Our research deals with communication in the business context, with a focus on companies and corporations. We seek to investigate and explore which role communication plays in three distinct areas: within individual business contexts, between organizational stakeholders, and across wider society in general. To achieve this, we refer to concepts and theories from communication science, linguistics, marketing, and psychology, and apply a range of methods from across empirical social research (e.g. interviews, content analysis, experiments).

Our goal is to generate high-quality research outputs in the field of corporate and organizational communication, and to contribute to empirical and theoretical knowledge production. In doing this, we concentrate on three broad research areas:

• Strategic communication: the endeavor of actors to use communication in a conscious and goal-oriented manner, in order to reach the goals set. Within this context, it is of interest how strategies develop, which role they play within an organization, and how they affect the organizational communication of companies in practice.

• Theme and content management: the endeavor of companies and corporations to manage narratives and content, which shape the public image of the company, by using communication. A key aspect of this process is corporate storytelling, the process of presenting important content in the form of a narrative.

• Legitimization of companies and corporations: traditionally, this license to operate was negotiated through economic success, but now this increasingly occurs in the public arena. Factors such as credibility, acceptance, trust, and reputation now depend on much more than financial position, making it of great interest to researchers working within organizational communication management. The public increasingly expects companies to help tackle pressing social issues, such as growing social inequality and the climate change crisis, and so issues of social responsibility, diversity and sustainability are becoming more and more relevant for researchers of corporate communication.