Citation
Elving, W.J.L. (2014), "What we are publishing about: corporate communication in the last four volumes", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-02-2014-0010
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
What we are publishing about: corporate communication in the last four volumes
Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 19, Issue 2
The number of submissions of manuscripts for CCIJ again increased in the last year, as did the number of downloads. We have already picked the prize-winning articles of Volume 18 (these can be found elsewhere in this issue). At the beginning of this decade in 2010 I presented an overview of the last ten years of publications in CCIJ, and I made some predictions of upcoming trends. It is interesting to see whether these trends, almost five years later did come out (to see whether there is some predictive value in my editorials). I did state the following:
Corporate identity, reputation and corporate social responsibility will almost certainly remain significant during the coming years, along with branding processes. The rise of the utilisation of social media in society will also be of great interest to the corporate world. The corporate world is changing as a result of the financial crisis. The transparency of organisations will be an important issue in the years to come, as well as internal and change communication (Elving, 2010).
Therefore, the subjects of the articles in all issues of volumes 15, 16, 17 and 18 have been categorised. Of course we need to keep in mind that we had, besides the annual Corporate Communication Institute annual Special Issues (Volume 15 No. 2, Volume 16 No. 3, and Volume 17 No. 3), four Special Issues in these volumes. The first was an issue on corporate apologia (Volume 15 No. 4), while the second (Volume 18 No. 2) was on CSR communication, based on the conference we held in 2011 in Amsterdam. The third Special Issue (Volume 17 No. 4) in this frame was on corporate marketing and the last Special Issue was on corporate heritage (Volume 18 No. 3). If we exclude the Special Issues, we see that CSR and CSR communication still remains the most popular subject in the articles of these four volumes. Second comes crisis communication, with a remarkable increase in papers on internal crisis communication, or how a corporate crisis is dealt with within the company that caused or is central to the crisis. These figures justify the topics for the Special Issues on CSR communication and corporate apologia.
Popular and predicted subjects are social media, and corporate reputation. We expect more on these two subjects in future issues. The number of articles dealing with financial reporting and investor relations is remarkable. These are very relevant themes within corporate communication, although I have the feeling that we do not pay a lot of interest them. For instance, if we judge the most popular textbooks, investor relations and financial communication have not received a chapter in these.
Also there are relatively many articles in these four volumes of CCIJ on stakeholder theory and communication management; these remain important, especially when issue management is involved, for instance in the relevance of issue arenas (Luoma-aho and Vos, 2010). Another unexpected popular subject was articles on language-related issues and on business writing.
However, the subjects show again the broad definition of corporate communications and the many interesting themes around corporate communications. In my view it also shows the vitality of corporate communications and the broad interests of the corporate communication community.
Starting this year we have increased the number of words allowed for manuscripts. Where we always had a maximum of 6,000 words, we have increased that to 8,000 words. The 6,000-word limit was too minimal, and many authors had troubles with having this word limit. We hope by increasing this word limit we have to desk reject fewer manuscripts because of this. Of course we will still desk reject manuscripts that exceed this word limit.
We again are able to present you a very interesting issue. The popularity of crisis communication and the internal angle of it are presented in the first article of this issue. Mats Heide and Charlotte Simonsson conclude that communication professionals have a rather limited role in internal crisis communication. Their role is primarily focused on information distribution through the intranet, even though they are also involved in strategic, managerial work during the acute stage of the crisis. Communication professionals are first and foremost called for once the crisis has already occurred, which can be seen as a “communication on demand approach, which limits a strategic orientation. In their paper some new roles and practices for communication professionals are suggested, which involve a strategic approach and cover all the stages of crisis. The second article, “Conceptualizing communicative leadership – a framework for analysing and developing leaders communication competence, by Catrin Johansson, Vernon Miller and Solange Hamrin, presents insights into leaders communication competence. The authors have created a theoretical framework around the concept of “communicative leadership, which can contribute to future research and the development of leaders communication competence.
The third article in this issue deals with financial communication and investor relations. Matthew Ragas and Alexander Laskin suggest a mixed-method way of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, some non-financial and relationship management-focused. Luca Cian and Sara Cervai propose a new framework and a standard terminology for reputation, corporate image, projected image, construed image, organizational identity and organizational culture in the fourth paper of this issue. In the fifth paper, Marita Vos, Henny Schoemaker and Vilma Luoma-aho compose a research agenda into issues, very important in corporate communications, and in issue arenas.
The final paper in this issue, by Alessandra Mazzei, suggests a multidisciplinary approach for the understanding of corporate communication. This multidisciplinary approach is developed with marketing and other related areas of study.
Wim J.L. Elving
References
Elving, W.J.L. (2010), “Trends and developments within corporate communication: an analysis of ten years of CCIJ, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 5–8
Luoma-aho, V. and Vos, M. (2010), “Towards a more dynamic stakeholder model: acknowledging multiple issue arenas, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 315–331