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Introduction
The focus on corporate communication management (CCM) in the area of communication and marketing has a long history. It started as early as the 1970’s (Yamauchi, 2001) and became widely researched in the 1990s (Argenti, 1994; Goodman, 1994; van Riel, 1995). Throughout the twentieth century, the field of corporate communication developed in schools of communication and journalism and became categorised as public relations or public affairs (van Riel, 1995; Christensen et al., 2009). After realising the importance of corporate communication in business, many business schools began to focus on it and make it part of management communication (Argenti, 1996). Consequently, these situations made the field of corporate communication more important for the organisations (van Riel, 1995), and many scholars believe that corporate communication has evolved within the business environment more rapidly and much more systematically (Argenti, 1996; Cornelissen, 2008; Zerfass and Sherzada, 2015).
The notions of corporate communication received the greatest attention in the 1990s (Goodman, 1994; van Riel, 1995) due to expansion of the global business environment. At that time corporate communication practitioners faced great challenges to deal with a “new generation” of stakeholders, which is more educated and demanding (Dowling, 1990). That development had brought strategic approaches in corporate communication practices and functions to gain stakeholders’ support (Argenti, 1996; Cornelissen, 2008; Cornelissen et al., 2006). In parallel with the business attention on strategic corporate communication, academic research also underwent significant growth. Many scholars started to venture into the corporate communication discipline and give a conceptual perspective on it (Argenti, 1994; van Riel, 1995). In addition, some researchers (Varey, 1997; Goodman, 2000) also contributed to the empirical knowledge. Varey (1997), for example, contributed to empirical study on corporate communication management in the UK, while Goodman (2000) studied the corporate communication trend in the USA. Both researchers used organisations as units of analysis in their study. Later, many researchers started to study the antecedents and consequences of corporate communication and other related variables (Bishop, 2006; Higgins and Bannister, 1992; Malmelin, 2007; Yamauchi, 2001). Theories from strategic management and social sciences disciplines are commonly used to study corporate communication functions (Balmer and Gray, 1999; Dolphin and Fan, 2000; Stainer and Stainer, 1997).
Although many scholars devoted to study corporate communication as a strategic...