Open AccessWhen Corporate Communication Goes Public: Communication Policies in Public Communication
Author(s) -
Marianne Grove Ditlevsen,
Peter Kastberg
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
hermes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.759
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 1903-1785
pISSN - 0904-1699
DOI - 10.7146/hjlcb.v20i38.25903
Subject(s) - communications management , corporate communication , communication studies , legitimacy , public relations , structuring , organizational communication , politics , political communication , situational ethics , database transaction , environmental communication , public sector , business , stakeholder , political science , marketing , computer science , law , programming language , finance
This article deals with communication policies within the public sector. It takes its point of departure within the overall framework of corporate communication and hence exclusively sees communication policies from that perspective. Communication policies are seen as means of corporate communication. As means of corporate communication they feature what we have labelled ‘mediational properties’ within an organization. As such they – from a communicative point of view – constitute the interface between the strategic and the operational levels of communication management. As policies they should support decision making processes when it comes to ensuring that any instance of communication is in line with the mission, vision and values of an organisation. And they should offer a de nite course of communicative action contingent on situational factors. The contextual background of the article is the re-structuring of the Danish regional political landscape, which is to have taken place by January 1st 2007. Communicating the mission, vision and values of the new municipalities is seen as an essential part of re-congurating and maintaining political legitimacy in the transaction period and beyond. The empirical part of the article deals with an extensive corpus analysis of a broad selection of authentic communication policies stemming from Danish municipalities. The analytical framework applied gives rise to a number of new observations regarding the generic heterogeneity of communication policies. The analysis also delivers new input to the theoretical discussion of the status of communication policies within a corporate communication framework in general and within a current Danish municipality setting in particular.