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Of the four disciplines under discussion in this special edition of Management Communication Quarterly, corporate communication is both the newest and perhaps the least understood. It is also the only one of the four that is specifically related to a functional area within organizations. This position article will first define the field of corporate communication as a discipline, then look at how it relates to the other subdisciplines under consideration (management communication, business communication, and organizational communication). The article will also focus on how corporate communication research is evolving.
Although the field of corporate communication may be new to those of us whose roots are from management or business communication, the field of study has been evolving throughout the 20th century in schools of communication and journalism (under the areas called public relations or public affairs) as well as in the real world under similarly named departments. In fact, most large corporations in the United States today have departments called corporate communication. This section of the article will describe the evolution of the field both in the academic and business worlds. It will then discuss the various subfunctions that make up the field of corporate communication.
THE ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE DISCIPLINE
The debate over who will control the corporate communication discipline within the academy is a relatively new one. As business schools have become more interested in corporate communication over the last 20 years, both schools of communication (such as Annenberg and Boston University) and journalism schools (such as Columbia and Missouri) have argued that the discipline is more logically connected to what they do rather than a part of management education. This is partly historical and partly political.
Historically, the field grew naturally as a subset of journalism. It was journalists, after all, who created the need for a field of study in the first place. In addition, for many years the people who worked in the area we now refer to as corporate communication came out of a journalism background. Most corporate executives believed that journalists were best equipped to deal with this area within the corporation because most of what practitioners did was related to media.
Similarly, schools of communication evolved to train practitioners for a career in public...