Introduction

Citation

Goodman, M.B. (2006), "Introduction", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 11 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2006.16811caa.001

Introduction

Michael B. Goodman PhD is the Founder and Director of the Corporate Communication Institute, and Professor of Corporate Communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University, serving as Director of Graduate Programs in Corporate Communication for 16 years. He has taught business and corporate communication courses at Bangkok University (Thailand), Baruch College CUNY, New York University, New York Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and SUNY at Stony Brook. Since, 1981 Dr Goodman has been a consultant in corporate communication, managerial communication, problem solving, new business proposals, change, and corporate culture. He has published widely, most recently: Work with Anyone Anywhere: A Guide to Global Business; “Today’s Corporate Communication Function” in Handbook of Corporate Communication and Strategic Public Relations; Corporate Communication for Executives. He is at work on “While you were looking the other way – forces redefining corporate communication strategy” with Cleve Langton and Peter Hirsch. He is a Member of the Arthur W. Page Society, a Fellow of the RSA (The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce), and a Fellow of The Society for Technical Communication. He is VP Eastern Region and Member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Business Communication. He received his BA from the University of Texas at Austin, and his MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Every day corporate communication professionals face important social, political, and economic issues – environment, economy, education, security, justice. They also are faced with the challenge of keeping pace with rapid change, of communicating and building reputation, of modeling the concepts of “truth” and “trust” as the common currency of a robust world civilization, and of meeting the rise in anti-Americanism and anti-globalism. These issues present considerable, but surmountable challenges for business and corporate communication professionals.

Since, its first offering as a regional conference in 1988, it has been the premise of the Conference on Corporate Communication that relationships among scholars and practitioners are an essential element of the social glue that binds civilized people together. And international meetings are important to build and maintain trust among professionals with common interests and goals, but who are disbursed around the world.

It is in this spirit that once again corporate executives and university scholars met in Wroxton, England in June 2005 to exchange information and explore communication from a global perspective.

The CCI Conference on Corporate Communication 2005 was intended to:

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  illuminate the interest in corporate communication as a strategic function in organizational success;

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  explore the influence of globalization on the corporate communication profession as it relates to theory, practice, roles, processes, and ethics;

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  continue as a forum for the exchange of ideas and information among industry and university representatives; and

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  indicate trends and provide analysis for communication professionals, university faculty, and others interested in corporate communication.

The confluence of changes in the political landscape in the USA, the UK, and the European Union was the subject of the keynote panel, “Transatlantic Triple Witching Hour: Communication, Trade, and Policy,” headed by Dr Alison Holmes, Director of British American Business, Inc. and Dr Nicholas D.J. Baldwin, author of Parliament in the 21st Century. The three-day conference featured speakers from Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, the UK, and the USA. The papers, presentations, and discussions were of essential issues: corporate reputation and identity, leadership communication, communication and technology, global corporate relations, crisis communication, communication measurement, communication strategy and rhetoric, communication in dispersed environments, communication theory and practice, communication research, organizational change and memory, outsourcing, blogs and webcasts, the communication challenges of cross cultural teams and the virtual workforce, the increasing role of corporate social responsibility, the complexity of global corporate relations.

The papers published in this issue of CCIJ were selected from the papers presented at the conference.

Bojinka Bishop’s “Theory and Practice Converge: A Proposed Set of Corporate Communication Principles” reports on empirical research which tested the use and value of ten specific characteristics of communication – the principles of authentic communication – and based on the findings, recommends them as corporate communication best practices.

“Communication of Corporate Social Responsibility by Portuguese Banks: A Ligitimacy Theory Perspective” by Manuel Castelo Branco and Lúcia Lima Rodrigues examines social responsibility information disclosure on the internet by Portuguese banks and compares the internet and annual reports as disclosure media. They conclude that “legitimacy theory may be an explanation of social responsibility disclosure by Portuguese banks.”

Elisabeth Combes-Thuélin, Sandrine Henneron, and Philippe Touron’s, “Risk Regulations and Financial Disclosure: an Investigation Based on Corporate Communication in French Traded Companies” explores disclosure as a critical issue of corporate communication and its implementation in publicly traded companies in the USA and Europe to promote transparency. The increase of mandatory risk reporting applying to companies leads to the question of whether or how companies are compliant with these regulations. The answer itself implies further questions: what is required to be disclosed? And what is risk?

Krishna S. Dhir’s “Corporate Communication through Nonviolent Rhetoric: Environmental, Agency and Methodological Prerequisites” examines some of the problems associated with the prevailing rhetoric in corporate communication. Dhir proposes the consideration of nonviolent rhetorical approaches.

Miranda Y.P. Lee, Daniel W.C. So, and Lornita Y.F. Wong’s “An inter-linguistic and inter-cultural analysis of global corporate websites” identifies inter-linguistic and inter-cultural commonalities and differences between web sites targeting, respectively, English and Chinese viewers, and examines within-language and within-culture variations of web sites for viewers in Greater China.

John McIlheran’s “The Use of Humor in Corporate Communication” investigates how humor can be used to help improve understanding of a message.

Gilmar J. Santos’ “Card Sort Technique as a Qualitative Substitute for Quantitative Exploratory Factor Analysis” advocates that qualitative research tools can replace and merge with quantitative ones, in order to simplify the task of gathering and processing information. This study demonstrates how a qualitative technique was successfully used to replace a quantitative tool.

Michael B. GoodmanDirector of Corporate Communication Institute and Associate Editor for North America, CCIJ