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98 Corporate Communications in Practice

mission of the organization – what it is, what it wants to be, and what it wants to
do – with what the environment will allow or encourage it to do. Often therefore,
strategy is characterized as continuous and adaptive in that it needs to be responsive
to external opportunities and threats that may confront an organization. A broad
consensus thus exists in the strategy literature that strategy is essentially concerned
with a process of managing the interaction between an organization and its external
environment so as to ensure the best ‘fit’ between the two.

Perspectives of corporate communications strategy

Given that the central concern of strategy is with matching or aligning the organi-
zation’s mission, and its resources and capabilities, with the opportunities and chal-
lenges in the environment, one would perhaps have expected lengthy discussions in
the strategy literature about the stakeholders that constitute the environment. But
this, unfortunately, has not been the case.Although the concept of environment per-
vades the literature on strategic management, until recently it has been conceptua-
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lized in ‘general, even rather vague’ terms. Environments were and often still are just
characterized, as Chapter 3 already outlined, in terms of markets or operating
domains, which ignores the whole range of other stakeholder groups that nowadays
have a profound impact upon an organization’s strategic scope and operations.What
is more, one would expect acknowledgement on the part of strategy scholars for the
role of corporate communications as a ‘boundary-spanning’ function, where the
function’s key concepts and tools for mapping stakeholders and stakeholder reputa-
tions could easily fill the ‘environmental void’ in theories of strategic management. 8
Here it is suggested that boundary-spanning functions can play a key role in the
process of managing such environmental interaction.As a boundary-spanning func-
tion, corporate communications operates at the interface between the organization
and its environment; to help gather, relay and interpret information from the envi-
ronment as well as representing the organization to the outside world.The academics
White and Dozier, for instance, argue in this respect that ‘when organizations make
decisions, they do so based on a representation of both the organization itself and its
environment’, and they go on to suggest that communications practitioners should
therefore play an important role in shaping perceptions of the environment and the
organization itself among decision-makers. 9
However, this role of corporate communications is not reflected in most strate-
gic management theories. In these strategy theories, communications is often still
seen as a largely tactical or ‘functionary’activity,in which professionals are considered
‘communications technicians’. In such a view, communications is concerned primar-
ily with sending out messages and publicizing a favourable image for an organization
with little, if any, involvement in more strategically important activities such as envi-
ronmental scanning, analysis or management counselling. Moving beyond these
strategy theories,White and Dozier argue that this picture is also repeated in prac-
tice with their suggestion that for the vast majority of organizations, the strategic
potential of corporate communications in its boundary-spanning role appears to go
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largely unrealized.This is the case,White and Dozier argue, as senior management
equally tends to treat communications largely as a tactical function, concerned