Country of origin and internationalisation of CCIJ 2006-2014

Citation

Elving, W.J.L. (2015), "Country of origin and internationalisation of CCIJ 2006-2014", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-11-2014-0082

Country of origin and internationalisation of CCIJ 2006-2014

Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 20, Issue 1

This issue marks the first of 2015, our 20th volume already. As second editor-in-chief of CCIJ (I took over from Sandra Oliver in 2006), 2015 will be my tenth volume. We have witnessed further internationalisation of Corporate Communications, we almost are at a stage that we can drop the “an International Journal” from the title, since the contents of CCIJ have internationalised more and more during my editorship. In Table I the countries of the authors that are most frequent published are listed.

Table I Overview of the countries of the first authors of articles from CCIJ from 2006 to 2014

When I entered in 2006, the field was dominated by the Anglo Saxon countries (USA, UK and Australia), with 71 per cent of the articles in 2006-2008. After the domination of the Scandinavian countries (except for Norway) in the years 2009-2011 who took about 45 per cent of all published articles, in 2012-2014 we see some form of a “balance” between the USA and Canada (23 per cent of all articles), Scandinavia (27 per cent), west and south Europe both with 16 per cent of all the papers, Asia with 8 per cent of all papers and the UK with 7 per cent of all the papers. Of course we do not select on the basics of region, and we send the papers forward double blind, but this balance between the country and regions of origin of the submitting authors is remarkable.

An overview like this gives also remarkable differences between countries. For instance authors from Germany have had a relative low number of accepted papers, maybe due to the fact that many German colleagues work in other German speaking countries, like Switzerland. Other remarkable countries not present as home country of authors are Austria, France, Belgium and Ireland. Also authors from Russia, Poland, Ukraine have not successfully submitted their work to CCIJ, just as some Asian countries, whereas Hong Kong, Singapore and India have had published papers in CCIJ. These figures are interesting and worthwhile to share, we could give all kinds of theories why some countries are present with many published articles and others not. Clearly the absence of Eastern European and South American countries could be due to the fact that their corporations still have to grow into stakeholder and reputation management or the simple fact that there are no departments of Corporate Communications in their universities. We will find ways to try to investigate this further and try to involve scholars from these regions and hope they will be in the journal in the next ten years as well.

The upcoming 20th volume of CCIJ is a promising as well. We will have a Special Issue of the second CSR Communication Conference, which was held in 2013 and in this issue you will find the call for papers for the third CSR Communication Conference that will be held in Ljubljana Slovenia, in September 2015. Also there will be a white paper on the programmes to Corporate Communications at universities. What are the issues taught, can we come with a list of subjects, skills and competencies that every master student in Corporate Communication should have? Maybe this will grow to an accreditation as the Business Schools already have.

Furthermore, this issue marks the new Editorial Advisory Board (EAB). We are very grateful of the former EAB and the work that they have done for CCIJ and do welcome our new EAB and hope they will help us the way forward and to the next step in the development of CCIJ. One of these developments will be the SSCI ranking. With a demonstrated international scholarship and annual downloads of articles that exceed 150,000 for over five years already we feel that we deserve this ranking. The ranking, however, is based upon the citations to articles of CCIJ in already ranked journals. For a relative new field of study as Corporate Communications, it is hard to get in these rankings. But we certainly will try again.

The first paper in this issue is an obituary for Wally Olins written by Professor John Balmer of Brunel University (UK). Wally Olins died last year and who else than Professor Balmer is able to pay a tribute to the important work of Wally Olins on Corporate Branding. The paper by Andrea Pérez of the University of Cantabria (Spain) is on the interplay between CSR reporting and Corporate Reputation. With this theoretical contribution the underdeveloped, heterogeneous and inconclusive literature on this link is made more accessible. The contribution of Suk-Chong Tong of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is about the influence of organisational trust, organisational reputation and investor’s trust in media specialist in Initial Public Offerings. It is one of the first studies that take these factors into the study of public offerings. The paper by Morteza Khojastephour from Mahsad Iran with Ahmed Ferdous and Michael Polonsky of Deakin University (Australia) deals with differences between domestic corporate brands and multinational corporate brands. Their conclusion is that multinational brands face far more complexity than domestic brands. The paper by Michel Haigh (Pensylvania State University) and Shelley Wigley (University of Texas at Arlington) deals with the impact of negative posts on Facebook. The authors suggest that organizations need to develop a strategy to respond to these negative posts.

The paper by Christian Fieseler of the BI Norwegian Business School with Christoph Lutz and Miriam Meckel of the University of St. Gallen deals with the work roles of European communication managers. The last paper in this issue is by Shua Yao and John Brumette both of Radford University with Yi Luo of Montclair State University (USA) study web sites of Chinese Fortune 500 companies on issues of legitimacy, value driven standards and culture.

This issue again demonstrates the diversity of our community and the international character of our research, with papers from authors from all over the globe and issues that reflect the broadness of Corporate Communications, with financial communication, branding, social media, communication management and intercultural differences. Once again, this issue shows how much value and diversity our field of study offers.

Wim J.L. Elving