The Public Discourse of the Corporate Citizen
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Volume 6 Number 1
The Public Discourse of the Corporate Citizen David H. Saiia and Dale Cyphert University of Northern Iowa
ABSTRACT The discursive responsibilities of citizenship demand a dialogic mode of corporate behavior characterized by demonstrations of respect, commitment, and exposure. Issues management that integrates strategic business goals with dialogic public communication efforts will better meet the discursive requirements of full membership in civil society. INTRODUCTION Effective strategic management of social and political issues requires corporate engagement in the larger conversation of public policy (Mahon, Wartick and Fleisher, 2002), but the nature of that engagement remains open to debate. The rapidly changing social environment of the 1960s created pressure for change, and corporate management began to struggle with the task of reconciling societal concerns with the operational demands of profitability (Ackerman, 1973). Recognizing the impact of evolving expectations on business policy, planners sought ways to recognize emerging issues (Ansoff, 1975), respond to a changing environment (Post, 1978) and integrate that response into corporate practice (Ackerman, 1973) in a process described as ‘issues management’ (Ansoff, 1975). Some have resisted that descriptor on the grounds that only the corporate response to those issues can be effectively ‘managed’ (Johnson, 1983), while others use the term to emphasize the strategic nature of that response (Heath, 1997).
Faced with well-organized criticism of corporate policies and practices, business was urged to move from a position of merely providing positive information to the press, toward the creation of an ‘advocacy position’ (Bateman, 1975) to protect its legitimate economic role in the realm of public policy decision-making and to proactively ‘align organizational activities and stakeholder expectations’ (Issue Management Council, 2002). More recently, the argument has been made that to the degree that effective organizations are defined in terms of their ability to monitor and respond to their social and political environments and create relationships with strategic constituencies, corporate communication is most effective when it is able to contribute to that process by maintaining a ‘symmetrical, two-way dialogue’ with external and internal publics (Grunig, Grunig and Dozier, 2002). There is less agreement, however, on the significance of any contribution that symmetrical communication with external stakeholders might offer to effective issues management, or whether asymmetrical communication or even deliberate disinformation might also be effectively used in some contexts. Generally granting the ethical desirability of symmetrical relationships between business and stakeholders (Wood, 1991), and their pragmatic advantages in some situations (Cancel, Mitrook and Cameron, 1999), many scholars nevertheless claim that powerful corporate entities can effectively use resources to dominate
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, pp. 47–57 # Henry
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