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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: ISTE Invoiced
- Sprache: Englisch
The Art of Communication combines over two decades of research and teaching into a comprehensive guide on strategic communication.
Grounded in the theoretical and methodological frameworks of 'situated communication' and 'communication project', this book highlights an understanding of both traditional and emerging communication practices. It particularly focuses on new genres, such as branding, design and digital communication strategies, and introduces the innovative concept of 'textscapes' – specially crafted environments to fulfill communicative objectives.
This book is enriched with practical examples and is particularly relevant in multicultural and international settings, providing essential insights for adapting communication strategies to diverse cultural contexts.
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Seitenzahl: 692
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
1 The Communication Domain
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Communication as a culture of doing
1.3. The communication ecosystem
1.4. Strategic communication
1.5. Organizational communication
1.6. The communication contract
2 A General Methodological Framework
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The communication campaign
2.3. Communication expertise
2.4. Communication policy
2.5. The communication project
2.6. Objectives and ecosystem of a communication campaign
2.7. Communication scenario and implementation
2.8. Communication campaign audit and evaluation
2.9. Management of a communication campaign
2.10. Communication campaign preservation and enhancement
3 The Realization Process of Communicative Doing
3.1. Introduction
3.2. A canon of core communication processes
3.3. Implementation and progress of a communication activity
3.4. Message appropriation
3.5. Communicative doing plan and program
3.6. Narrative framework and controlled realization model of communicative doing
3.7. Communicative doing: the ergastic and anagnoretic dimensions
3.8. Dramaturgy and communication campaign
4 The Objectives of Communicative Doing
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Communication motives and objectives
4.3. Semiotic and strategic value of the message
4.4. A general framework for campaign objectives setting
4.5. Campaign objectives qualification process
5 Milieu and Area of Action of Communicative Doing
5.1. Introduction
5.2. The status of the milieu in a communication project
5.3. Situating a communication campaign in its milieu
5.4. The action area of a communication project
5.5. Environmental features influencing communicative doing
6 The Actor and the Communicative Doing
6.1. Introduction
6.2. The actor as character
6.3. Action roles in a communication project
6.4. The actorial milieu in the communication ecosystem
6.5. Cognitive and potestative dispositions to communicate
6.6. Emotional dispositions to communicate
6.7. The trust of actors in a communication activity
6.8. The will to participate in a communication activity
7 Genres and Scenarios of Communicative Doing
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Genre, scenario and communication contract
7.3. Scenarization of a communication activity
7.4. The resources of communicative doing
7.5. The reliability of a communication activity’s contribution
8 The Contribution (Service) of Communicative Doing
8.1. Introduction
8.2. The message domain of reference
8.3. Brand and communication object
8.4. Message and life cycle of a communication activity
9 Elements of the Conceptual Design of a Communication Campaign
9.1. Introduction
9.2. The conceptual design of a communication campaign
9.3. Specification of the phases and actions of a communication campaign
9.4. The specification of a communication campaign’s message
9.5. The specification of the media sphere and supports of a communication campaign
Conclusion
References
Index
Other titles from ISTE in Information Systems, Web and Pervasive Computing
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 4
Table 4.1. Chart to help specify the strategic, semiotic technical objectives ...
Chapter 7
Table 7.1. Outline serving as a framework for writing the general scenario for...
Chapter 9
Table 9.1. The three central tasks in the conceptual design of a communication...
Table 9.2. Questionnaire for scenarizing the temporal architecture of a commun...
Table 9.3. Analytical table for scenarizing a communication action
Table 9.4. Specifying the main elements making up the message of a communicati...
Table 9.5. Empirical grid of a set of semiological element types for specifyin...
Table 9.6. Table standardizing the process of designing the mediasphere and me...
Table 9.7. Typical phases in realizing an edited support for communication
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. Four central features of the communication campaign as a genre of ...
Figure 2.2. The seven main tasks in a communication project
Figure 2.3. The communication project ecosystem and overall functional depende...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. The canon of the seven core processes of communicative doing
Figure 3.2. The four basic components of a communication campaign scenario
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. The four main statuses that the milieu occupies during the life cy...
Figure 5.2. Question-and-answer game to explain the milieu – given – in which ...
Figure 5.3. The three zones and fields of action that make up the area of acti...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1. A canon of common actantial roles defining the narrative and funct...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1. Adapted version of Kapferer’s (1991) original six-theme scheme for...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
Other titles from ISTE in Information Systems, Web and Pervasive Computing
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Series EditorImad Saleh
The Art of Communication
Semiotic Foundations and Strategic Applications
Peter Stockinger
First published 2025 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUK
www.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USA
www.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2025The rights of Peter Stockinger to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948643
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-83669-012-2
Introduction
The aim of this book is to present and discuss the main elements of a semiotic and pragmatic approach to communication. Together, these elements form a general framework for understanding what we call a situated semiotic theory of communicative doing.
This theoretical and methodological framework provides perspectives and conceptual tools for the interpretation (comparative description and simulation) of all kinds of communication activity. In this book, we focus on specialized communication projects, specifically strategic or influence communication. These are projects dedicated to the design and implementation of campaigns that pursue explicit objectives in different fields of activity such as, for example, organizational communication, political communication or development communication (see, for example, Cabañero-Verzosa (2003)1).
The situated semiotic approach to communication that we propose to develop in this book is not limited to these specialized practices of communicative doing. It is also intended to cover everyday communication activities and practices, in which information exchanges take place at all times and in a completely natural way. In other words, the theoretical and methodological framework that we seek to present here is intended to provide conceptual tools for describing and simulating natural forms of communicative doing (“natural” in the sense that these forms are acquired from birth and according to the socialization processes specific to a given culture).
What exactly do we mean by a theoretical framework? It includes the knowledge we draw on in order to understand one or a set of communication activities: to understand, either in order to engage in and carry out (or to contribute to carrying out) a communication activity, or in order to learn, sometimes to understand “better”, or sometimes to do “better”.
The knowledge we need, or at least are able to draw upon, consists first and foremost of the ideas we have about the object we are interested in. An idea is a mental image (or representation) of the object of our interest. A central feature of any mental image is that it allows us to recognize (with varying degrees of success) that the domain of reference is something we already (more or less) know and master. Of course, the mental image – the representation – of a domain can be uncertain and vague or, on the contrary, precise and detailed. It can be efficient and appropriate to our needs, part of a practical knowledge, based on tradition or experience, part of a common knowledge, or rather reserved for a community of initiates.
Our aim, then, is to identify and problematize the most diverse ideas “about communication”, and to transform them into a structured set of concepts that make up this semiotically and pragmatically inspired theoretical framework, which we hope will help us methodically approach a communication activity. Like any conceptual framework, the one proposed in this book represents a certain level of expertise, seems to be relatively stable, but always remains fallible and therefore open to revision.
Our work on constructing and clarifying the conceptual framework is based on several types of information sources, all equally important. The first, of course, is provided by a variety of primary data corpora. No research project – even the most abstract or the most “heuristic” – can be carried out in the absence of empirical data, which serve for expertise and experimentation. In our case, the data we have a particular interest in are those generated by, and at the same time that document, a communication campaign project throughout its entire life cycle, from conception to implementation to achievement, and its appropriation by a given audience.
A second type of source includes paradigms and research that already exist in our field, as well as those from other fields of knowledge, which can help us to better understand our own. Our work is part of an extremely prolific field of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on the various domains, practices and sectors of communication. Today, it hardly seems possible to master all of the theoretical currents that structure and develop this field of research. In addition to the applied research that comes more directly from the various sectors of contemporary communication (such as organizational communication, social media communication, influence communication, international communication, etc.), our main point of reference is research in discourse analysis, rhetoric and, of course, semiotics and pragmatics. For decades now, this research has provided both theoretical and practical contributions central to the understanding of communication as a practice of information production and appropriation that is common to the human species (and beyond) and, at the same time, historically and socially differentiated into the most diverse practices and ecosystems (see, as examples only, Barthes 1957, 1964; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1971; Eco 1975; Greimas 1976; Halliay 1978; Fairclough 1995; Hess-Lüttich 2001; Danesi 2013, 2018; Nöth 2016).
While attempting to be as open as possible, and to consider a wide variety of theoretical and practical approaches to communication, the core of the framework presented in this book remains faithful to the phenomenological, semiotic and pragmatic tradition of language, in general, and communication, in particular. Taking a more historical and longer-term view, in addition to the monumental work of Edmund Husserl, we cite as references, by way of example: the interpretive sociology and anthropology of Alfred Schütz (1932, 1979), Max Weber (2002), George H. Mead (1934), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) and Clifford Geertz (1973); the sociolinguistic and ethno-methodological research on language and communication carried out by researchers such as Dell Hymes (1962), Harold Garfinkel (1967), Erving Goffman (1973) and John Gumperz (1982); the important debate between Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann on communicative doing (“kommunikatives Handeln”, in German) and its anchoring in a given communication ecosystem (Habermas 1981; Luhmann 1984).
A third type of source, equally essential to the development of our theoretical framework, is the diverse expertise of communication professionals themselves, and even the commentary and discourse on (influence) communication produced by both its enthusiasts and its opponents. We here refer to not only the abundant professional literature (consisting of multiple methods, case studies, expert reports, etc.), but also to the countless comments (on “buzz”, on “infox”, etc.), often anonymous, about a particular communication campaign and/or influence communication in general. These heterogeneous testimonies provide an invaluable testing ground for the value and solidity of theoretical knowledge used to describe, understand and, ultimately, manipulate (in the technical sense of the term) actions of the communication campaign genre.
However, it also goes without saying that the conceptual construction of a theoretical framework based on a multitude of highly heterogeneous data sources must respect the minimal epistemological requirements of any scientific project, namely the conceptual coherence of a proposed vision, its empirical relevance and its intrinsically revisable character.
The term methodological framework, on the other hand, refers to a global vision of the methods and techniques (the know-how) already in existence or yet to be invented for dealing with an object in the light of the vision (the theory) by means of which this object is made intelligible. Methodology is an indispensable part of any theoretical construction of an object. In addition to its vital importance in mobilizing a theory to understand and manage concrete cases of communication, it also “serves” to verify and test a given vision: a theory. In other words, it can serve to identify the weak points and the flaws in an existing theory that call for its critical revision.
The starting point of our research – and its central conceptual issue – is the critical and systematic reconstruction of the notion of communication activity. Intuitively speaking, we regard any agitation as embodying a communication activity whenever it is a process that responds (or appears to respond) to an objective by providing information that is relevant; in other words, information whose particular value can be appreciated in its ability to satisfy the objective.
This process can be expressed and orchestrated in the form of common or specialized communication activities, produced naturally and spontaneously, or in a premeditated, explicitly purposeful way. It can take the form of a simple, direct, almost instantaneous activity between two individuals. However, it can also take the form of a complex activity – a communication campaign, for example – which is supported and progressively concretized by a whole series of actions taking place in multiple places, over a more or less long period of time, and involving entire populations of individual and/or collective actors. Finally, it may concern only one individual, at a given moment or during entire periods of their life, when it takes the form, for example, of a more or less ritualized and repetitive soliloquy, a possible indicator of pathological behavior.
The objective to which a communication activity seeks to respond is called the strategic objective. The strategic objective represents the goal we wish to achieve through the means of communicative doing. It specifies – with varying degrees of precision and clarity – a projected situation that describes (mentally) the goal for which a communication effort is engaged in. For example, the strategic objective guiding an exchange in a restaurant between a customer and a waiter is typically to satisfy the customer’s desire to consume a good meal and the strategic objective guiding an influence campaign may be to secure a political mandate for a candidate.
The projected situation to be realized through a communication effort differs in more or less significant ways from the given situation, which is experienced, by an actor, as being sufficiently “dramatic” to engage in a communication effort. The given situation thus includes the features that drive the actor (or actors) to make an effort to produce and exchange information in order to realize the projected situation. These features qualify the lack or need that motivates this will to act, using the means offered by communicative doing.
The strategic objective must be distinguished from the semiotic (and technical) objective. The semiotic objective consists of mobilizing know-how and devising a plan for producing and circulating the information needed to satisfy the strategic objective (in the best possible way). For example, in a face-to-face meeting between customer and waiter, they must know how to conduct an oral exchange and in a campaign to promote a candidate for a political mandate, it is necessary to know how to organize events and produce “punchy” speeches. The technical objective, for its part, specifies the distribution (physical, temporal, technical, human) of the know-how and the plan to be mobilized.
Any process for carrying out a communication activity (whether common or specialized, natural or deliberately planned) presupposes an agreement between the actors involved, who form the community of stakeholders, on the objectives of the activity and the environment in which it takes place. This agreement is called a communication contract and may be explicit or simply implied. The contract both regulates and limits the various contributions of the actors involved. The agreement extends to all actors, and even to those who compete or conflict with the intentions of the project initiator.
Throughout the realization process of a communication activity, a population of actors is formed and organized, which we call the community of stakeholders. The community can be very small or include a large population; it can have a transient existence, limited to the life cycle of a day-to-day activity, or it can be stabilized and institutionalized. To understand and analyze the stakeholder community of a communication activity, we take into account:
the
persona
that an actor embodies, which can be related to their “character”, or to their intellectual, social or personal profile;
the
role
an actor assumes in the community, assuming that there exists a small canon of
basic roles
into which each actor necessarily fits;
agentic dispositions
, which illustrate the
subjective part
of each actor’s contribution, taking into account their
cognitive
and
potestative capacities
, their
emotional state
, their
will
to participate in a communication action, and finally their
confidence
in it, in themselves and in the community.
We see each communication activity as a process that realizes, instantaneously or gradually, with or without difficulties, the contribution expected to achieve a given strategic objective.
This realization process takes the form of a project whose life cycle is shaped and punctuated by a series of key phases, of which the following are particularly important:
the
specification of the objectives
(strategic, semiotic and technical) of a communication activity;
the
localization
of the activity in the milieu in which it is deployed;
the
conceptual design
or
scenarization of
its future implementation(s);
the
actual implementation
and its
progress
;
the
coordination of
the various acts and actions involved throughout the life cycle of the project;
the
critical assessment
of the project’s progress in relation to the objectives set;
the
valorization
of the results and experiences acquired during the project.
All of the efforts of the actors in the stakeholder community are part of one or more of these phases. They play a crucial role in the definition of the communication plan (see, for example, Libaert (2017)), which serves as a reference for the implementation of one or a series of communication campaigns.
The realization process for a communication activity is inherently characterized by a tension between opposing forces, which we call agonistic and antagonistic. Agonistic forces facilitate the realization of an activity’s objectives; antagonistic forces, on the other hand, make it more difficult, or even improbable. The contributions of actors in the stakeholder community exhibit one or the other of these two forces. Together, the seven phases and opposing forces form the thematic and narrative structure that underpins all communication activity. This structure is deployed on two hierarchically distinct levels:
the
level of control
(
regulation
) that governs the process of realization of a communication activity;
the level of implementation, the actual realization of the activity.
We call this central structure the controlled realization of intentional activity in general, and of communication activity in particular. It is necessarily present as a background that organizes not only the management and implementation of influence communication campaigns, but any “natural” and “routine”, everyday communication activity.
The structure of the controlled realization of a communication activity generates the so-called narrative framework which is an a priori configuration for both understanding and designing, planning and simulating a communication activity. In other words, as soon as we take an interest in an exchange as banal as the one that takes place in a restaurant between the waiter and the customer who wants to drink another glass of wine, we occupy a certain position in order to apprehend it, and by occupying a certain position, we hold onto a certain version of the exchange.
All communication activity takes place in a milieu and is constrained by the peculiarities of the environment. To better grasp the particularities of the environment and its effects on a communication activity, we propose several distinctions.
First, we consider the milieu lato sensu and the milieu stricto sensu, which is relevant to the realization process underlying a communication activity. The milieu lato sensu is what phenomenologists call the given world or the natural world (i.e. the world as it exists and in which people’s lives and activities are necessarily inscribed).
The milieu stricto sensu is also called the communication situation. The communication situation includes all of the elements that condition the realization process of a communication project, whether in terms of the production, circulation, appropriation or use of information. It is shaped by the milieu characteristic of the (social) practice in which a communication activity takes place. Bartering with a shopkeeper to obtain a food item or extolling the virtues of a food product are communication activities that are part of the social practice of consuming food. Deploring inappropriate social behavior, or disaster situations in which human lives are lost, are communication activities that are part of the social practice of social protection.
According to de Certeau (1990), a practice is a culture of doing which, as a standard of reference, both constrains the activities of actors and provides them with resources for resolving a certain variety of needs or desires, such as the basic need to consume food, protection or self-actualization. In this sense, a communication activity is always conditioned by at least two practices:
the
social practice
in which it is embedded, and which provides the material for the strategic objective to which it must respond;
the
communicative doing
that provides the material for the realization of the expected contribution (or service), i.e. information relevant to a community of actors in the form of accessible, usable messages.
This double dependency conditions (i.e. both constrains and enables) the controlled realization process of a communication activity and its contribution, i.e. the message whose content (the information provided) is expected to meet a given strategic objective. This conditioning takes the form of techniques and genres of communicative doing. Techniques of communicative doing are the skills needed to produce a contribution. Genres are the forms in which a message “flows”, its content, the expression of its content, the textual format and the physical support chosen.
We distinguish between three main communication practices: common practices, specialized practices (for example, linked to a particular profession) and strategic or influence communication practices, the latter representing genuine technology of persuasion. By adapting to the different milieus to which it offers appropriate solutions for the production, circulation, appropriation and use of information, each of these three communication practices differentiates itself into an enormous variety of situated versions of the culture of communicative doing that it represents.
So, for example, the differentiation of the third practice occurs in response to the specific needs of a social organization (e.g. a corporation or a local government) to implement effective methods of communicative doing. This is the main reason why, in organizational communication, we distinguish different dedicated communication practices, such as internal communication, external communication, “intercompany” communication, financial communication, institutional communication, recruitment communication, proximity communication or crisis communication. Other specialized practices have emerged in response to the need for methods of influence adapted to the nature of a social organization (see corporate communication, associative communication, communication for heritage institutions, territorial communication, communication for international institutions, etc.) and/or a sector of activity (communication in the agri-food sector, communication in the luxury goods sector, communication in the tourism sector, communication in the security sector, etc.). Each of these specialized practices forms genuine ecosystems, both historical and social, comprising communication knowledge and know-how adapted to the respective milieu in which they are situated.
In order to understand the role of the milieu in which a communication activity takes place, we use a small set of methodological distinctions:
the
domain of reference
or
expertise
that constitutes the object of the communication activity;
the
range of acts
or
actions
that, according to a given plan, contribute to the progressive realization of the communication activity;
the
area of action
occupied by the communication activity, consisting of a
territory
and a
spatial
(geographical) and
temporal
(historical)
horizon
;
the
environment
(physical, social, linguistic, etc.), especially that of
social practice
, which constitutes the context in which the communication activity is carried out;
the
population of actors
, which forms the
community
of
stakeholders
of the communication activity;
the
message,
which offers
information
about the domain of reference and constitutes the
contribution
(or
service
) provided by the communication activity to the achievement of a given
strategic objective
.
We also distinguish between several statuses that the milieu occupies throughout a communication project (i.e. the controlled realization of a message through one or more actions that together form, for example, a communication campaign), namely:
the
given milieu
as it appears at the beginning of the communication project;
the
projected milieu
as we would like to see it realized at the end of the communication project;
the
current milieu
, which includes the various
resources
and
rules
provided by the given milieu and which are
mobilized throughout
the communication project;
and, finally, the
realized
(or simply
new
)
milieu
as it appears at the end of (or as a consequence of) the efforts made throughout the communication project.
This distinction between the different statuses of the milieu echoes the distinction we introduced above between given and projected situations to describe and explain the emergence and stabilization of an objective (strategic and semiotic). It also recalls the fundamental role of the evaluation process in a communication project, in order to be able to identify and recognize, schematically speaking, its success or failure.
Like any other activity, communication activity is an observable process, a process that is constructed, staged and completed, so to speak, before our eyes, or rather before our organs or instruments of perception. By inscribing itself in a given milieu, the communication activity produces its own milieu, which we can observe, interpret, appreciate, comment on and, finally, exploit according to our purposes.
We use inferential procedures to reconstruct the meaning of a communication activity from observable data. Meaning is both what a communication activity is about and what it says about it (what it shows or makes us feel). What a communication activity is about is its object, the domain of expertise (or experience). We also speak of the domain of reference, i.e. the domain to which a communication activity refers throughout its realization process. What a communication activity tells us about the domain of expertise is called information. Information includes all of the features and aspects that are revealed and developed by a communication activity as relevant, new, interesting, striking elements, etc., for understanding and manipulating a domain of expertise in line with a given strategic objective.
For example, in an exchange between a restaurant guest and the waiter aimed at satisfying the guest’s desire for another glass of wine during their meal, the domain of reference for the exchange is not simply wine “as such”, but rather wine in its role as a beverage that accompanies, with varying degrees of success, a series of dishes. In other communication situations, the domain of reference of the communication activity may change to a greater or lesser extent: it may be understood as a commercial object, as part of a campaign to introduce a new brand to a market; it may take on the meaning of a heritage object, as part of a tourism campaign; it may take the form of a legal object, as part of a campaign to legislate on the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Information, on the other hand, is the particular value that wine, as an alcoholic beverage accompanying a dish, has or can acquire for one or the other of the two. The meaning of wine – its particular value – for the customer can be inferred, for example, from its aroma, its color, its price, depending on the customer’s olfactory and gustatory preferences, as well as their economic affluence.
To return to the inferences that allows us to reconstruct the meaning of a communication activity, these are based on the features of data that form part of the milieu (current, projected or realized) of the activity that we can observe (that are accessible to our perception) and that we compare with our experiences and our knowledge; in short, with the standards that form the cultural framework that serves for us to interpret and evaluate the communication activity.
By becoming an object (a domain of expertise) that arouses our interest or, more generally speaking, the interest of any actor, the milieu peculiar to the communication activity becomes a signifying milieu, a milieu that (potentially) carries meaning. A signifying milieu can be compared to a landscape, which both expresses and represents a certain vision and value of nature and is open to a wide range of possible interpretations and uses. With reference to the notion of text, understood as the written or spoken realization of “mental” content in the form of a spatial and (usually) linear arrangement of linguistic signs (i.e. “words”), we call a signifying milieu textscape, and we speak of the signifying milieu of a communication activity in terms of the textscape(s) of communicative doing. The textscape of communicative doing shares three constitutive layers with all other kinds of textscapes, whether real or merely imaginary:
the
content layer
of the textscape, its
meaning
for a community of actors;
the
layer of expression
and
staging of
content in the form of a device of sensitive, perceptible signs;
the
layer of materialization
and
mediatization of
the expressed and staged content in the form of the physical and technical supports essential to its production, circulation, appropriation and use.
In this book, we take a closer look at the possibilities of a methodical design (“conceptual design”) of a communication activity of the communication campaign genre. The conceptual design of a communication activity is nothing more than the writing of a scenario according to which, or with reference to which, a communication campaign is implemented and achieved with varying degrees of success.
In other words, writing such a scenario produces an ideal textscape (i.e. a model in both the regulatory and normative sense), against which the real textscape of the activity itself can be assessed as it progresses. In order to justify its decisions and conceptual choices, the production of an “ideal” textscape – the scenario for an activity or campaign – must necessarily take into account two constraints: firstly, that of the objectives (strategic and semiotic), and second, that of the given milieu. In other words, the ideal textscape, the scenario, is the solution (if one exists) that brings together, in the field of communication, desire and imagination, on the one hand, and what already exists, on the other.
Chapter 9 is more explicitly devoted to questions of scenarization, i.e. the conceptual design of a communication campaign or series of campaigns. The previous chapters will serve to introduce and discuss the theoretical and methodological framework for a better understanding of the truly complex object that is communication activity.
The first chapter provides an overview of the domain of communication. It will problematize the notion of communication practice, understood as a culture of doing in the sense of de Certeau (1990), and propose a heuristic distinction between three main practices: “natural”, everyday communication activities; communication activities related to professional specialization; and, finally, activities that are part of that ubiquitous social technology of persuasion known as strategic or influence communication. We will explore the notion of the communication ecosystem, a holistic concept that allows us to better understand the framework and context in which a communication project is set up. To illustrate this concept, we will briefly discuss certain aspects of one of today’s most important communication sectors: organizational communication (i.e. communication that focuses on institutional actors such as companies, local, national and international authorities, associations and cultural heritage institutions).
The second chapter presents a general methodological framework for carrying out communication projects. This framework comprises a canon of specializedprocesses and activities that together constitute the various stages and phases of a project’s life cycle. The introduction and discussion of this methodological framework gives us with the opportunity to discuss and problematize three concepts directly related to the implementation of communication projects, namely that of the campaign (which cannot be reduced to its traditional manifestation as an advertising campaign!), that of professional communication expertise and that of an organization’s communication policy, which provides the frame of reference (i.e. the standard or culture) for its various communication projects.
In the third chapter, we look at the process itself of realizing information in response to a given strategic objective. We propose to understand this process called communicative doing as a process using a model that operates on two levels: a first level of the actual realization process, understood as the implementation, progress and successful completion of one or more actions, and a second level of coordination or control which governs this realization process. Combining this model with the canon of core processes that identifies and characterizes the main issues to which every communication project should be sensitive, we propose to understand every communication effort as an act that is part of a stage play. A stage play is the expression, the manifestation of a certain dramaturgy that, in order to achieve a given strategic objective, (1) imagines and produces actions and interactions whose creative and innovative or, on the contrary, conventional and hackneyed character (2) is recognized (evaluated and judged). We refer to these two complementary dimensions of communicative doing as ergastic doing and anagnoretic doing: ergastic doing includes the creative activities that contribute to solving a problem using the means of communicative doing, while anagnoretic doing includes all of the activities that evaluate, sanction and validate the contributions of ergastic doing.
In the fourth chapter, we further discuss the fundamental distinction between strategic objective and semiotic (and technical) objective, which grounds all communication activity as a purposeful attempt to respond (or try to respond) to an interest, need or desire by the means offered by communicative doing, but whose satisfaction depends on it only causally, in a more or less probable way. On the basis of a practical method widely used in professional circles, we present a methodological framework for the specification of the objectives (or scenarization) that preside over and guide a communication project.
The fifth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the inevitable anchoring of all communication activity in a preexisting milieu. We develop in greater detail the main distinctions we have already mentioned, in order to make the use of the milieu as an essential initial condition to be integrated in the design and management of any communication project more operational. Of particular interest here is the areaoccupied by a communication activity, i.e. its spatial and temporal horizon, and the given social, technical and natural environment that characterizes its territory.
The sixth chapter is devoted to a discussion of the actors who are, for one reason or another, involved in a communication activity and make up its community of stakeholders. We look at three structural features that help us to better define a community of stakeholders as a whole and/or each of its actors. The first is the profile, or character of an actor. A second feature is the role(s) an actor plays throughout a communication activity implementation project. Finally, a third feature is the actor’s subjectivity, which we refer to as agentic dispositions. Agentic dispositions include, among other qualities, an actor’s ability (cognitive or potestative) to “play” their role on stage, their emotional dispositions, their will to intervene or their confidence in themself and in the project.
The seventh chapter is reserved for a fuller discussion of the notion of the genre of communicative doing. We understand the genre of communicative doing as a collection of skills, techniques and resources that a communication practice offers to actors in the process of realizing a more or less concerted effort – consensual or, on the contrary, polemical – to satisfy a given strategic objective. This discussion allows us to introduce the notion of the scenario: a genre of communicative doing is a practical model of communication that is part of the cultural heritage of a communication practice (common, specialized or influential) and has been progressively built up over time and through multiple experiences. The scenario, on the other hand, is a model obtained through a series of deliberate choices based on methods offered by the methodological framework of the communication project.
The eighth chapter will return to the question of the message that a communication activity produces, circulates and submits to a wide variety of appropriation and exploitation activities. We further examine the question of message quality and, more specifically, the information we (as members of the stakeholder community) expect to receive from a communication activity. We also consider the issue of branding in the broadest sense of the term. To this end, we draw on an approach widely used in professional circles, that of Jean-Noël Kapferer (1991), one of the most renowned experts in the field of field of strategic communication.
Finally, as mentioned above, the ninth and final chapter of this book is devoted to the issue of conceptual design, also known as scenarization of a communication campaign. Design or scenarization is a process made up of a variety of more specialized activities aimed at specifying the model (i.e. the scenario) with reference to which a campaign should be implemented in order to meet a given strategic objective. A campaign scenario design includes: (1) the identification and description of the actions that make up a campaign; (2) the specification of the message to be conveyed by the various actions; and (3) the specification of the media, i.e. the supports and devices, both physical and technical, by means of which information is produced, staged and made available for appropriation and use by the community of its stakeholders.
To conclude this introduction, we would like to add that the theoretical and methodological framework presented in this book is the result of a relatively long period of about 20 years of teaching and research dedicated to “media communication” understood as a practice of persuasion and influence used particularly in organizational communication.
In 2005/2006, we introduced the teaching and research of this communication practice at Inalco (Institut national des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in Paris, in a decidedly international and multilingual context. In response to the urgent demand from students at the institute for systematic teaching dedicated to the issues and techniques of strategic and influence communication, we first created a specialization course in the bachelor’s degree program, followed in 2015/2016 by a master’s degree in (international) organizational communication.
To meet the demands of such teachings, we have been forced to gradually broaden our own theoretical and empirical horizons, as we were originally trained in linguistics, semiotics and discourse analysis. As we all know, this is an exciting and enriching process, but one that is difficult (and, as we say, “destabilizing”, not exactly comfortable) and that encounters many obstacles, both conceptual and practical, as well as political (in the sense that it is difficult to reconcile with the “disciplinary” logics and power relations that exist in traditional academic institutions).
It is this academic background, it seems to us, that explains the particular angle of our semiotic and situated approach to communication. In short, and to recall, this approach focuses mainly on:
the
message anchored in
a
given milieu
,
produced
(or
co-produced)
by a population of actors forming the
community
of
stakeholders
and
representing
a (possible) contribution to the achievement of one or a set of objectives;
the structure of the
message
, its
signification
and
meaning
, its
expression
and
staging
, and its
mediatization
;
the
controlled realization
process of the message, both from the first sketch to the final version.
Like many other books of this type, this one is based on a large number and variety of research, training and professional expertise projects that I have supervised over the years. These projects have involved many classes of students in the master’s program in Communication at Inalco (Institut national des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), whose enthusiasm and personal commitment have helped me to gradually refine my own ideas about strategic communication practice.
I would also like to express my collective gratitude to all of my colleagues and friends in the various French and foreign research laboratories with whom I have had the pleasure of working with over long periods of time on national and European research projects. I will not mention them individually as the list would be far too long. Nevertheless, I would like to thank the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the CIS laboratory (Centre Internet et Société, UPR 2000) for hosting me for a minimum of one year and providing me with the perfect conditions to complete this work.
My greatest and deepest gratitude goes, of course, to my wife Elisabeth, with whom I have shared an extraordinary scientific and personal adventure for almost 30 years now. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to our two sons, Alexis and Matteo, who, in the course of many lively discussions, have introduced me to their own fields of research, which may be far removed from my own, but whose topics are rich and inexhaustible sources of inspiration for my own reflections.
Finally, I would like to end my thanks with a heartfelt tribute to Elisabeth and Albert, my sister and brother-in-law, who, together with my wife, have always been by my side and have allowed me to work in a privileged environment.
Peter StockingerNovember 2024
Note
1
We also refer to the research published in the domain of strategic communication in the two specialized journals: International Journal of Strategic Communication (see:
https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/hstc20
) and Communication & Organisation (see:
https://journals.openedition.org/communicationorganisation/
).
1The Communication Domain
1.1. Introduction
The first chapter of this book is devoted to a general presentation of our view of the domain of communication, and, more specifically, communication in the sense of a specialized social or professional practice, such as that which can be found, for example, in the major communication ecosystems that shape our contemporary civilization.
First, in section 1.2, we will discuss the notion of a communication practice. We will define it as a particular system of order that serves as a reference, a standard for any concrete activity involving the production, circulation, appropriation and exploitation of information – of “news” – which represents a certain value for the actors involved in this genre of activity.
Drawing on media history (understood more in the sense of the somewhat outdated term “mass media”) in particular, we will introduce, in section 1.3, the holistic notion of the communication ecosystem, which will serve as a reference throughout this book for problematizing communicative doing.
Section 1.4 will be devoted to a discussion of a specific communication practice that interests us in this book. This practice is sometimes called strategic communication and sometimes influence communication. It is a communication practice that can be understood as a form of social technology that serves to achieve extra-communicational goals through the means such a communication practice can offer.
In section 1.5, we will take a brief look at a particular communication ecosystem. This practice is built around the specialized communication practice of organizations (companies, public authorities, associations, etc.) and represents one of the most important and dynamic economic sectors today.
We will conclude this first chapter with section 1.6, in which we introduce the central notion of the communication contract. The communication contract describes the intersubjective agreement (i.e. between the actors involved in a communication activity) that is indispensable for recognizing the very existence of a communication activity, which is understood as a means offered by communicative doing to respond to a problem and satisfy a given objective.
1.2. Communication as a culture of doing
The act of communicating belongs to a specific genre of social practice. A practice brings together a set of techniques – knowledge and know-how – that enable people to solve certain problems which arise over their lives (see the classic works of Haudricourt (1964) and Leroi-Gourhan (1964)).
Cooking (or, more precisely, the act of cooking) is a technique that allows us, among other things, to feed ourselves, to satisfy our need or desire to consume edible products. It is a technique that is both basic (it is one of the basic human techniques) and highly specialized, in the sense that it is differentiated into a multitude of genres of culinary practices – culinary knowledge and know-how – throughout the world and in every era.
A technique is experimented with, passed on and eventually perfected through repeated and varied use. In this sense, we consider a technique to be a standard that an actor (whether an individual, a social group, an institution or even an artificially created agent) uses to solve a problem. A standard (Stockinger 1988, 1992; Hansen 1995) is thus both:
an
epistemic framework
that serves as a
reference point
and
resource
for an actor to understand and solve a particular type of problem;
a
constraint
(a norm, a rule, a tradition, etc.) that transforms an actor’s concrete activities into
normal
(i.e. what is considered normal),
predictable
,
routine
behavior.
In this sense, a practice and the techniques that it makes available can be described as a (dynamic) system of order. This double presupposition – of being both an epistemic framework that opens up to an actor the possibility of solving a variety of problems and enables them to do so, and a constraint that conditions the actor’s doing – is a fundamental feature of any culture that is understood as a system of order.
By analogy, the same applies to communication, to communicative doing (to the kommunikative Handeln, in the terminology of Habermas (1981)). Communication is a social practice; in other words, and following de Certeau (1990), it is a culture or art of doing that both enables and constrains the realization of a certain type of contribution (or service) by an actor in solving a given problem. The type of contribution (or service) in question here is the production and sharing of relevant information; information that has a certain value in terms of the objectives that an actor proposes to achieve.
The objectives against which the value of information is assessed are called strategic objectives. A strategic objective is the representation of a situation that an actor (or a group of actors) wishes to realize (or, on the contrary, to avoid or to exclude) by using the means offered by communicative doing. The means offered by communicative doing are represented by a wide variety of techniques that serve to conceive, produce, express, mediate and appropriate relevant information.
The information provided by a communication activity in a given domain takes the form of messages. Depending on the discursive register chosen, a message narrates, describes, explains or instructs a domain of reference. The message is expressed and staged through one or more sign systems (including the verbal system) and is materialized or embodied in one or more physical supports, called media (for the production, circulation, appropriation or archiving of information). In other words, the contribution of a communication activity to the achievement of a strategic objective is characterized, in other words, by:
content
made up of what is “said” (in the broadest sense) about a domain that is the object of a communication activity;
the multisensory
expression
and
staging
of this content;
and the
physical support
that makes it a
good
, a “
product
” that can be used and exploited in the form of, for example, an oral discourse, a written document, a photograph or – as we shall see – any physical object and any technical procedure that can serve as a communication activity.
The actual realization of a communication activity is represented by another class of objectives, which we call semiotic and technical objectives. A semiotic and technical objective specifies the model or scenario of the contribution to be realized and the process by which it will be realized. We speak of semiotic objectives insofar as their realization mobilizes techniques – knowledge and know-how – for the production and appropriation of signifying data, which together make up the contribution of a communication activity. Signifying data are part of the textscape, the sensitive milieu of a communication activity. The term “technical” reminds us that the realization of a communication activity is always subject to various extra-semiotic constraints, such as temporal (a contribution must be realized at a given moment), economic (the realization of a contribution implies a certain cost), logistical, legal, political, etc.
Communication – communicative doing – is a basic practice common to humanity. As a basic practice, it is – such as food, clothing or shelter – part of the “baggage” of humanity, both common and natural (i.e. innate). Differentiated into a variety of specialized practices, it is indispensable to life in society and to all social activities. We can therefore speak both of a culture of communication that is common to the whole of humanity (and probably far beyond, to all living beings that exchange information with their milieu) and of an (enormous) diversity of cultures of communication that is situated and evolves in an equally enormous diversity of historical, natural and social milieus.
The specialization of communication practices corresponds (structurally and historically) to the emergence, institutionalization and cultural and socio-technical evolution of the main sectors of activity that characterize the social life of a (human) society whose internal organization exceeds a certain threshold of complexity. The paradigmatic example, analyzed by communication theorists such as Habermas (1981) and Luhmann (1984), is that of modern Western society (roughly speaking, the society that has developed since the 15th century). The emergence of a multitude of specialized fields of activity (in industry, economy, law, politics, science, education, art, health, etc.) has simultaneously led to a growing need to invent and develop communication techniques and instruments that are adapted to this very specific historical and social milieu. This process of inventing new communication techniques and tools accelerated significantly with the invention of the printing press, around the 15th century, and gradually gave rise to a variety of socio-technical and economic communication ecosystems over the following centuries.
Let us take a look at everyday communication, with its countless acts that are designed to exchange information for a multitude of purposes, important or anecdotal, dramatic or trivial. These acts include a wide variety of ways of communicating: ways of communicating with the staff in a restaurant or hotel; ways of communicating and interacting with shopkeepers in the marketplace; ways of asking strangers on the street for information; ways of exchanging information with colleagues at work; ways of relating and passing on lived experiences; ways of sharing ideas and views about the world, about others, about the past and the future, with family, friends or the public.
The ways (or manners) of communicating “spontaneously” are mostly learned tacitly, through experience, and form models that we call genres of communicative doing (see Chapter 8), according to which (or in reference to which) a concrete communication activity is deployed: a concrete exchange between a customer and a shopkeeper in an open-air market, a concrete discussion between two colleagues at a university, a request for service formulated by a customer in a restaurant to a waiter, the recounting of the important events of the day during the daily dinner in a family circle. A genre of communicative doing can thus be compared to a traditional technique (knowledge and know-how) that serves for the realization of a semiotic (and technical) objective. Its merit undoubtedly lies in the fact that it enables everyone to easily – “almost automatically”, “without thinking much” – use and take advantage of the possibilities offered by communicative doing, which contribute to overcoming the problems – both big and small – that are part and parcel of everyday life.
We need to distinguish between common genres and specialized genres of communicative doing. We speak of common genres when we are dealing with communication techniques that are part of the communication understood as a natural activity, as typically embodied in the routine activities of everyday communication by a population of actors.
Specialized genres are more explicitly elaborated and experienced techniques or know-how – arts of doing, technical cultures – used by actors to plan and implement a communication activity in order to achieve more explicitly formulated and detailed objectives. These genres fall either within a field of activities known as specialized and/or professional communication, or within a field known as effective communication, strategic communication or influence communication.
Under the term professional communication, we bring together all communication activities and practices that are part of the culture of a given profession and its social milieu (see, for example, von Hahn (1983); Krings and Arntz (2008); Burkhardt et al. (2017); Klammer (2017); Singy and Merminod (2021)). It is in this sense that we speak of, for example, technical and scientific communication, medical communication, legal communication or political and diplomatic communication1.
Inextricably linked to the progressive specialization and differentiation of professions, communication, in the sense of a variety of techniques for producing and circulating information, has developed quite spectacularly in the milieus that characterize emblematic “modern” and contemporary professional practices, such as research and consulting, investigation and intelligence, or management and auditing. Historically speaking, the evolution of these new professional practices is inextricably linked to the evolution of human societies, which are understood as a form of collective intelligence, in order to deal with problems that an individual actor – or a simple, loosely structured collective grouping of any number of individual actors – would not be able to solve alone.
A particularly emblematic example is the profession of journalism and the practice of journalistic communication. Understood as a specialized and historically rooted practice, journalistic communication is practiced by actors who are dedicated to locating and selecting, processing and disseminating information through a very specific mediasphere, which is aptly named “the media
