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Circumscribing Corporate Communications 17

Theory perspectives on corporate communications

The past decades have witnessed a marked increase in the volume of research into
corporate communications. Initially, and until well after 1950, research on the man-
agement of communications between an organization and its stakeholders was scat-
tered out among scientific disciplines and mainly completed by researchers working
in areas such as social psychology, sociology and even economics and industrial rela-
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tions. More recently theoretical strands and research activities that previously were
disparate have been woven together and integrated into a single theoretical discipline
of corporate communications. This theoretical discipline, which in large parts of
the world, particularly the US, is still labelled as ‘public relations’, has started to
bring together a considerable amount of research and, as the nexus for these
researches, added them up to a coherent whole. In doing so, the corporate com-
munications field has increasingly started to grant itself credibility and independent
status as a field of theoretical inquiry (instead of being defined as a subset of mass
communications theory, for instance) and is now seen by many as ‘maturing’ in its
theoretical scope, sophistication of its analysis and the many new insights that it has
brought. 16
As a result of this consolidation, two dominant theoretical strands can now be
seen to form the foundation of the theoretical field of corporate communications:
(1) theoretical perspectives informed by communications theory; and (2) theoretical
perspectives informed by management theory. Both these theoretical strands subsume a
huge variety of academic research that employs very different theoretical frameworks
and focuses by and large on different areas of the corporate communications field
(Table 1.2).The rhetorical and critical perspectives on corporate communications,
the dominant theoretical perspectives within the communications strand, for their
part, primarily focus on the rhetorical strategies and symbolism within messages
issued by an organization, and the effects that these rhetorics and symbolism have on
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individuals and society as a whole. Rhetorical analysis, dwelling upon communi-
cations theory, thus concerns itself principally with the phenomenon, process and
effects of communications as rhetorical scholars believe that symbolic behaviour is
the essence of how relationships between organizations and stakeholders or publics
are created and influenced. Cheney and Dionisopoulous illustrate this claim for the
centrality of communications by arguing that symbolism ‘must be considered as the
substance of organization’, and that ‘corporate communications must be self-
conscious about its role in the organizational process (which is fundamentally rhetorical
and symbolic) in responding to and in exercising power (in public discourse) and in
shaping various identities (corporate and individual)’. 18
The management strand of theory and research on corporate communications is
in contrast with the rhetorical and critical perspectives not so much concerned with
the act or process of communicating by organizations and its influence upon targeted
groups and society at large, but with the management processes that professionals
engage in to build relationships with stakeholders. From this management perspec-
tive, the focus is thus not on the symbolic act of communicating, as this is only seen
as a means to an end (the end being the building and maintaining of favourable
reputations and relationships with key stakeholders), but on the analysis, planning,