Understandings of organization in strategic communication research

Abstract

While strategic communication research (SCR) has placed a lot of emphasis in recent years on defining its research profile by clarifying interrelations between strategy and communication, the role of organization as primary research context of strategic communication has gained less consideration thus far. This chapter highlights how different understandings of organization can contribute to SCR. As a first step, we focus on established understandings of organization in extant organization and management scholarship (i.e. entity-oriented, context-oriented, and process-oriented understandings), their reception in SCR, and how this reception impacts on the respective understanding of strategic communication. We then unfold the "communication constitutes organization" (CCO) approach as a fourth way to reflect on the interrelation between organization and strategic communication, which can be fruitful in three ways: strengthening mutual exchange between organizational scholarship and SCR, reflecting on extant understandings to organization from an explicitly communicative perspective, and defining the specific focus and contribution of SCR in this endeavor.