Editorial

Citation

Elving, W.J. (2011), "Editorial", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 16 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2011.16816daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 16, Issue 4

This issue marks the latest of 2011. And I do not want to repeat myself, but still these are very interesting times from a corporate communication viewpoint. This editorial is written after the downgrading of the triple A-status of the US Government and the worldwide loss on the stock markets. Maybe I frame these too much within our own field of study, but I cannot ignore the clumsy communications of this crisis again. Especially European politicians are perfectly capable of creating crisis rather than to prevent it. But we have been talking too much of how important our field of study is, and we all know its value. We need to get back to do research and report that to our peers, our students and the rest of the world.

At the end of the summer we can look back at the spring conferences being held. The Corporate and Marketing Communication Conference was held in Athens, Greece. CCIJ had the opportunity to present a best paper award for the best corporate communication paper during the conference. With the help of the organizing committee lead by Professor George G. Panigyrakis, of the Athens University of Economics and Business, we selected the paper by Prokopis Theodoridis, Athina Y. Zotou; Antigone G. Kyrousi: “Male and female attitudes towards female stereotypes: some preliminary evidence” as best paper. We hope to see their contribution soon in CCIJ.

The CCI conference was for the first time in ten years time not in Wroxton (UK), but in the hometown of CCI, New York City. Fortunately this resulted in an increase of number of submitted papers, leaving the organising committee to read more than 700 pages. In the past years we issued two awards, an academic and a practitioner award. We altered that during the conference into an empirical/academic contribution and into an award for the best applied contribution. By this we want to focus on the content of the research and papers presented, not whether the author works in academia or not. This means that scholars as well as practitioners are able to win one of the two awards.

The winners of the CCI 2011 awards in the empirical/academic category were as follows:

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  Runner up. “The voicing of ONE by many: rethinking integration within communication and brand management”, by Sophie Esmann Andersen and Trine Susanne Johansen, University of Aarhus.

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  Best paper. “Hi Fans! Tell us your story! Implementing a stewardship-centered social media strategy to maintain brand reputation during a crisis”, by L. Simone Byrd, Alabama State University (USA).

In the applied category, results were as follows:

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  Runner up. Mary Streche from Gagen MacDonald, LLC (USA) with her paper “Delivering new strategic imperatives in a changing business environment: a study of internal communication best practices in leading global businesses”.

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  Best paper. Elizabeth de Groot, who works at the Radboud University, The Netherlands, with her paper “Personal preference or policy? Language choice in a European-based international organization”.

These authors will be invited to submit a manuscript to be revised and included in one of the next issues of CCIJ, just as other papers presented at the CCI conference will be send forward to reviewers as well.

In 2012, the CCI conference will be again at Baruch College in New York City, from Tuesday June 5-Friday June 8. The deadline for submitting an abstract is December 15 2011, and a full paper needs to be completed and submitted by March 15, 2012. The CCI conference has had its successful first decade of conferences on Corporate Communication. More information can be found on the web site of Corporate Communication International at Baruch College, New York City.

By the time this issue is published, we will have held the Corporate Social Responsibility Communication (CSR Communication) Conference in Amsterdam, sponsored by the journal. More than 70 abstracts from authors from 30 different countries have submitted their work to be presented in Amsterdam. There will be a special issue of CCIJ of the best papers presented at this unique conference, which is organized in close cooperation with the associations of professionals in The Netherlands (Logeion) and Germany (DGPR) and the CSR Association in The Netherlands (MVO Nederland).

Finally, the current issue of CCIJ is a promising one again. The first article is on the readability of mission statements by Setayesh Sattari, Leyland F. Pitt and Albert Caruana, coming from Sweden, Canada and Malta. The authors analysed the mission statements of 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. The main conclusion is that most of the mission statements are understandable if you have a university degree. The second article is by Niina Meriläinen and Marita Vos, from Finland on human rights organizations and online agenda setting. In this article the authors give insights in the agenda setting tactics human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International use and that by use of online media they gain in influence in the agenda setting of the publics and politicians. The third article is by Arvid O.I. Hoffmann, Aida Tutic and Simone Wies from The Netherlands. They show higher investor relation’s quality levels and lower shareholder activism intensity for companies with educational diverse investor relations teams. In particular the presence of marketing and communication experts in investor relations teams contributes to higher investor relations quality and lower shareholder activism. The fourth article in this issue is by Mary Welch from the UK, on the engagement concept and its evolution. The fifth and last paper in this issue is by Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen from Denmark. In their article they compose an integrative framework for internal communication of a company that is facing a crisis. There is a focus on external communication of companies in crisis, but the internal part, how employees should deal with crisis is underdeveloped. This paper was selected from the EUPRERA 2010 conference, held in Jyväskylä, Finland. Both the Journal of Communication Management and Corporate Communications: An International Journal have links with EUPRERA and have agreed that the best papers from this conference will be invited to submit their work to one of these journals.

We hope that you will benefit from these great articles, and that you can use these insights for your own work and/or research.

Wim J. Elving