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Purpose – Libraries have been experiencing relentless change and uncertainty in their environment. The literature on corporate communications, strategic management and planning, marketing and public relations more recently, has been recommending using communications as a strategy to coherently and proactively handle and foresee change. Planning and using an overall communications strategy will bring integrity and adherence to the library's goals and direction while reducing the discomfort of change. This selected bibliography is a quick starting point for understanding the significance of an overall communication strategy and its use for managing conflicts and changes in the library's environment strategically. Design/methodology/approach – This article covers books and articles from mid‐1980s to 2004, published around the world. The sources are listed alphabetically by author and then chronologically for different sources by the same author, providing brief but useful information about the content covered for each source. Findings – This bibliography illustrates a variety of research from corporate communications, strategic planning, communications management, marketing and public relations literature that emphasize the role of communication in strategic management. Research limitations/implications – It records a comprehensive list of publications covering international perspectives as well as publications about communication strategy. Practical implications – This selected bibliography is primarily intended for librarians, library planners, managers or administrators, but is also relevant to corporate and business professionals, planners and administrators. Further, it would also be a useful resource for students, faculty and researchers of communication. Originality/value – This bibliography presents a much needed resource list for gathering insights into the strategic role of communication for organizations such as the library that are in a state of constant change.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why corporations frequently do such a bad job in change communications and succumb to clichéd terminology when communicating change.

The approach was to identify particularly egregious examples of poor communications and to identify some reasons why change communications seems so difficult for large corporations.

Poor change communications has a number of sources. Chief of these is the failure to involve employees in the change process from the beginning and to acknowledge candidly that all change processes have losers as well as winners.

The views expressed in the paper are based on the author’s own experience rather than extensively researched data.

While poor change communications will always exist, leaders who understand the natural tendency to use obscure and clichéd language in the field will be able to mitigate its effects.

With trust in corporations at all-time lows, one can believe that more effective change communications will help to restore some of the lost trust between capital and labor.

While the clichéd corporate language is the frequent target of critics, there are few treatments of its connection with change communications.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of employee emotional intelligence on the relationship of intra‐department communications and employee's reaction to organizational change in China.

Based on the literatures in organizational change, organizational communications and emotional intelligence, the authors derived three hypotheses which were tested with data collected in a large state‐owned enterprise (SOE) in the telecommunication industry. Factor analysis and regression analysis were combined for the hypothesis tests.

It was found that intra‐department communications positively influenced employee's reaction to organizational change with employees' emotional intelligence moderating the relationship. When employee's emotional intelligence is higher, intra‐department communication has greater positive effect on employee's reaction to change.

With the adopted western measurement scales, this study was unable to reveal the Chinese contextual aspect of organizational communications. As the data were self‐reported, they may have common source deviation.

To foster and maintain employees' positive reactions to change, managers and organizations may consider developing strategies to improve employees' emotional intelligence, so as to embrace future changes.

This is an initial effort in examining the joint effect of intra‐department communications and employee's emotional intelligence on employee's reaction to organizational change. It may lead to additional research on organizational change management.

Whether organizational change results from a merger, acquisition, new venture, new process improvement approach, or any number of flavors‐of‐the‐day management fads, employee communications can mean the success or failure of any major change program. The Strategic Employee Communication Model with the best practice definitions, which are composites of effective employee communication examples collected from researching selected Fortune 500 companies, help management understand the strategic role of employee communication in a high‐performing company. The model functions as an analytical tool to diagnose a company’s strengths and weaknesses in employee communication so that the company can structure the change communication program and position communication to facilitate the overall change program. In this paper, I explain the Strategic Employee Communication Model and best practice definitions, demonstrate a change communication approach to improving employee communications using the Strategic Employee Communication Model, and provide a case study of the successful use of the model and approach during a major change program.

This monograph presents a review of the frontiers' ideas in marketing communications as of today, in six exploratory steps. It begins with an examination of the nature of acceptable goals for marketing communications and then examines what and with whom we should communicate. Where and when communications should be placed is next discussed in terms of the objective functions of multimedia models and frequency effects. The sixth step focuses on the match between evaluative instruments and initial objectives and exhorts communicators to experiment better and more often and indicates how. A Self‐Audit questionnaire enables the reader to score himself badly or well according to conscience, whilst acting as a device for defining improvements that can sensibly be made. The monograph is empirically based on the Cranfield Programme's findings from 1972–1976 of which the author was Co‐Director; he is now its Co‐Chairman.

This study aims to examine how a manager’s learning goal orientation (LGO) influences frontline service employees’ (FSEs’) engagement in cross-selling activities. Such engagements must exist before they can achieve service–sales ambidexterity. Drawing on achievement goal theory and the meaning-making perspective, this study predicts that learning-oriented managers encourage and foster FSEs’ cross-selling behaviors by facilitating their ability to derive positive meaning from the cross-selling initiative. They do so by conveying high-quality information about the initiative and related changes to individual employees, as well as by encouraging the formation of a collective perception of open communications within the work unit.

Hierarchical (nested) data from 39 managers and 357 FSEs of a major logistic service company are used to test the hypotheses.

As predicted, a manager’s LGO relates positively to FSEs’ cross-selling activities, through sequential mediations of the hypothesized communication mechanisms and employees’ benefits-finding.

A manager’s LGO is an important antecedent of FSEs’ cross-selling behaviors. This study establishes this influence and clarifies the processes by which it occurs. This study also extends previous research by specifying the important role of employees’ meaning-making, which prompts them to adopt cross-selling, as a mediator of the multilevel communication influences that result from their managers’ LGO.

Examines the issue of communicating strategically during significant organizational change. In the author’s experience, differentiated communication tactics during different phases of organizational change can have an important impact on the level of acceptance of that change by organizational participants. Enumerates and discusses empirically supported principles of effective communication and then applies them to several stages of organizational change. Draws examples from cases with which the author has had personal research and/or consulting experience. Offers general communication strategies together with specific tactics as possibilities to help facilitate change.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.

The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.

The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.

In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.

To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

This chapter describes two change efforts involving participatory action research within the pharmacy operations division of Kaiser Permanente. Focus is on a parallel learning mechanism that has been used to support communications and change during two large-scale information technology interventions. It begins with basic background information on participatory action research in organizations. Since the case setting is Kaiser Permanente, the chapter provides some information on the U.S. healthcare industry context and then shifts to Kaiser’s communication forum, a learning mechanism that has been in place for 35 years. Cognitive, structural, and procedural aspects of the learning mechanism are explored, and the chapter features interviews with some of the key forum players. Both in the forum’s infancy and in its current more institutionalized state, the pharmacy organization has been in crisis. Implications for the use of parallel learning structures on a long-term basis to support long-term participatory action research are explored along with contributions to theory on insider/outsider action research.

The aim of the paper is to review the internal communication process of an electrical utility organisation and propose a template for improving communications centred on learning organisation principles. It also looks at the contribution which good internal communications make to the development of sustainable business improvement. The case study central to this research is a large electrical utility organisation with almost 40 separate operational facilities geographically dispersed across Northern Ireland. It has experienced significant change over the last decade. Managers continually adapt strategies, policies and procedures in an attempt to proactively address the challenges presented by the external competitive environment. Communicating these changes to employees has posed a problem for managers and has led to confusion and allegations of operational inefficiency. The paper critically evaluates the approach adopted by the managers to address their internal communication problems in the midst of change. It goes on to propose a communication template which is a common‐sense approach to good internal communications and draws conclusions regarding the link between internal communications, organisational learning and change management.