Postmodern corporate communications: from passive target groups to active stakeholders

This crossroads in corporate communications can be explained by social change which includes but goes far beyond the impact of digitisation during the third industrial revolution. As the global economy transitioned into the third phase of globalisation, rising industrialised nations like China, India, Brazil and Mexico achieved increasing success in exporting to the markets of the

Western world, with the result that what were previously locally and regionally active businesses became global players themselves. Although the world is still not really ‘flat’, global connectedness is steadily increasing. At the same time, the fundamental excesses of casino capitalism in certain investment banking circles and crises such as ‘Dieselgate’ over the past decade have ensured that the issue of environmental protection is no longer the only aspect of corporate responsibility that is prominent in the minds of the public (see also Chapter 5). Given that digitisation has resulted in communication channels no longer being a scarce resource, and that social media can transform passive target groups into active stakeholders, and indeed that the demands placed on companies today go significantly beyond business success, corporate communications are now subject to fundamentally new requirements