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Circumscribing Corporate Communications 11

in their work. The book merges reflections and insights from academic research and
professional practice, with the aim of providing a comprehensive overview of the
status and playing field of the corporate communications profession. In doing so, the
book also provides armoury to communications practitioners and senior managers
by providing valuable concepts, insights and tools that can be used in their day-to-
day practice.
In this chapter, I will start by circumscribing the field of corporate communica-
tions and will introduce the strategic management perspective that underlies the rest
of the book. First, I will discuss how corporate communications is an area of both
professional practice and theoretical inquiry, and outline how the linking of these
two domains advances our understanding of the profession.Then I will explain that
corporate communications is a multidisciplinary field with different theoretical
disciplines (e.g. mass communications, rhetorics, management) offering different lenses
for looking at it; and subsequently start defining the strategic management perspec-
tive on corporate communications that is central to this book.This perspective sug-
gests a particular way of looking at the corporate communications profession, and
indicates a number of management areas and concerns that will be covered in the
remaining chapters.As the book progresses, each of these areas will be explained in
detail, and the strategic management perspective as a whole will become more and
more clear. Good things will thus come to those who wait, and read.

1.2 The intersection of theory and practice

As with every other business and management discipline that is not only an area of
professional practice, but also the subject of theoretical inquiry, one way to start cir-
cumscribing corporate communications is by considering theory and practice and
how both these domains relate to one another.Academics concerned with building
theories and communications professionals who are more immediately involved
in the nitty-gritty detail of executing communications programmes, obviously have
very different orientations to the corporate communications field.Yet, as I will sug-
gest,combining theoretical and practitioner orientations will be advantageous in that
it leads to theory and practice informing each other and ultimately will advance our
understanding of the field of corporate communications as a whole.

Traditional views of theory and practice
in corporate communications

Traditionally,however,this view of linking theory and practice was not widely shared
within corporate communications or adjacent management fields. Many academic
commentators in these fields traditionally have been ‘on the defensive’ in that they
have argued against closer links between theoretical inquiry and practice. In fact,
some academics have even considered virtually all kinds of practitioner intervention
and mediation in academia, including applied research and consultancy, as detrimen-
2
tal to the academic enterprise of basic, fundamental research. In the view of these
academics, theorizing and academic research are naturally directed at fundamental