Editorial 31.5: From stakeholders to communicative actors: agency, relationships and responsibility in corporate communication

From stakeholders to communicative actors: agency, relationships and responsibility in corporate communicationCorporate communication has traditionally focused on organizations and the stakeholders, publics, employees, consumers and communities with whom organizations communicate.These categories remain useful because they help scholars identify relationships, distinguish organizational constituencies and examine differences in expectations, communication needs and behavior.However, corporate communication has historically privileged organizations as communicative agents.For example, much of the field still implicitly begins with the assumption that organizations send messages to stakeholders or publics, and organizations almost always initiate that communication.Even relational approaches can retain the organization as the entity initiating communication.However, an argument can be made that contemporary corporate communication has multiple communicative centers such as employees, executives, practitioners, consumers, activists and publics who now produce and circulate communication independently.In other words, formal organizational authority and communicative authority are no longer identical.For example, employees increasingly communicate publicly about organizations, while consumers distribute and reinterpret corporate messages and stakeholders form their own networks through which they produce alternative accounts of organizational behavior.Communication professionals have also gained greater autonomy through digital technologies while simultaneously becoming more dependent on the technological systems through which communication is produced and circulated.Employees can advocate for organizations, criticize them, construct professional identities independently of them or refuse to participate in organizational narratives altogether.Publics, meanwhile, can amplify corporate communication far beyond its intended reach or make organizational messages visible for reasons that organizations neither intended nor control.Corporate communication, therefore, increasingly takes place among multiple communicative actors.This does not mean that organizations have ceased to matter as centers of communicative power, nor does it mean that communication has somehow become democratized merely because more people can speak.Rather, the changing communication environment requires closer examination of communicative agency, which can be examined by extending Lasswell's (1948) questions about who communicates, what is communicated, through which channels and with what effects to ask the following questions: who can communicate, under what conditions, with what degree of autonomy, through which resources and technologies and with what consequences.Such a perspective extends longstanding debates about relationships, stakeholders, voice and participation.It also introduces a more difficult question: if contemporary corporate communication involves increasingly distributed forms of agency, how should the field understand the relationship between agency, power and responsibility?From stakeholders to actors Stakeholder theory provided an important corrective to narrowly managerial understandings of organizations by recognizing that organizational decisions affect, and are affected by, multiple groups (Freeman, 1984).