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Session Submission Type: Roundtable Proposal
This panel intervenes in scholarly thinking about corporate communication by drawing from the perspectives of cultural and media studies. Corporate communication has been classically understood as a the “framework in which all communications specialists… integrate the totality of the organizational message, thereby helping to define corporate image as a means to improving corporate performance" (C.B.M. Van Riel, as qtd. in Kitchen 1997: 22). This robust area of research has examined how corporations communicate effectively with stakeholders, including employees, consumers, investors, and members of the public. Administrative work in communication studies assesses how corporations may better manage crisis, and how intraorganizational communication facilitates decision-making, among other topics.
While these remain worthwhile goals, our panel seeks to place them in dialogue with scholarship in media and cultural studies that considers how corporations use communication to influence action, manage present and future risk, and shape perceptions in ways that amplify corporate power (Power 2007, 2016; Kiechel 2010; Lury and Moor 2010; Marchand 1998).
Our goal is to not only expand ideas about what constitutes corporate communication, but to theorize what it might mean to consider the corporation as first, foremost, and primarily a communicative/media object. This approach allows us to account for the expanded functions of today’s corporation as (inter)mediary, platform, and underwriter of public communication.
Members of the roundtable assess the tournaments of value, forms of legitimacy, and regimes of control that corporations adopt in their capacity as communicative/media objects. By critically intervening in corporate communication, our aim is to assess how communication has become a form of management, and with what implications for public life. The rationalized, solutions-oriented, practicable approach to communication contained in such corporate innovations as consulting work, obtaining a social “license” to operate, or “impact” investing, as well as the technological platforms that enable such forms of communication (e.g., crowdsourcing or crowdfunding, hashtags, interoffice time management and accounting systems) deserve critical attention as an ensemble by media scholars.
References
Kitchen, P. J. (1997). Was public relations a prelude to corporate communications? Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 2(1), 22-30.
Lury, C. & Moor, L. 2010. Brand valuation and topological culture. Pp. 29-52 in Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture, eds. M. Aronczyk & D. Powers. New York: Peter Lang.
Marchand, R. (1998). Creating the corporate soul. Berkeley: U of California Press.
Power, M. (2016). Riskwork: Essays on the organizational life of risk management. New York: Oxford University Press.
Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty: Designing a world of risk management. New York: Oxford University Press.
Consultants and the Communication of Ambiguity - Devon Powers, Temple U
Communicating Corporate Environmentalism - Melissa Aronczyk, Rutgers University
Corporate Reputation Management and Communicative Capitalism: A Love Story - Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario
Feeling Ethical: Affect, Storytelling, and Impact Investors - Zenia Kish, Stanford U
Some Observations on Corporate Communication and Personal Finance - Liz Moor, Goldsmiths, U of London