Corporate Communications

Convention, Complexity and Critique

Lars Thoeger Christensen, Mette Morsing, George Cheney, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412931038, 9781412931021
• eBook ISBN: 9781473902626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

The field of corporate communications describes the practices organizations use to communicate as coherent corporate `bodies?. Drawing on the metaphor of the body and on a variety of theories and disciplines the text challenges the idealized notion that organizations can and should communicate as unified wholes.

The authors pose important questions such as:

- Where does the central idea of corporate communications come from?

- What are the underlying assumptions of most corporate communications practices?

- What are the organizational and ethical challenges of attempting truly `corporate? communication?

Clearly written with international vignettes and executive briefings, this book shows that in a complex world the management of communication needs to embrace multiple opinions and voices.

Rewarding readers with a deeper understanding of corporate communications, the text will be a `must read? for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars, in the arenas of corporate communications, organizational communication, employee relations, marketing, public relations and corporate identity management. Practitioners in these areas will be provoked to re-examine their assumptions and habits.

PART I

The New Corporeal Project

1

The Emergence of Corporate Communications

Rehabilitating the Corporate “Soul”

The traditional potency of the family, the church, and the local community suddenly seemed dwarfed by the sway of the giant corporations. This momentous shift in the balance of social forces created a crisis of legitimacy for the large corporation.

Roland Marchand (1998: 2)

Introduction

When we talk about current management trends, we often ignore their historical dimension. Some developments, like corporate blogging, are obviously fairly new: they are made possible by the development of digital communication technologies. Most trends, however, have precursors in the history of business enterprise. This is true also for corporate communications. As a field of practice, corporate communications dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century where major corporations felt a growing need to justify their practices to the general public. To do so, they depicted themselves as vital and benevolent institutions of society. A similar trend is visible in today’s corporate communications. While the scope of the field, its vocabulary, and the specific techniques of its practice have developed in a number of important respects (see also Chapter 5), most of its basic concerns remain the same. In this chapter, we take our point of departure in the field’s historical heritage, but show how it has developed into a multi-disciplinary and strategic discipline concerned with the management of communications at many different levels. In particular, the chapter will address the following issues and questions:

Chapter 1: Points of Challenge

• The driving force behind corporate communications has always been the quest for social legitimacy. How is the issue of legitimacy different in the communication world of today?
• Corporate communications has become a management function with strategic ambitions. How does that ambition change the role of communication?
• By incorporating multiple fields of theory and practice, corporate communications blurs the boundaries between internal and external communication. What are the implications for our notions of senders, receivers and communication purpose?

The Quest for Legitimacy

For more than a century, the driving force behind corporate communications has been the same: social legitimacy. In his masterful account of the rise of corporate imagery in the USA, historian Roland Marchand illustrates how the development of corporate communications is a story of an ongoing legitimation crisis for big business. Although public sentiments toward business corporations have shifted many times over the last century, the feeling among large corporations that their social and moral legitimacy is at stake has persisted over the years. From the anti-monopoly sentiment of the late nineteenth century to the expansion and concentration of business during the Second World War and beyond, the size and power of major corporations have been recurrent issues shaping corporate communications in the USA. In spite of its legal legitimacy, the growth of the great corporation and its large-scale concentration of capital – often exhibited by extravagant headquarters and massive factory complexes – fostered the feeling that the corporation had become detached from the local community that supported it. Toward the end of the ninenteenth century, a growing number of voices in the USA regarded the big business corporation as a “body” without a soul.

The basic strategy of corporate communications has been with us for around 150 years.

Early corporate communications campaigns reflected, in the words of Marchand, a “quest for a corporate soul,” (1998: 4) in other words, a desire to restore the social role of the corporation in the eyes of the public. Hoping to fill the vacuum left by traditional institutions of authority, such as family, church and neighbourhood, corporations increasingly depicted themselves as social institutions with responsibilities and aspirations beyond their commercial activities. However, while some corporate leaders undoubtedly had wider social aspirations, the typical corporate communications campaign aimed to make the public understand and, eventually, hold affection for the company. This is what we mean by the corporate quest for social legitimacy: the pursuit by corporations to be seen as essential and accepted members of the larger community.

BOX 1.1 Legitimacy

The word legitimacy derives from the Latin legitimare and refers to the state or quality of being rightful and justifiable. Legitimacy is considered a basic condition for rule: without a minimal amount of legitimacy, a system of rule will degenerate to a simple coercive system. In political science, the notion of legitimacy is used to refer to the popular acceptance of a governing regime or law. This indicates that legitimacy must be distinguished from legality. An action can be legal without being legitimate (as in the case of an immoral law) just as an action can be seen as legitimate without being legal (as in civil disobedience). Legitimacy has also been applied to non-political situations, such as the (il)legitimacy of a corporation operating in a developing country, using natural resources and hiring local workers and thus impacting on both natural and social environments.

Legitimacy is linked to questions of consent, whether this is tacit or expressed more explicitly.

Following the works of the sociologists Max Weber (1978) and Talcot Parsons (1960), the notion of legitimacy has attracted considerable attention among organizational scholars addressing the normative and cognitive forces that constrain, construct and empower organizational actors. According to professor of sociology and law Mark C. Suchman “legitimacy is a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions” (1995: 574). Based on this definition, Suchman identifies two approaches to legitimacy: a strategic-legitimacy and an institutional-legitimacy approach. In the strategic-legitimacy approach, legitimacy serves a function and is designed and controlled by managers to achieve a favourable perception among the organization’s stakeholders. In the institutional-legitimacy approach, legitimacy is a set of constitutive beliefs constructed by social institutions. It is therefore out of managerial control, but nevertheless permeates the organization entirely. This is the case, for example, when health programmes become a norm for organizations even though they are initiated by health associations to promote people’s health or by the state to reduce welfare expenditure caused by obesity and diabetes. So, from a strategic-legitimacy approach, top managers may take a number of initiatives to promote the company’s social legitimacy, but if these activities for some reason oppose institutionalized expectations to corporate behaviour, the organization may not be perceived as socially legitimate. From an institutional perspective, social legitimacy extends far beyond managerial decisions and actions.

Organizational legitimacy is a socially constructed set of assumptions about proper corporate behaviour.

Large American companies practised corporate communications long before it became an established discipline. Marchand describes how the US Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1908 initiated a number of communication campaigns with the aim of explaining and justifying its monopoly status in US society. Hoping to protect the corporation from public ownership or increased regulation, AT&T argued that the company’s size reflected its responsibility as a national provider (“Making a Neighborhood of a Nation”) and its ability and willingness to deliver a universal service across the country (“In the Public Service”). Simultaneously, the campaigns sought to integrate the associated Bell companies into one unified Bell system. Through the alignment of all advertising to the same style, AT&T’s strategy was to create an appearance of national uniformity in all its messages and campaigns. Because the company needed to prove its legitimacy not only to the public but also to itself, internal and external messages were often combined, with the company speaking simultaneously to employees about their indispensable service function in a national network and to customers about their prospective access to a seamless communication “highway”. These AT&T campaigns were supplemented by wide-ranging PR material, including books, magazines, newspapers and films, all ostensibly for educational purposes. AT&T’s efforts were among the most comprehensive and professional attempts to engage in corporate communications during the first half of the twentieth century. Gradually, other corporations and industries embarked on similar efforts. Among the most prominent industries on this arena were railroads, automobile manufacturers, steel producers, the meatpacking industry and of course oil. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, described itself as one big railroad family in which the employees worked as a unified body governed by the head of the family, that is, by top management. As early as the late 1920s, General Motors (GM) launched its first corporate branding campaign. Drawing on metaphors like “neighbourhood” and “family”, the campaign was designed to create a higher level of organizational coherence among GM’s employees and produce a more clear and distinct image in its surroundings.

Early corporate communications campaigns depicted corporations as tightly knit families or unified bodies with social concerns.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many corporations were involved in extensive corporate communications efforts. At the beginning of the new century, these efforts were expanded considerably. In addition to institutional advertising campaigns, like the ones from AT&T or GM, corporations sought to build and shape their images through the design of urban department stores, through the introduction of corporate welfare programmes, or through their presence at trade fairs, which grew in importance and sophistication during the first half of the twentieth century. Before the end of the Second World War, many of the communication practices associated with contemporary corporate communications programmes were already widely known and applied among large business corporations. Thus, corporate branding, integrated communications, social responsibility, sponsoring, image analyses and even storytelling are not nearly as new as we tend to assume. To managers of the 1940s and beyond, they were already regarded as indispensable communication activities, necessary to grant legitimacy to the modern business corporation.

The efforts made by corporations to present themselves as unified bodies have deep historical roots.

Yet, much has changed. Since the Second World War, and particularly during the last few decades, the issue of social legitimacy has intensified dramatically. Under the impact of globalization and new communication technologies, contemporary organizations are facing more critical, outspoken and educated audiences than organizations in the past. In contemporary society, where corporations are expected to play a far more active social role, they often find their “licence to operate” challenged by powerful and well-organized publics. In some towns in the USA, for example, there have been moves to revoke corporate charters. And for many organizations, legitimacy continues to be a salient issue, regardless of what the organization does to improve its moral and social standing in the eyes of the public. TDC, for example, a former state-owned monopoly of Denmark and now one of the largest telecommunications providers in Northern Europe, has for many years been a target of public criticism. The company has initiated many activities within the area of corporate social responsibility, such as the integration of disabled employees, the arrangement of work practices for disadvantaged youth, the integration of ethnic minorities, as well as economic support and collaboration with Welfare for Children, a non-governmental organization working to improve conditions for disadvantaged children. Still, the company has great difficulties escaping the type of public attention and scrutiny that surrounded it per its former status. While institutionalized expectations to TDC’s societal engagement are high, its social initiatives are often overshadowed by media attention to issues like layoffs, remuneration of top management, shareholder profits and sale of stocks to hedge funds. As an icon of telecommunications, TDC simultaneously finds itself criticized for the shortcomings of the entire industry. Public perception of poor service in the telecommunications industry, for example, often shapes the image of TDC even though the service of other major providers may be just as poor.

In contemporary society, the issue of organizational legitimacy has intensified dramatically.

With the issue of legitimacy reappearing in new and complex ways, the field of corporate communications has changed accordingly. During the last decades, the field has been shaped by three central developments: communicative expansion, disciplinary convergence and strategic concentration. The remainder of this chapter will elaborate on these developments.

Communicative Expansion

Today the scope of corporate communications has expanded to the corporate body in toto, encompassing more and more communication functions and activities. Some writers even talk about “total communications” (Åberg, 1990) to describe the tendency for corporate communications to become a pervasive organizational practice that involves both externally and internally directed communication activities. According to mainstream textbooks, corporate communications comprise the following range of communication functions (Dolphin, 1999; Goodman, 1994):

• marketing communication, including advertising and customer relations;
• business-to-business communication;
• image and profiling activities, including sponsorships;
• public affairs, including media relations, government relations and lobbying;
• financial relations, including investor relations;
• financial and non-financial reporting;
• labour relations;
• crisis communication and issues management;
• employee communication, including work instructions and training programmes; and
• technical communication.

The expansion of the field, however, goes further. Organizations of today conceive of virtually everything they say and do as potential communication. Thus, in addition to the formal communication activities mentioned above, organizations include a growing amount of organizational dimensions in their communication package, for example: leadership, personnel, architecture and design, accounting practices, investment policies, production methods, resource generation and use, waste disposal, inter-organizational collaboration, product information and so on. Within this expanded communication universe, the question of integration becomes urgent: How can the many symbols, messages and behaviours be aligned in order for the organization to retain its credibility and legitimacy vis-à-vis its different audiences? While the integration p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue - Images of Corporate Communications
• PART I THE NEW CORPOREAL PROJECT
• PART II BEHIND THE CORPOREAL PROJECT
• Epilogue - Challenging the “Bodily” Pursuit
• The Artist
• The Authors
• References
• Index