Strategic Communication

Special Issue

Guest Editors:

Gail Fann Thomas, Naval Postgraduate School
Graduate School of Business & Public Policy

Kimberlie Stephens, U of Southern California
Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism

The Journal of Business Communication is seeking scholarly manuscripts for a special issue on Strategic Communication, scheduled for publication in January 2015. JBC is an international journal that contributes to the knowledge and theory of business communication as a distinct, multifaceted field approached through administrative disciplines, the liberal arts, and the social sciences.

Strategic communication is an emerging field of study in the private and public sectors. Conceptually, strategic communication sits at the intersection of management strategy and communication. However, that intersection is relatively undeveloped in the academic literature. To date, the management strategy literature points to the significance of communication but undertheorizes it. Likewise, the organizational communication literature rarely incorporates theory and tools from the strategy literature. Given the centrality of strategic communication in a hyper-digitized, globally-connected world, a subfield of strategic communication begs for further theoretically driven research.

Possible topics for the special issue include:

  • How firms rhetorically link identity and strategy.
  • Ways in which organizations engage multiple rhetorics to address both internal and external stakeholders.
  • How organizational members use language to enact the environment.
  • The relationship among language, materiality, and strategy making or strategy implementation.
  • The role of language in establishing organizational legitimacy.
  • Using language to understand the black box of strategizing processes.
  • How organizations use discourse to shape an institutional space.
  • The role of storytelling in the development and implementation of strategy.
  • How strategic communication impacts organizational outcomes such as shareholder price.
  • The role of talk in executives' strategy-making meetings.
  • Narrative horizon scanning as a means of developing strategy.
  • How communicative networks inform the implementation of strategy.

    • The special issue is being co-edited by Associate Professors Gail Fann Thomas, Graduate School of Business & Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA and Clinical Assistant Professor Kimberlie Stephens, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, U of Southern California. The co-editors are happy to discuss initial ideas for papers and can be contacted directly: gthomas@nps.edu or kimberlie.stephens@usc.edu.

    Manuscripts will be double-blind reviewed, following JBC's normal review process. Submissions are not limited to ABC members.

    Fifteen hundred word abstracts that include research question, method, data, and conclusion should be emailed to gthomas@nps.edu no later than 31 January 2014. Contributors will be informed of decisions by February 2014. Deadline for submission of full papers 15 May 2014.