Strategic Communication: Reflections on an Elusive Concept

ABSTRACT

The article explores how strategic communication successfully established itself as an academic discipline despite (or perhaps because of) being centered on an elusive concept. Drawing on ideas about the evolution of academic disciplines proposed by Alexander M. Shneider, we argue that strategic communication is currently caught in a cycle of constant reinvention obscured by a discourse of emergence. Although the discipline is undoubtedly becoming more sophisticated, it is doubtful whether there is genuine progress. The authors examine facets of strategic communication that contribute to the current state of affairs. Although clearer conceptualization and a more realistic understanding of the discipline are identified as a prerequisite for maturation, progress—as opposed to sophistication—ultimately depends on the development of discipline-specific, unique, and robust methods.

Notes

¹ Even for the United States, traditionally seen as market-driven, Caplan estimates for the year 2011 that federal, state and local governments taken together subsidized education with roughly a trillion dollars. (2018, p. 5).

² In a recent book Graeber (2018) also qualified public relations as a bullshit job and categorized its practitioners as “goons,” i.e., the class of people with bullshit jobs that require them to act aggressively on behalf of their employers (the other classes of bullshit jobs are “flunkies,” “duct-tapers,” “box-tickers,” and “taskmasters”).

³ There is a basic level of theory-building that can be addressed in absence of methodology: the issue of consilience in a narrow sense, of hard-to-vary explanations in a wider. Based on the case made by Edward Wilson (1998), Nothhaft (2016) and others argue that theory in strategic communication must be compatible, i.e., consilient, with the mind sciences. The argument draws ultimately on David Deutsch’s (2009) exposition that scientific explanations are characterized by the quality of being “hard to vary.” Mythological explanations, in contrast, are normally easy to vary, i.e., one can replace the supreme serpent by the archaic turtle, one god by another god, without disturbing everything else. For strategic communication research, hard-to-vary explanations mean that theory must arrive at a point where explanations for a phenomenon are not easily substituted by another, slightly different explanation, as in the case of Rennstam’s article, where “branding in the sacrificial mode” can be effortlessly replaced by other explanations.