Corporate communications as a sustainable and active contributor to democracy - some remarks

Abstract

Background: The Organisational Communication Department at Lisbon’s Superior School of Mass Communication and Media Arts and its Sponsors, are proud to have hosted in Portugal the IV International Symposium on Global Corporate Communication, June 27-29 2007. The Symposium was organised as the closing event for the 2007 term of the GlobCom project GlobCom is an international project run by 9 universities in 9 countries of 4 continents. It aims to give students a chance to learn Global Corporate Communication by developing a strategy for a real client with colleagues based all over the world. The students of the universities are involved in PR/Communications courses and are at least in their 3rd Semester. They form 6 international e-teams and each one gets the same PR brief and has to develop and submit a solution in the form of a professional presentation, like in a real international agency pitch. The students of the e-teams communicate and co-operate with each other using different distance working tools and benefiting from an exclusive GlobCom platform available at www.pr-got.com.
GlobCom was founded in 2003 by Dr. Volker Stoltz, former CEO of Weber Shandwick Europe and currently a lecturer in international PR at the Erfurt University in Germany. The objectives of the GlobCom project are to make participating students learn how:
1. To work in an international team
2. To act together online
3. To solve a global PR problem like an agency
4. To overcome cultural barriers
5. To recognize cultural diversity as a strength
6. To learn that a global strategy has to be implemented locally
7. To convince with a presentation
The problem: When developing the theme for the IV International Symposium on Global Corporate Communication, the main questions defined a focus on Public Relations and Corporate Communication’s role in the democracy. We where questioning how much time we devote to thinking about the impact of our practices on democracy? If it’s true that legitimacy is an overriding objective of corporate communications and public relations, how is this pursued in the practice of global corporate communication? We where certain that one of the major social functions of communicators today is to contribute to clearer and less confusing communicative environment, but how can we use the classic tools of corporate communication to achieve this aim? How do we assess the impact of our communication strategies towards democracy? How do we use the power of lobby or issues management to promote and protect greater values that overlap the interests of present and future stakeholders?
These broad questions led us to develop a program including several possible derivation areas and the main conclusions are hereby presented accor- ding to the structure of event’s the program. In this publication, presenters at the IV International Symposium on Global Corporate Communication also explain their ideas in more detail so these remarks are only intended to provide a global look to how the several contributions added to the initial questions and how they have show «Corporate Communication as a Sustainable and Active Contributor to Democracy».