Introduction to special section on change communication

Citation

Elving, W. and van Vuuren, M. (2008), "Introduction to special section on change communication", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 13 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2008.16813caa.003

Introduction to special section on change communication

Article Type: Change communication From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 13, Issue 3

This special section on change communication has been edited by Mark van Vuuren (University of Twente, The Netherlands) and myself. One of the driving factors behind running a special issue on change communication was that change communication was a popular theme among our readers. This was highlighted by the download statistics of the last few years. Other popular themes that we identified were integrated communication and communication issues concerning corporate social responsibility.

Perhaps, change communication is such a popular topic among our readers because of the constant changes in our professional lives. As has been calculated by Pfeffer and Sutton, most change processes fail, do not reach the goals which were formulated at the beginning of the change, and result in rumours, gossip, disappointments, frustration, uncertainties, fatigue and cynicism.

Communication professionals within these changing organization have to produce materials in print or online to help the organization to implement the change, probably knowing that this documentation will not help their colleagues to adopt the change, but unable to facilitate management to help the employees to cope with the change. In times of changes, organizations rely on communication, but seem to overestimate the results of information provision.

We had a total of 16 papers submitted to this special issue, four of them were desk rejected, due to inappropriate topics. The other papers were sent out for review. Another six papers were not selected following the first round of reviews, one paper was withdrawn by the authors, and one paper was rejected after the second submission. This left a total of four papers which were selected for the special issue, thus we took the decision to present the papers as a special section within a normal issue. As guest editors of the special section we have provided the final paper in this section. It assesses what we think we can learn from these papers and what should be the research themes in the future.

Wim ElvingEditor-in-Chief

Mark van VuurenUniversity of Twente, The Netherlands