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Circumscribing Corporate Communications 13

FIELD OF

theoretical professional
inquiry practice

CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS
Figure 1.1 The intersection of theory and practice in corporate communications

are more closely related to practice. New insights and knowledge will in fact come
from well-established collaborative links between academics and practitioners, which
ensures validity in the collection and codification of data,offers anchorage for abstrac-
tions and data and tests for hypotheses, and also provides for new understandings that
may arise from putting academic knowledge into practice.A good example of such
conjoining of academic and practitioner forces is the Reputation Institute,an organi-
zation committed to the development of reputation measures that are academically
rigorous and valid, but at the same time practical enough to be used by communi-
cations consultancies and market research agencies in practice. 5
In essence, I believe that combining the specific and localized knowledge that
comes out of the intelligent reflection and applied research of professionals in prac-
tice with academic research that is generally more conceptual and global in outlook
will enlarge our overall knowledge base of the corporate communications field.
Brinberg and Hirschman have made a similar point with their claim that academic
research should be laid next to more applied practitioner reflections and research so
that the knowledge coming out of both can inform and complement one another.
The net result is that our overall base of knowledge is enriched because each study
addresses it from an alternative orientation.The strengths of one orientation (e.g. the rela-
tive emphasis on the development of the conceptual model in academic research) com-
pensate for the weaknesses of another orientation (e.g. the lack of emphasis on the
conceptual model in practitioner research). 6

At this point, it will have become clear that I favour a close link between theory
and practice in order to enhance our overall knowledge and understanding of the
field (see Figure 1.1); and I have also taken this principle at heart in writing this
book so that the most comprehensive overview available of the corporate commu-
nications field is provided to the reader. But there is also a second reason for favour-
ing this mutually supportive interplay of the theoretical and the practical; namely
that such an interplay can advance the day-to-day practice of communications
practitioners.