Content area
Full Text
Joep Cornelissen: Joep Cornelissen is at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK.
Introduction
Academic research in corporate communication has been traditionally biased towards an organisational perspective concerned with the management of corporate image and reputation. This is caused, first, by historical reasons in terms of the initial mass communication perspective. Traditionally, with mass communication, more homogeneous audiences and also constant audience responses, and with a lower degree of competition, linearity in communication effects could be presumed and hence a perspective from the organisation outwards was understandable and also sufficient. This explains the early message control by the receiver (Van Raaij, 1998). As a result, these new media are characterised by more specialised content, speed of transmission and non-linear access (Peters, 1998). New media have made interaction possible, and the initiative to enter into a dialogue, and the control over contact and content is increasingly in the hands of stakeholders. Corporate communicators therefore need to understand the dynamics of stakeholder involvement and communicative behaviour as it relates to the new media landscape.
Images as end-states
A lack of attention to the receiver perspective within the field of corporate communication reflects itself in the notion that images are considered as end-states within the individual stakeholder rather than as intermediate effects. The behavioural actions of stakeholders are referred to merely in terms of the assumed propensity to act created by the image. As such, the rationale for corporate communication is seen as to establish favourable relationships with an organisation's stakeholders, which it is hoped will be translated by such stakeholders into a propensity to buy that organisation's products, to work for, or to invest in an organisation (Murray, 1976, cited in Jefkins, 1978; Balmer, 1995; Van Riel, 1995). Logically, there should be a further step, namely, behavioural actions, which have not been adequately identified within the corporate communication literature.
Considerable emphasis has been placed on the image formation process, such as the work of Williams and Moffit's (1997) conceptualisation of image formation as an impression formation process; Van Rekom's (1997) hierarchical value maps; and Dowling's (1986) image formation model. Here, the understanding of the term "image" refers to an impression created at a particular time at a particular level of abstraction (for example, Cheney, 1992; Grunig, 1993). An image...