At the helm of ten years leading CCIJ

At the helm of ten years leading CCIJ

Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 20, Issue 4.

This editorial is my personal reflection upon the journal, my ten years of being editor in chief and corporate communications as a field.

With this fourth issue of the 20th volume of CCIJ ends my editorship. As of the next issue Timothy Coombs who recently switched to Texas A&M University, USA will take over my role as editor in chief of corporate communications. In this last editorial I will reflect upon CCIJ, its development under my editorship and its current position and its potential.

I took over during volume 11, in February 2006 from Sandy Oliver. Corporate communications at that time was an Anglo-Saxon dominated discipline reflected in the first ten issues (Elving, 2010). But having a Dutch editor reflected the increased awareness and presence of the field and the study of corporate communication in Europe.

Emerald asked me to become editor in chief to create a robust double-blind review system, that was not functioning properly before 2006. The first years were overwhelmed by the administrative burden of being editor in chief, reviewers need to be selected manually and the reviewer database needed to be updated. Fortunately Scholar One Manuscript Central was introduced in 2009, that reduced the administrative burden of being editor in chief enormously.

In the mean time, it was necessary to develop the journal further. Who are the key scholars within corporate communications, what are they writing about and how can we include them in the journal was another important task. There was a Anglo-Saxon tradition but as I noticed at various conferences corporate communications grew enormous in Europe, although many times under other labels, as communication management, strategic communication and organizational communication (Elving, 2012). We initiated several special issues, most of them succeeded, whereas others were less successful and resulted in a special section with only two articles. Among the special issues we successfully had were corporate apologia (2010), corporate marketing (2012) and CSR communication (2013, 2015), besides of course the annual issue of the Conference on Corporate Communication of Corporate Communication International which was first located at the Farleigh Dickinson University, USA, but later moved to Baruch University in New York.

In managing all these special issues there were only a few rules that needed to be applied, papers selected should have undergone a robust, double blind review procedure, and if a paper was not eligible for publication the manuscript would not be included. Because of the general theme of the CCI conference, we stopped having special issues from the conference, although authors who present their work are encouraged to submit their work to the journal. We decided that special issues should cover a theme within corporate communications, and not whole scope of the field and journal. That could give the impression that there were two ways to submit your work, a regular, but also a shortcut in submitting work for the CCI conference.

In the first years we had some difficulties in having enough copy to complete an issue. Because of our principles, we had to postpone two issues because of a lack of enough quality submissions to have a complete issue, and one issue after a burglary at my university where they took all the memory and hard disks from our computers. But with the growing interest in corporate communications, this has been never the case in the last five years, and the use of Scholar One helped in this as well, since reminders for revisions and reviews are sent automatically.

Corporate communication is growing in importance in practice and as such with number of students in master programmes. At my own University (University of Amsterdam), we started in 2011 with a Master in Corporate Communication (MCC), we grew within five years to the largest master programme (about 200 master students annually) at the department. This is also what colleagues from other universities are witnessing and also since these MCC's are offered at a variety of faculties and disciplines, we certainly can conclude that the interest in society in corporate communication still is increasing.

MCC's are offered from a wide variety of disciplines and faculties, so now the time has come to define a set of standard elements that employers can expect when they are hiring a new communication professional with a MCC. What competencies does this person have and what kind of competencies, theoretical baggage and practical skills does (s)he have. Since MCC's are offered at business schools, humanities, social sciences and language faculties, all with their own set of ideas and methodologies we need to come with a joint definition of what constitutes a MCC and in the long run might need to have an accreditation like MBA's have. Transparency and the need to fulfil certain standards are more and more important for organizations (and reflects the importance are from corporate communications), so if we as MCC's do not have these for ourselves, who are we to challenge organizations to do so. We have been discussing this already in several meetings at various conferences with about 25 different colleagues, representing all backgrounds from Europe and the USA. We are finalizing our initial thoughts in this, that will be submitted soon to this journal (Illia et al., forthcoming), and hopefully this is the starting point of an active discussion and hopefully to a set of standards for MCC's.

Internationalization has been an dominant issue during my editorship. As mentioned above, in 2006 the journal was Anglo-Saxon dominated. In the last ten years we have witnessed a growing number of European scholars (non-UK) that published their research in CCIJ. Half of the papers published are from Europe (Elving, 2015) and 30 per cent are from the traditional Anglo-Saxon countries (UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand). The remaining 20 percent comes from the other regions of the world.

An editor or an editorial advisory board has no direct influence in the country of origin of the authors who submit their work for CCIJ and of course our standards are for all authors alike, but Africa and South America, are the only regions with marginal presence in the journal. Given the fact that the journal is truly international I call upon the new editor and Emerald the publishers to drop the second part in the title: An International Journal. With solely corporate communications as title, the journal positions itself even more at the heart of the field of study, and the content and diversity of the authors show that it is a true international journal, no need for longer emphasizing this in the title!

With the growing amount of submissions for CCIJ we also saw an increase in the variety of subjects in CCIJ, but also clear linkage of important developments in society for corporations (see also Elving, 2014). We witnessed a large amount of articles in CCIJ that are dealing with CSR communication, even without counting the special issues. Communicating about CSR can be seen as a reflection of the tensions between society and organizations. Society demands more transparency of organizations and organizations realize that they are part of society and cannot act solely in their own interest. This development leads to a shift in the quests for organizations not what they are doing for society, but in a tendency in showing what benefits they can offer society in the long run. Ten years ago companies could present anything as CSR and as beneficial for society, like for instance reduction of waist, or the use of energy saving lamps. These days all efforts will be judged and scrutinized if they only are presented, and not acted upon (Golob et al., 2013; Elving et al., 2015).

Another important topic is crisis communication. Although no statistics are available, it seems that the number of crisis organizations face did grew in the last decades, but certainly our connected world makes an issue very fast into a crisis. Many cases have been presented in the journal, from the Danish milk crisis (Frandsen and Johansen, 2010), to the Norwegian terrorist attack on the small island (Falkheimer, 2014). Crisis, crisis responses and how to deal with crisis internally and externally is on top of the mind of corporate communication professionals and scholars. Every organization will face a crisis and have to be prepared. Developments in the journal show an increasing interest in internal crisis management, the way the organization are making sense of the crisis internally.

The third an last important development our field of study showed was the further expansion of communication media. Social media were introduced and used in practice and of course this was reflected in submissions to the journal. Social media have their benefits upon traditional mass media. However, we have not been able to come up with a good label for these digital media, just like new media as term, social media is not covering the whole concept of all these new media. Social network sites has not been accepted as an alternative, but social media remains a misleading label, as if a telephone call can not be social. The use of digital media has increased enormously, not only for individuals, but also for organizations. Although, organizations have in general not been successful in applying new forms of digital media, probably because these have been adopted so fast by society that experimenting and experiencing has not been possible.

A remaining important topic is internal communication. It was important in all volumes of the journal, and probably will remain important in the future. It is the backbone of all marketing communications and PR, acknowledged in concepts as employees as brand ambassadors, integrated marketing communications and internal PR and branding. This makes the position of corporate communication top of all other forms of organizational and marketing communications, which of course has been recognized in the many definitions we have about corporate communication.

Developments in society and in organizations make the position of corporate communication stronger and more vital. The field of study had been reshaped from a technical to a strategic function (Elving, 2012) before I took over. In the past we have seen a lot of research upon the position of (corporate) communication in organizations, whether corporate communication professionals had a seat in the c-suite. We have witnessed a decrease of publications in these kind of research and publications. Although we have always published about what developments professionals experience and what their challenges were, it seems less relevant to know how professionals think about the state of the profession in organizations, regions or countries. There is little theory in this kind of research, it is a reflection upon what is happening now, or what has happened yesterday, which might not be that relevant for tomorrow and does not add that much to our knowledge. We have grown into a serious and not to be denied field of study and practice, and the most recent issues not only show an increasing global presence, but also an increased robustness, and theoretical soundness of the articles in the journal.

CCIJ has played an important role in establishing this position. By applying the robust double blind review procedure we have encouraged our colleagues to apply higher standards in research and theoretical underpinnings of their research. The standards of the current submissions are that the scope and the research questions are introduced in the introduction, but also reflected upon in the discussion. What does the specific study add to our knowledge and the theories in use of our field. I know for certain, that I have frustrated authors with these fundamental issues and questions.

Also, non-corporate communication submissions increase as the journal grows in importance. Since the field is fast developing, the exact boundaries are hard to establish. Fortunately, the number of articles published in the journal, makes it easier to refer to relevant work in the journal and join the relevant discussions within corporate communications.

We have not been able to acquire an ISI ranking for the journal, despite the numerous efforts. This is one of my most frustrating things in ten years serving as editor in chief. Whereas the usage of the journal almost hits 200,000 downloads per year, CCIJ has not been ranked in the ISI system yet. We are in the process of another application, and I am confident that CCIJ will have an ISI ranking in the end. An ISI ranking is for many of our colleagues important at their universities. An ISI ranking is translated as an indication of quality and an impression of its international coverage. Having said that, ISI is also an self-serving system, it is hard to get in the system, because it requires references to the journal in the already included listed journals. But as a relative new field of study, what corporate communication still is, it is hard to get included, as we have witnessed. Articles in CCIJ should be referred to in other (listed) journals, like the management and communication journals. We have these, and the trend is that it is increasing and progressing, with more than 400 citations in 2014. Our most recent impact factor is 0.905 is also an indications of quality of the journal.

I wish Timothy Coombs all the warmth of our community as they gave to me. I hope to have established a quality scientific journal of an important, if not one of the most important fields of business and organizations, since organization and business cannot exist without communication. I thank the community for the trust in me, and I am honoured to have served you as editor in chief of corporate communications in the last ten years.

Wim J.L. Elving

References

Elving, W.J.L. (2010), “Trends and developments within corporate communication: an analysis of 10 years CCIJ”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 5-9

Elving, W.J.L. (2012), “Corporate communication positioned within communication studies”, Communication Review, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 66-77

Elving, W.J.L. (2014), “What are we publishing about: corporate communication in the last four volumes”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 125-127

Elving, W.J.L. (2015), “Country of origin and internationalization of CCIJ 2006 – 2014”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 1-6

Elving, W.J.L., Golob, U., Podnar, K., Nielsen, A.E. and Thomson, C. (2015), “The bad, the ugly and the good: new challenges for CSR communication”, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 118-127

Falkheimer, J. (2014), “Crisis communication and terrorism: the Norway attacks on 22 July 2011”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 52-63

Frandsen, F. and Johansen, W. (2010), “Apologizing in a globalizing world: crisis communication and apologetic ethics”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 350-364

Golob, U., Podnar, K., Elving, W.J.L., Nielsen, A.E., Thomson, C. and Schultz, F. (2013), “CSR communication quo vadis”, Corporate Communications, An International Journal, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 176-192

Illia, L., Elving, W.J.L., Chirstensen, L.T., Podnar, K., Lurati, F., Golob, U., Romenti, S. and Invernizi, E. (forthcoming), “Masters in corporate communication”, position paper