Publisher's Synopsis
Corporate Communication and Strategic Success: Engaging Issue, Argument, Conflict, and Crisis addresses the interplay of issue, argument, conflict, and crisis in corporate communication as it emerges via varied constituencies. The work is targeted toward providing necessary conceptual clarity between these four terms, which require differentiation and discernment. This work will identify the sources of issue, argument, conflict, and crisis in corporate communication via a current (but not unduly current) case study, grounded in the marketplace, where a company has conflated and confused the four terms. We have selected the BP Oil Spill off the southern coast of the United States. The relationship between issue, argument, conflict, and crisis is an important topic for any audience interested in the communication and communication ethics within organizational life. Corporate communication identifies both internal and external publics as audiences that live situated within a moment of dispute where the difference between issue, argument, conflict, and crisis must be discerned to sustain and maintain effective leadership and institutions. This topic of relevance appeals to an audience of students and practitioners. Each audience will benefit from continued study of sources of issues, argument, conflict, and crisis, as well as the communicative responses to moments of contention and uncertainty in organizational life. Each section of this work is a product of intensive research stemming from a comprehensive review of the journal, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, the premier international journal on corporate communication. By examining these essays, the authors will select a representative article for each chapter, and will work within the content to provide the theoretical foundation for examining the case study. We are deliberately doing this to focus audience attention upon this journal. We are taking them through a piece of scholarship from the beginning to end of each chapter that can be read alongside the chapter. In addition, we are looking at practical implications of each one of these, concluding each chapter at a problem level. By the time the practitioners or students are done, they will have encountered the theory and application twice through the essay, the supportive research, and then directly to the example.
