Corporate Communication

Argenti is Professor of Management and Corporate Communication, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in the USA where the tradition of teaching communication was, as elsewhere, often based on basic skills development such as speaking and writing. He has also taught at the Columbia and Harvard Business Schools and should, therefore, know better, after having studied for 20 years in the subject, than to state that “the notion of it as a functional area of management equal in importance to finance, marketing production is very new”.

This book is a second edition and aims to show the changes that have taken place leading to the “development of a totally integrated corporate communication function” (p. ix). Perhaps we are going to have to rely on the emergence of more historical analyses of our profession if this misapprehension is to be corrected. The research works of L’Étang, Pieczke and Miller at Stirling University in Scotland is attempting to fill the European credibility gap, given that most received knowledge in the post‐war period has emerged from the USA.

Nevertheless, setting aside this serious criticism of limited perception, this is a key text and one of which no student at diploma or master’s level is likely to want to do without. The basic theoretical subject areas are covered, including managing government affairs, investor relations, employee communication, media relations and corporate advertising, etc. Case studies are well written and a particular joy was to see an early section on defining case studies and how to prepare them ‐ an essential prerequisite to any student or writer as the proliferation of bad, descriptive case study books produced in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated. A number of visuals are included, principally advertisements to illustrate weak and strong corporate advertising or old and new logos and their impact on image and identity. Where dogmatism does creep in, for example, “the CEO should have a direct line to the corporate communications function” (p. 53), the reason for it is clearly given, supported by graph material showing the symmetrical activities involved and budgets.

When the author concludes his introduction by saying “I hope you enjoy reading about this exciting new field [sic] as much as I have enjoyed discovering corporate communication hidden among organisations, different departments”, this reviewer can empathise as an academic attempting to reintegrate this discipline after fragmentation during the recent restructuring of higher education. Practitioners too know that a recovery and re‐emergence of corporate communication has begun with the expertise of people like Argenti and so yes, we do join him in “exploring the great unknown” in the interface between human, organisational and digital communication.