Brigitte Planken Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

The changing landscape: Developments and directions in research

The last few decades have seen dramatic changes in the business communication landscape, and on a worldwide scale. Globalization, advances in communication technology, and the introduction and widespread adoption and use of new media, from email and hypertext to social networking environments such as Facebook and Twitter, have transformed the communication arena for all organizations, profit or non-profit, governmental or NGO. Practitioners in the various corporate communication disciplines face ever more complex strategic choices regarding not only what to communicate when and to whom, but more than ever how to communicate and through what media. Furthermore, with the democratization of communication and information access, the issue of stakeholder influence on organizational  reputation has perhaps become more relevant than ever. Corporate communications are no longer the only, primary source of information about an organization for its external and internal, local and global stakeholders. As a result, one of the challenges now and in the near future is what organizations, if anything, can do to manage, curb or put to strategic use what others communicate about them.   

In keeping with the theme of this convention, the aim of this keynote will be to illustrate how the changing landscape has already transformed the field of business communication research in at least three ways: through the evolution of a strong intercultural orientation, the potential of multi-modality as an analytical approach to account for non-linguistic aspects of communication, and the advantages and challenges posed by multidisciplinarity and multi-methodology (Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson & Planken, 2007). At the same time, and with an eye to the continued development of this dynamic field, potential future avenues of enquiry will be suggested.

Reference

Bargiela-Chiappini, F., Nickerson, C., & Planken, B. (2007). Business Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.