy professionals with an understanding of strategic management
as critical factors for effective corporate communications strategies.

4.2 Perspectives on strategy in corporate
communications

Over the last 30 years or so, strategy has become established as a legitimate field of
1
research and managerial practice. On the practice side, the massive interest in strat-
egy in a sense reflects the complexity of managing contemporary organizations,
which forces managers to think about strategic courses of action for their organiza-
tion in interactions with markets, publics or stakeholders in the environment (see
Chapter 2). In the subsequent evolution of research and thinking on strategy, a diver-
2
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sity of paradigms or schools of thought has since emerged. Mintzberg has forcefully
argued that the concept of strategy itself has variously been defined as a plan (i.e.
a specific guide or course of action in the future), a ploy (i.e. a specific manoeuvre
to outwit an opponent or competitor), a pattern (i.e. consistency in behaviour over
time), a position (i.e. the location of products in certain markets), or a perspective
(i.e. an organization’s fundamental way of doing things). Also, the process of strategy
formation within organizations has become variously depicted in these different par-
adigms as following a rational planning mode, in which objectives are set out and
methodically worked out into comprehensive action plans, as a more flexible intui-
tive or visionary process, or as rather incremental or emergent in nature, with the
process of strategy formation being rather continuous and iterative. Each of these
paradigms thus varies in whether the process of strategy formation is characterized
and described as top-down or bottom-up, as deliberate and planned or ad-hoc and
spontaneous, as analytical versus visionary, and whether it assumes perfect rational-
ity versus bounded rationality. And, of course, processes of strategy formation may
vary across organizations, emphasizing one or more of these elements from strategy
theorizing.

General perspectives of strategy

Moving beyond the diversity and the distinct views presented by each of these
different schools of thought, there is also a large consensus and some general patterns
in thinking about strategy concerning the following three points.