Bridging Corporate and Organizational Communication: Review, Development and a Look to the Future

TLDR

Corporate communication has traditionally been driven by other disciplines, yet its emphasis on wholeness and consistency is increasingly shaping contemporary organizational communication. The study reviews corporate communication literature to highlight intersections with organizational communication and argues for greater integration. The authors conduct a formative and critical review of corporate communication research, mapping its intersections with organizational communication traditions. The review relaxes traditional assumptions and demonstrates how corporate and organizational communication dimensions interact, enriching theorization and linking micro‑ and macro‑level analyses.

Abstract

The theory and practice of corporate communication is usually driven by other disciplinary concerns than the field of organizational communication. However, its particular mind-set focusing on wholeness and consistency in corporate messages increasingly influence the domain of contemporary organizational communication as well. We provide a formative and critical review of research on corporate communication as a platform for highlighting crucial intersections with select research traditions in organizational communication to argue for a greater integration between these two areas of research. Following this review, we relax the assumptions underlying traditional corporate communication research and show how these dimensions interact in organizational and communication analysis, thus, demonstrating the potential for a greater cross-fertilization between the two areas of research. This cross-fertilization, as we will illustrate, enriches the theorization of corporate and organizational communication and may better link micro- and macro level analyses.