Yolandi Botha PhD

The increasing pluralistic business environment, where stakeholders continually challenge the treatise of organisational primacy, places more pressure on organisations to address and prioritise diverse stakeholder expectations. Stakeholders are central to the success of organisations, which necessitates engagement, transparency and responses to stakeholder concerns. Despite consensus in existing literature on the significance of stakeholder engagement, no common understanding on what it entails exists. Another gap is to approach stakeholder engagement from multiple stakeholder vantage points and to explore the role of the strategic communication professional in facilitating stakeholder engagement. The digital network revolution, among others, has brought about a “collaborative turn” that allows innovative and engaging opportunities to obtain valuable information from stakeholders through interactive conversations. These forces resulted in a paradigmatic shift in strategic communication where emergent processes and the rejection of linearity become prevalent. The role of the strategic communication professional is to facilitate a stakeholder engagement strategy that elicits dialogue, consultation and reciprocal relationships that are evolutionary and mutually defined. Based on this contextualisation, this paper proposes a theoretical, conceptual framework for multiple stakeholder engagement by drawing from the principles of polyphonic strategic communication. Depending on the controllability of voices, a polyphonic communication perspective for multiple stakeholder engagement allows interplay between a centralised strategic communication approach through stakeholder enablement and a more decentralised communication approach to elicit stakeholder empowerment. This paper serves as foundation for further empirical validation of the proposed multiple stakeholder engagement framework and emergent, multi-voiced approaches in strategic communication.

Amidst challenges of economic uncertainty, resource constraints, social movement and unrest, increased pressure is placed on organisations to address diverse stakeholder expectations. Stakeholders are central to the success of an organisation, and this fact compels the latter to engage, be more transparent and respond to stakeholder concerns. Stakeholder engagement is an integral part of ensuring organisational sustainability and success, as it utilises strategic direction and operational excellence to serve as tools for competitive advantage. Contemporary organisations have realised there are opportunities to be derived from changing the nature of organisation–stakeholder relationships, from control to collaboration, from exchange to engagement. With the emergence of strategic communication as an all-encompassing function to achieve the mission of the organisation, the task of the strategic communication professional is to facilitate stakeholder engagement strategies that will elicit evolutionary and mutually defined dialogue, consultation and reciprocal relationships. Although the concept of stakeholder engagement is not new, and there is consensus in the existing literature on its significance, there is no common understanding on what it actually entails. Furthermore, there is a dearth of literature on approaching stakeholder engagement from multiple vantage points, and on the role of the strategic communication professional in facilitating the stakeholder engagement process. To address the need for theory building in the field, this article aims to highlight key considerations (from the literature) for an approach to multiple stakeholder engagement from a strategic communication perspective. This, to provide a strategy for continuous engagement which will result in sustainable relationship building with strategic stakeholders, as well as short-term, secondary stakeholder engagement on the basis of working relationships.

The pressure on organisations to become more global and information intensive and the increasing uncertainty and complexity of the organisational environment have increased the convolution of organisational change. Globalisation and interactive technologies such as Web 2.0 have transformed traditional media and created a communication environment of connection, convergence, and collaboration which is labelled as the ‘collaborative turn’. This changing communication landscape has stimulated postmodern thought in the field of strategic communication and emphasises purposeful communication of the communication agent on behalf of the communicative entity in the public sphere. As a starting point towards developing the concept of change-orientated communication from a postmodern strategic communication perspective (termed as ‘strategic change-orientated communication’), this literature paper aims to provide a contextualisation of this conceptual problem. Furthermore, since communication professionals are ostensibly slow in the uptake of postmodern developments in communication, this paper aims to expand the body of knowledge on the changing communication landscape with specific focus on change orientated-communication. By doing so, the paper provides an elaboration on the changes in the field of strategic communication with an emphasis on contemporary postmodern thought which serves as basis to emphasise the necessity for change-orientated communication from an emergent change context and, most importantly, the subsequent conceptual development thereof. This paper will conclude with a proposition of preliminary attributes of ‘strategic change-orientated communication’ which not only serve as one of the first steps in the concept development process, but also a heuristic for future research.

A dominant focus on organisational stakeholders is evident in both the literature and practice since it is argued that the success of organisations is predominantly dependent on stakeholders’ perception of the organisation. This paper is built on the preposition that the importance of corporate communication to the organisation, especially on strategic level, should become more prevalent due to the focus on stakeholder relations and management because stakeholder relations is increasingly being seen as the heartbeat of corporate communication (Luoma-aho & Paloviita 2010:49). This paper contextualises corporate communication as strategic organisation-stakeholder relationship (OSR) building function in terms of a theoretical exploration on two-way symmetrical communication, essential corporate communication functions and excellence communication characteristics. This will be explored among senior communication professionals at Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listed South African organisations by means of a qualitative approach.