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48 Mapping the Field

that these corporate communications managers in the Netherlands and France work
‘from the position that the total communications effort must serve the corporate
strategy, the importance of which is paramount’ and that they therefore ‘found it
natural to link the two disciplines’. 32
5. Adoption of the vocabulary and concepts of corporate communications. The term
‘corporate communications’ has made a steady inroad into professionals’ vocabulary,
as well as in job and departmental titles.This adoption of the term and its associated
vocabulary is in part political as it underlines the decline of public relations as the
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field’s guiding descriptive term. Olasky, among many others, has noted that practi-
tioners of public relations have become associated with a litany of derogatory terms
such as ‘tools of the top brass’,‘hucksters’,‘parrots’,‘low-life liars’ and ‘impotent, eva-
sive, egomaniacal, and lying’; and that corporate communications seems a politically
better alternative. But the change is also more than just political or nominal, as
corporate communications’ central concepts of stakeholder, identity and reputation
are on top of the professional agenda and have in fact become central to the current
practice of communications management. A survey of Fortune 500 companies in
2001 found that managing reputation was considered the lead philosophy among
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communications departments. And identity, the question of what the company is
and stands for, is considered by many senior managers and communications practi-
tioners as one of the cornerstones of stakeholder engagement and communications
programmes.
The adoption of the vocabulary and tools of corporate communications is, as
Chapter 3 outlines, linked to the rise of the stakeholder model of strategic manage-
ment, which required a broader, strategic and management oriented communica-
tions function in comparison with the craft and tactical communications approaches
of before. Freeman, one of the intellectual leaders of stakeholder theory, suggested in
1984 that ‘the stakeholder approach requires a redefinition of the public relations
function which builds on the communications skills of PR professionals, yet is
responsive to the real business environment of today’. Freeman acknowledged the
need for savvy communications professionals who can build and maintain relation-
ships with key stakeholders,but maintained that ‘in the current business environment
the concepts and tools that have evolved for PR managers to use are increasingly
ineffective’. Speaking in 1984, he even went on to suggest that because of these
traditional concepts and tools such as ‘the vitriolic press release,the annual report,a slick
videotape,corporate philanthropy,etc.today’s PR manager is a sacrificial lamb on the
35
altar of multiple stakeholder dissatisfaction with corporate performance’. Freeman’s
analysis, albeit somewhat charged, did point to the crux of the matter at that time.
New concepts and tools were effectively needed for managing communications with
stakeholders and for understanding how communications could be strategically
employed to meet organizational objectives. Corporate communications is the strate-
gic management function that has since arisen to this end. Within the corporate
communications framework communications to stakeholders is approached and
managed in a strategic manner through the central concepts of identity and reputa-
tion, and communications programmes are more clearly linked to the corporate
strategy and corporate objectives. To illustrate the adoption of the stakeholder model
of strategic management within the world of business, Box 2.2 presents a case study